ROSH HA'AYIN, ISRAEL - VideoFlow's Digital Video Protection (DVP) technology has solved major quality issues for ALMA TV (www.almatv.kz/en). ALMA TV is the leading provider of cable television in Kazakhstan with over 120 channels gathering content from around the world but was experiencing a lot of quality issues with its content delivery over MPLS (MultiProtocol Label Switching) networks.
Dmitry Basin, CTO at ALMA TV, explained, "We decided to use MPLS, which is considered the most reliable form of IP network currently available for the video delivery. However, we experienced video quality problems so we tried almost every standard approach including Pro MPEG FEC (Forward Error Correction) to resolve it but none of these legacy technologies could deliver the quality that we expect to provide to our customers.
The SVN Group, VideoFlow's distributor in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), suggested VideoFlow's technology as a solution because it automatically corrects for jitter and lost packets giving a stable, reliable, video quality over unmanaged, unreliable networks such as the Internet. During the first test between two cities, VideoFlow's diagnostics and statistics showed that the Service Provider was not actually meeting the service level agreement (SLA) and the actual bitrate was, in fact, fluctuating. This evidence enabled ALMA TV to have the bitrate improved to what it was paying for and, interestingly, even over the poor connection, VideoFlow technology was able to deliver the best possible quality video given the network conditions as its proprietary software automatically corrects for lost packets ensuring jitter-free, perfect video.
"Being able to accurately monitor the behaviour of the connection in real time is invaluable as it helped us find out the fundamental problem of the poor connection and then get it fixed," added Vadim Morozov, SVN's General Director. "We could not have done it without the detailed statistics that the VideoFlow equipment provides."
Dmitry Basin, commented, "When SVN said that they had a solution to our problem, their comment was all you have to do is plug it in and it will work. And it really is that simple. We have tested it thoroughly and the VideoFlow solution is really unique - really simple to use and does exactly what it is supposed to do. It enables us to provide our subscribers with a reliable high quality service. We have proven that VideoFlow is the best technical solution with one connection and we are currently rolling out the same solution to five more cities."
The resulting configuration will have DVP100 Sentinels in six cities receiving a 40Mbps content from a DVP1000 Protector at ALMA TV's main headend in Almaty. This new network deployment is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2014 with additional links being added in 2015 to more than 14 locations. "Now that we have proved that the VideoFlow DVP solution consistently delivers the quality of video required, it is a simple matter of replicating this solution to extend the network to additional locations," said Vadim Morozov.
Mr. Adi Rozenberg, VideoFlow's CTO, added, "VideoFlow DVP technology provides better and more reliable solutions than legacy ones and at a fraction of the cost. Our in-built diagnostics accurately indicate any problems in the network or in the video stream giving real time intelligence. This enabled the operator to rapidly respond to any issue considerably reducing the time required for fixing the problem on a live network reducing the time to repair to a minimum. By providing an integrated video protection/video monitoring solution, VideoFlow is redefining the ways that broadcasters gather and move content over unmanaged networks to replace dedicated, expensive connections without compromising quality and often slash costs as well."
VideoFlow technology
Live video broadcast are sent as a continuous bit stream, which the Internet was never designed to handle, resulting in artefacts caused by jitter, and packet loss. More than a couple of seconds of latency is unacceptable by customers expecting to enjoy the excitement of live events like sport as they happen. VideoFlow's patent pending technology opens the Internet for delivering content by ensuring that no packet is lost and nullifying the jitter caused by transiting the Internet. By doing so, it affords broadcasters, teleports and operators the opportunity to use a highly advanced, low cost solution for live, high quality video streams in place of existing, expensive solutions.
The DVP comes as a "Plug and Play" pair - a Protector, which stores the packets until it is certain that they have been correctly received, and a Sentinel which monitors the health of the video stream by watching for packet loss and requests packets to be resent from the Protector's cache only if required. This is ensured by VideoFlow's patents, which cover techniques to minimize the number of packets that have to be resent. VideoFlow's solution is highly flexible working with internet connections as slow as 200Kb/s or as fast as 800Mbps yet delivering the desired high quality. VideoFlow's patents also covers techniques to reduce bandwidth overhead to the minimum possible and to keep any delays at less than the two seconds, which is the maximum tolerated for true live broadcasts. VideoFlow's DVP family of products enables the reduction of bandwidth requirements cutting operational costs compared to the current solutions.
