Advanced Television

Flanders’ VRT goes DataMiner

September 13, 2018

Skyline Communications, the global leader in end-to-end multi-vendor network management and OSS software solutions for the broadcast, satellite, cable, telco and mobile industry is proud to announce that Flanders’ public broadcaster, VRT, has selected its state-of-the-art NMS/OSS DataMiner platform to further unify and strengthen its operations. This prestigious win further extends Skyline’s long success streak with major broadcasters around the globe, underlining the tremendous strategic value of a powerful vendor-agnostic end-to-end network management and orchestration platform.

DataMiner – VRT DataMiner will provide overarching end-to-end management of the entire technical ecosystem, including but not limited to all satellite uplink and downlink infrastructure, the WAN infrastructure, fiber connections, headend platforms and of course server infrastructure, straight across all vendor and technology boundaries. The award-winning DataMiner platform will also manage all VRT’s contribution links across Flanders, which feature a multitude of access points on strategic locations such as parliaments, telecom operators and the national digital terrestrial television networks. Another important DataMiner characteristic driving the tremendous success of the platform is its unique future-proof nature. This all revolves around the fact that Skyline is a truly independent technology partner, combined with the fact that DataMiner is the only solution that truly integrates with any product from any vendor. Consequently, DataMiner offers VRT the capability to easily extend the platform across any future infrastructure, without any constraints or potential conflicts of interest.

“The way in which media is used is constantly changing nowadays. It’s just neither sustainable nor interesting to keep on working with traditional, static solutions. Linear services no longer suffice, as viewers expect to be able to watch whatever they want whenever they want, causing media operations to become more and more complex and agile,” commented Michael Moelants, Telecom, Ingest, Playout and Business Continuity Manager at VRT. “As a public service broadcaster, it is our duty to reinforce the Flemish media landscape. With the deployment of DataMiner, we are ensured that it will help us to have a future-proof and flexible operation that lives up to our viewers’ expectations.”

Thanks to the innovative AI-based technology that is integrated into DataMiner, VRT is guaranteed to uphold its high service quality, despite the fact that ecosystems are becoming more and more complex. The AI-powered DataMiner platform enables the operator to resolve issues before they even get the chance to occur. DataMiner will further ensure optimal quality and availability of services in a cost-efficient manner through its ability to initiate a failover to switch from main to backup or vice versa, based on the health state of individual products that contribute to the playout channel and the KPIs DataMiner collects from the monitoring points of each channel.

“The project at VRT is one we’re really proud of,” said Didier Schepens, Sales Manager EMEA & APAC at Skyline Communications. “Thanks to DataMiner, VRT will be able to further follow its intended course of being a flexible media company that adapts to change and takes advantage of new opportunities. With just a single pane of glass, operators can intuitively manage, control and orchestrate any product, software function or media service, irrespective of the underlying technology.”

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