Advanced Television

Media Excel and Vidmind partner to provide Cloud TV service

March 20, 2013

Vidmind, a pioneering End-to-end Cloud TV technology provider for operators, broadcasters and retailers, has formed a partnership with Media Excel, an innovator of adaptive bitrate, multi-device transcoding for multiscreen video delivery.

The joint transcoding management component, Vidmind SnowCannon, is in field trials by a number of operators, including a leading East European household brand – a newcomer to the lucrative TV market place. Vidmind’s 1st ever fully managed Cloud TV service will bring a comprehensive home entertainment experience, including live HD-TV, VoD, catch up TV, social features and a TV app market, to the brand’s multimillion customer base.

Media Excel was chosen by Vidmind not only because of its powerful transcoding solution which produces superior quality video in multiple formats but also because of the adaptability of the Media Excel platform. Media Excel’s HERO product can be operated as a local service or on a Cloud service. This allows Vidmind to run the encoding process at the customer’s headend but manage all services through the Cloud.

Vidmind’s first ever fully managed cloud Platform-as-a-service represents  a new business-to-business-to-consumer category in the OTT TV market, which according to Digital TV Research is expected to generate almost $29 billion by 2017.

Any company wishing to become a virtual TV Operator can now enjoy a fully scalable and redundant platform available anywhere in the world. Free of any up-front development or setup costs, Vidmind’s unique monthly pay-as-you-grow business model enables new virtual TV operators to scale up their operations, virtually risk-free, as they acquire more content and subscribers.

The Vidmind platform is the control centre for operators. Using a cloud-based infrastructure, operators can provision the service, manage media content and target specific subscriber segments with deals and promotions. Comprising patent-pending technology, the Vidmind platform is where content is ingested, transcoded, encrypted and delivered. Operators can manage subscriber settings, gain insights on specific subscriber segments and tailor content offering to them.

SnowCannon is the transcoding workflow manager. It is the mitigating layer between the transcoder and the service delivery platform, WildFire, managing the transcoding of numerous media files at a time. SnowCannon supports the consistency of the Vidmind experience across devices, so that every media asset can be viewed in various screen resolutions.

“The success of online video-on-demand services like Netflix is merely a sign of things to come. New Internet-TV providers are popping up like mushrooms after the rain,” said Danny Peled, CEO of Vidmind. “However the winner in each market will be the one who delivers the best experience.” He added. “Strong technology partners like Media Excel help us combine our core competencies into one solid, robust OTT TV solution and offer the richest feature set available today.”

“It is a big honour to have our technology selected by Vidmind,” said John Hotchkiss, COO of Media Excel. ” Vidmind’s unique service models demands the best in transcoding and management, and Media Excel is more than up to the challenge.”

Vidmind will be presenting its End-to-end Cloud TV platform at TV Connect 2013 at the Olympia Exhibition Centre in London, March 19-21 in Stand 11. Visit www.vidmind.com to schedule a demo.

Categories: Press Releases, Video