Advanced Television

Elemental takes aim at traditional video infrastructure at NAB 2015

March 25, 2015

Elemental Technologies, a supplier of software-defined video solutions for multiscreen content delivery, has announced the expansion of its product line to support statistical multiplexing and enhanced management operations in large-scale video processing deployments. New capabilities enable broadcasters, content owners and pay TV operators to implement flexible and scalable unified infrastructure that supports both traditional broadcast and multiscreen linear video delivery.

At NAB 2015, Elemental will demonstrate software-defined video solutions that integrate functions including statistical multiplexing, end-to-end redundancy and multiscreen content delivery such that pay TV operators can architect unified headends for linear channel operations. With next-generation video encoding, multiplexing, and advanced system management solutions from Elemental, operators can extract more bandwidth capacity from their networks, ensure reliable 24/7 operations and reduce total cost of ownership for linear video delivery when deploying hundreds of channels.

Elemental® Statmux is the industry’s first software-based multi-codec, multi-resolution statistical multiplexer. Multi-codec, multi-resolution statmux support allows operators to mix and match different codecs within their workflows and delivery networks and thoroughly optimize bandwidth usage while putting forward new linear and OTT service offerings in a unified approach.

Latin American pay TV leader TCC is using Elemental Statmux to optimize its linear video delivery. A Uruguayan service innovation pioneer in content distribution, TCC selected Elemental Statmux after exhaustive testing in which the solution delivered 15 to 20 percent bandwidth savings compared to TCC’s existing video processing solution.

“TCC is currently deploying Elemental Statistical Multiplexing on our DVB-S2 satellite infrastructure,” said Marcelo Coggan, chief technology officer for TCC. “Our investment in technology from Elemental is strategic as it positions us not only as a leading pay TV operator but also as a provider to a multitude of pay TV operators in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and other countries in the Southern Cone region.”

For more sophisticated 4K UHD TV and unified headend strategies, Elemental Live encoders can ingest 4K UHD or HD content and transcode it into parallel HEVC UHD and MPEG-2 or H.264 HD and SD streams, allowing a single system to create multi-resolution channel statmux outputs from a single source. Whatever the codec combination, a linear video delivery solution from Elemental is designed to adapt and grow with rapidly evolving cable, satellite and terrestrial network requirements. The ability to mix resolutions and codecs on the same mux channel opens many different possibilities for TV operators and enables a smooth migration path from legacy standards.

“Only software-defined video solutions from Elemental can offer linear TV and pay TV service providers alike complete control of the entire content delivery chain through unified infrastructure,” said Aslam Khader, chief product officer for Elemental. “As linear content providers add additional service offerings, they are able to quickly scale up and introduce new features with flexible software from Elemental.”

In conjunction with the launch of Elemental Statmux, the latest release of Elemental® Conductor management software offers the features and functionality required by pay TV operators for large-scale live workflows. New capabilities such as bulk actions that allow multiple channels to be stopped, started and edited simultaneously simplifies management of hundreds of channels while ensuring configurations are synchronized. The combined capabilities of template-based channel configuration and secure authentication capabilities provide confidence that all channels are configured with the desired settings by authorized users. Manual or automatic failover switching with customer-defined conditions add a layer of redundancy control expected by pay TV operators.

Categories: Press Releases