Mediaset España selects Unified Streaming tech
May 3, 2022
Unified Streaming, a specialist in smart video streaming technologies, is partnering with Mediaset España, a player in the linear broadcast and VoD markets in Spain, to optimise Mediaset España’s live streaming and linear programming.
Mediaset España is also implementing Unified tech to enable content protection for premium content in its on-demand workflow, and to package its entire video-on-demand catalogue, with and without DRM.
Mediaset España selects Unified’s technology as it pivots from push-based streaming to a pull-based protocol, which creates content dynamically, or on the fly, only when it is needed. Mediaset España’s partnership with Unified Streaming also aligns with the Spanish company’s optimization of its multi-CDN (Content Delivery Network) strategy. Spreading distribution over numerous CDNs keeps Mediaset España nimble, diversifies risk, and lets it evade vendor lock-in.
Mediaset España’s pull-based origin, which is running in the Microsoft Azure cloud, facilitates this multi-CDN strategy. Improvement to the caching setup of the CDNs has greatly reduced the requests to, and egress from, the Unified Origin to the CDNs.
Rather than signing its systems over to a one-stop-shop, Mediaset España is signaling that it prefers the approach of Unified Streaming – a best-of-breed with tech that Mediaset España can tailor to its own requirements. If any issues arise, Mediaset España can replace components easily without, for instance, needing to re-encode its content library – an advantage of modularity that beats its previous setup, which necessitated an entire restructuring if any changes were made somewhere in its delivery flow.
With Unified Origin technology Mediaset España gains the flexibility needed to stream to all devices and to serve all use cases. Certain smart TVs and STBs (set-top boxes) can be quirky, since they’re usually outfitted with older standards and legacy DRM (digital rights management) implementation. Unified Streaming finesses these particular third-party idiosyncrasies just as simply as it accommodates the latest standards.
The interoperability of Unified Streaming and Mediaset España has been tested in Azure via Kubernetes, a system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. With the Unified Origin integration, failover—or the ability of software to switch unnoticeably to a solid backup system, without fuss—has been characterised as perfect.
About the cooperation between his company and Unified Streaming, Mediaset España CTO Manuel Jesús Guisado, commented: “The reason this has worked so well is because Unified’s support team is so laser-focused on packaging, and every packaging issue that was seen in testing, they solved.”
Ewout Meijer, Sales Team Lead at Unified Streaming, said: “Mediaset España’s goal of building a best-of-breed OTT solution aligns perfectly with Unified Streaming’s vision of providing broadcasters and operators with the tools to deliver the best and most personalised viewing experience.”