MediaKind scores in Champions League live streaming for SFR

France’s second-largest telecoms operator with 25 million customers, has extended its deployment of MediaKind’s Video Storage and Processing Platform (VSPP) solution to deliver live OTT coverage of UEFA Champions League (UCL) football.

The crown jewels of the European game, the UCL places huge demands on viewing quality and the Mediakind solution is said to have enabled SFR to deliver premium live OTT streaming sports content to over one million concurrent viewers for last year’s final between Bayern Munich and Paris ST Germain while ensuring the best possible viewing experience.

The SFR deployment includes MediaKind monitoring services, which enable SFR and MediaKind experts to access remotely the VSPP platform to perform proactive observation of performance and identify and mitigate potential areas of risk to the streaming output. SFR continues to deploy MediaKind’s solution and services to enable streaming coverage of the competition during the current European football season.

“As the shift towards streaming content intensified last year, we understood the demand for OTT would quickly translate to the live sports space too. Working with MediaKind offered a wonderful opportunity to test our growing competency in the live streaming space by delivering one of Europe’s most important sporting competitions to our subscribers across France,” said SFR CTO Christophe Delaye. “By leveraging the power of MediaKind’s high-performing VSPP solution, we have been able to scale our platform and provide stable, high-quality live coverage of European soccer to our largest-ever OTT audience.”

MediaKind VSPP provides CBR and ABR streaming services, allowing users to build a unified cluster with a single ABR recording copy. The solution removes content duplication and is said to be able to provide savings on storage of up to 30%, enabling service providers to quickly deliver a full range of next-generation TV services efficiently and cost-effectively. It also uses a geo-redundant self-healing architecture for multiple use cases – including a rolling buffer for replay services, nPVR assets, and archive content – to allow for layers of content protection. The solution is also attributed with being able to extend content durability and availability by providing a continuous streaming experience, even when the original content is corrupted by external (source, network) or internal (hardware or disk fail) factors.

“Ensuring reliable, low latency streaming to large volumes of concurrent traffic is a significant undertaking, even for the most robust networks – every second counts. Through the capabilities of our video-optimised VSPP solution, we were able to protect the quality and integrity of SFR’s live sports content and deliver it to the screens of a record-breaking audience in France,” added MediaKind SVP global sales Damien Montessuit. “Enabling this high-scale live OTT streaming of one of Europe’s most important soccer competitions is not only a success but also a significant achievement for all the technical teams involved.” Rapid TV News