Cgates goes live with Synamedia video network solutions to future-proof OTT growth

Synamedia, the world’s largest independent video software provider, today announced that one of the leading Lithuanian telcom companies Cgates has gone live with Synamedia video network solutions across its pay-TV services. These technologies will support live and time-shifted viewing on set-top boxes and OTT, ensuring Cgates has the flexibility and scalability to meet its future growth plans while optimizing the delivery of high quality video streaming across all platforms.

During the first part of the engagement, Cgates went live with Synamedia virtualized DCM to support the encoding of its 200 cable channels, in HD and 4K. Cgates chose Synamedia’s virtualized DCM because it maximizes picture quality yet minimizes hardware requirements thanks to Synamedia’s industry-leading VIVID Compression. By optimizing bandwidth and latency with content-aware encoding, the virtualized DCM now delivers a superior viewing experience to Cgates’ subscribers, even at peak times.

Complementing the virtualized DCM, Cgates is now deploying Synamedia’s Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) headend, including packaging and storage for VOD and catch-up, as well as Synamedia’s private CDN supporting both HLS and MPEG-DASH. By using Synamedia’s video network technologies for its entire delivery ecosystem, Cgates will give subscribers an immersive and consistent high quality viewing experience across its TV mobile app and its pay-TV service including its new Android set-top boxes.

An important factor in Cgates’ decisions was the cloud-native architecture of both the virtualized DCM and the ABR headend that gives it the flexibility to deploy on-premise then move to a hybrid or cloud models as required. Both also share the same easy-to-use interface that simplifies configuration and uses Synamedia Video Services Manager (VSM) to provision and manage cloud resources.

Cgates is now working with Synamedia on future enhancements including low latency for live sports streaming, and disaster recovery.

Tomas Burovas, CEO of Cgates commented, “With bold plans to grow our services, particularly streaming, we needed a technology partner who could share our vision with future-proofed, flexible, scalable solutions. Synamedia stands out from the crowd with its attention to innovation, particularly its latest compression techniques.”

“As a technology partner Synamedia went above and beyond our expectations. For example, we wanted a special feature for when time-shifted content is presented to the player. None of the vendors we were talking to had this feature. We were blown away when Synamedia’s engineering team developed the feature for us in less than a week,” said Marius Dabrisius, CTO at Cgates.

Julien Signès, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Video Network at Synamedia, added, “We get a lot of attention for our big name customer wins, but our powerful yet cost-effective solutions are also well suited to smaller and medium sized video service providers. By deploying our video network solutions across its entire data plane, Cgates is optimizing the delivery of quality video today and is primed for the next stage of its growth.”

Synamedia worked with its regional partner Scansatec for the Cgates’ deployment. Based in Finland, Scansatec specialises in pre-sales, integration and support for video solutions across the Baltics and Nordics.

Synamedia’s video network portfolio powers premium quality broadcast and broadband video for more than 1,000 operators worldwide and 100 million daily viewers. Its video distribution, processing and delivery services and solutions create compelling live multi-screen experiences, enable software-defined video processing and unify operations. The award-winning portfolio also touts cloud-native portable video workflows, converged broadcast and broadband end-to-end ATSC 3.0 offering and low latency solutions for live video. Its virtualized Digital Content Manager (DCM) features live transcoding to multiple bit rates and formats, scalable video functions and best-in-class video quality all aimed to deliver infinite entertainment. BCS Bureau