Stream Circle – Best Of Show Winner At IBC

"This year, I strongly recommended all my contacts not to miss the revolutionary Stream Circle solution," says Martin Junek from Provys, "and I was proved right because Stream Circle was amongst the winners of the Best of Show Award at this year's IBC". So what is Stream Circle all about?

Stream Circle is a cloud-based television playout service that allows broadcasters and video content owners to easily open new channels at a fraction of the cost and time of launching a traditional linear channel. Stream Circle's service is fully adaptable to channel brand identity and programming. Clients simply provide Stream Circle with their content and programming schedule and they obtain a new TV channel stream for distribution. It is that easy.

Digital transmission makes more channels available to the viewers but it is still expensive if it is not watched by many thousands of people. Nowadays, broadcasters need to deliver more channels for less money but DVB has a limited bandwidth and is costly. At the same time, IP delivery is becoming cheaper and allows the launch of specialised channels targeting smaller audience groups. Additionally, most people still want "to be entertained" and so require linear type programming. These are exactly the needs that Stream Circle fulfils: a cost effective TV type of entertainment production, extremely cheap for traditional broadcasters and quite affordable for newcomers as well. Stream Circle claims that, in addition to linear programme scheduling and delivery through IP networks, it also facilitates complete automation workflows for playout, which include live video, full-featured graphics insertion, closed captioning, crawlers, multiple audio channels, etc., etc. All of this is a cloud based linear TV service requiring no capital expenditures. Technically, the streamed channels can reach their viewers in a number of ways: standard delivery through available CDNs such as Amazon or IBM's cloud services, through a Smart TV application or an HbbTV (Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV) application.

Traditional broadcasters usually run a standard traffic system and real-time broadcast automation to support the operations for daily services. Certainly, they would prefer not to build a new master control for each internet TV channel. This is precisely the open door for Stream Circle to offer its internet linear automation service purchased on a monthly basis to maximise cashflow efficiency. The only step that may be required is to integrate the traffic system and the ad-sales platform with Stream Circle using its SOAP-based APIs to deliver the content metadata, schedules, ad-campaign content and provide on-line reporting. If there is a need for integration with some affordable broadcast technology, Stream Circle have recently announced compatibility with the NDI (Network Device Interface) standard developed by NewTek Inc. NDI is naturally based on IP networking and can be easily implemented in cloud infrastructures such as Stream Circle. Using NDI, this flexible open architecture allows adding new and additional devices into production and workflow or rapid deploying setups for live transmission in remote areas. NDI will also support integration with ASPEN, SMPTE 2022, and other emerging standards. By its IP nature, NDI can be easily implemented in cloud infrastructures such as Stream Circle.

Returning now to our review of the IBC, many visitors were intrigued by the revolutionary technology and massive future potential offered to the whole media industry by the Stream Circle solution at this year's show.

www.provys.com

www.streamcircle.com

This article is also available to read at BFV online here, page 32.

(JP/LM)