Kasenna Launches Spanish VOD Service

Kasenna has announced that Jazztel, the Spanish telecommunications and data transmission provider has launched its video on demand (VOD) service across Spain using Kasenna’s PortalTV product suite.
The system, installed and implemented by Kasenna authorised reseller Telindus, powers the new VOD service, Videoclub, launched by Jazztel in December 2006.
The project, which encompasses more that 50 of Kasenna’s video servers, has been hailed as one of the broadest roll-outs of IPTV based VOD services in the world today.
The Videoclub service gives Jazztel customers access to a huge range of video content, including movies, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Jazztel’s nationwide VideoClub service is built on the foundation provided by Kasenna’s MediaBase Video Server platform, employed by Jazztel to deliver H264 video streaming right across Spain, and vFusion, Kasenna’s content distribution software, which allows Jazztel to optimize storage between the centralized server and streaming edge servers.
Videoclub will offer all customers of Jazztelia TV (Jazztel’s TV service) access to a catalogue of free and pre-paid content, which the subscriber would be able to choose from a catalogue of new releases. In addition, it has a recommendation and novelty section, so the customer will always know the new contents that can be accessed that month.
Miguel Angel Rodriguez, Home Market Director for Jazztel commented: “Our Videoclub service will help satisfy the demands of our customers for greater access and control to video entertainment. We believe that the advanced VOD services that Kasenna makes possible will greatly enhance our business proposition and value in the Spanish market. Our customers will be able to control the movie playback as they would with a DVD, which is a huge improvement over the traditional satellite movie services. Certainly, a key factor in choosing Kasenna was the open architecture of their solution which will allow us to continue to develop or VOD offerings into the future.”
Robert Hopkins, Managing Director for Kasenna in Europe, concluded: “We are proud to be a partner of Jazztel in building one of the largest roll-out of IPTV-based Video On Demand infrastructures in the world today. Our media servers and content distribution software are the only systems in the world that combine high performance, broad interoperability, and full service network management for efficient delivery of today and tomorrow’s broadband video services. Our solution that is being used by Jazztel also offers an easy upgrade path to advanced features such as network video recording, without the need for new hardware and with seamless integration into the vFusion content management system.”
Jazztel, which has its own infrastructure across Spain, offers broadband solutions for voice, data and Internet services for residential and business markets. The IPTV service now includes broadcast TV and On Demand Video and Jazztel plans to add NPVR on to its network. The first phase has been implemented already across all of Spain’s largest cities serving more than 100,000 simultaneous subscribers.
Kasenna’s MediaBase is a high performance, scaleable video server platform that provides the underlying streaming and content delivery network for Video on Demand services as well as providing capture facilities for NPVR. Available for Linux operating systems, MediaBase XMP is the industry’s first and only full-featured platform that handles deployment of video in multiple formats (MPEG-4, MPEG-1, MPEG-2), from narrowband to broadband to broadcast using open standards on mainstream computing hardware.
Kasenna’s vFusion content distribution application is built to solve the challenges of operating and managing a video server network in a highly distributed architecture to offer ease of management and monitoring of the networked servers to reduce total cost of ownership. vFusion centralizes all content management, content distribution, server configuration, and server management into a single application.
(DS/SP)