Ericsson, the 140-year-old Swedish technology conglomerate that continues to reinvent itself every couple of generations, made news on three fronts April 18 at the National Association of Broadcasters’ conference in Las Vegas.
No. 1: Thanks to its acquisition of Envivio last fall, the company has now come out with a process it calls MediaFirst Video Processing, which it claims is the only Ultra HD video processing system that can manage and work inside all computing environments and is deployable in private cloud, public cloud and on-premises.
No. 2: NBC Olympics has selected Ericsson to provide video contribution and distribution solutions for its production of the Games of the XXXI Olympiad, which take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from Aug. 5 through Aug. 21.
No. 3: Ericsson has expanded its Unified Delivery Network ecosystem with new partner additions that include China Telecom, Dolby Laboratories and Paramount Pictures.
MediaFirst Video Processing
Ericsson’s MediaFirst Video Processing solution for ultra-high-quality encoding and video delivery unites the company’s suite of video processing capabilities and video compression research. The video processing solution works with the Ericsson MediaFirst TV Platform to create agile, cloud-centric TV distribution.
Ericsson MediaFirst Video Processing has three main elements:
–software-defined management and workflow to orchestrate and manage any video processing configurations and architectures that span multiple compute platforms;
–an advanced suite of video coding algorithms and processing functions to build any business use case for head-end functions that deliver video with high quality and efficiency; and
–support for any compute environment to give complete customer flexibility to deploy Ericsson MediaFirst Video Processing across private clouds, public clouds and on Ericsson custom platforms, enabling accelerated processing with Ericsson’s video chip.
Ericsson has delivered pioneering video compression expertise and technology to customers for almost 25 years.
NBC’s TV Coverage of Rio Olympics
Ericsson will provide a range of its video processing systems and advanced modular receivers, supporting NBC Olympics with the delivery of high-quality HD broadcast to millions of viewers. Expert Ericsson engineers will also be providing 24/7 event support onsite, as well as assisting with equipment and system set-up.
This isn’t the first time Ericsson and NBC have worked together in the Olympics. The company’s encoding solutions were most recently used by NBC Olympics for the 2014 Sochi Winter Games, and prior to this, Ericsson supported NBC Olympics production of the 2012 London Games, 2010 Vancouver Winter Games, the 2008 Beijing Games and the 2006 Winter Olympics from Turin, Italy.
Unified Delivery Network Update
Following the introduction of Unified Delivery Network (UDN) during Mobile World Congress in February 2016, Ericsson has expanded the UDN ecosystem to include 22 members. Among them are China Telecom, Chunghwa Telecom, Dolby Laboratories, Far EasTone Telecommunications, Globe Telecom, Mavshack, Paramount Pictures, Singtel, SK Broadband, XL Axiata, Vubiquity and Twentieth Century Fox.
The global content distribution network (CDN) extends content and service provider network capabilities to the public domain for enhanced OTT (over-the-top) content delivery.
In broadcasting, OTT content refers to the delivery of audio, video and other media over the Internet without the involvement of a multiple-system operator in the control or distribution of the content. The Internet provider may be aware of the contents of the Internet Protocol packets but is not responsible for, nor able to control, the viewing abilities, copyrights, and/or other redistribution of the content.
The additions to the Ericsson ecosystem improve the traditional CDN model by using existing service-provider networks and powering new business models via network-wide transparency, the company said.