IP TELEVISION
PROJECT INFORMATION
ABOUT
Our client provides broadband internet service through solely owned FTTH fiber optic network across Georgia, and serves as the major regional backbone. They deliver services to both business and residential customers.
They decided to enter IPTV / VoD market with a low-cost, customized solution to deploy new service nationwide. The solution had to be technically superior to their competitors existing services in the market in order to be highly competitive.
The Project
The main challenge was to deliver high quality IPTV service with VoD features and keep deployment cost to minimum, in order to easily reach economies of scale and offer competitive price.
The second challenge was to develop scalable solution, which could handle an increased customer base, as well as higher nationwide traffic loads.
- 50 Full HD Channels
- 250 SD Channels
- Multicast (Live Streaming), Unicast (On Demand Streaming)
- Recorded content of 2 months per channel
- Rewind by program name, date/time
- Time Shift (+/‐ 30s; 1m; 5m)
- Trick Play (+/‐ x2; x4; x8; x16; x32)
- User profiles stored in CMS
- 4-5 seconds STB boot‐up time
- STB UI with 3 languages (GE, EN, RU)
- Low delay / Fast channel switching
- STB with H.264/AAC
COST-EFFECTIVE OUTCOME
OUR SOLUTION
In order to meet their specific business requirements, we developed a cost-effective solution, efficiently deployed on low-end hardware ($100,000 total). Transcoder modules were set up on low-cost Intel Xeon E3 series based servers, and streaming modules were set up to use mid range SATA hard drives.
Our solution allows multiple modules to be deployed as the whole system, or integrated into existing system separately
HIGH QUALITY DELIVERY
TRANSCODER
Transcoder software enables high-quality delivery across any platform or device, ensuring end users are receive adaptive content. The solution provides low delay / low latency streaming and can handle transcoding of up to 11 FHD channels simultaneously.
The solution provides high performance using hardware acceleration based on Intel Quick Sync (using libVA API) dedicated video encoding/decoding core, resulting in superior speed and performance. Moving heavy computing loads of video transcoding to dedicated GPU cores keeps CPUs focused on other tasks and improves system responsiveness.
Main Features
- MPEG-2 transport stream, HLS
- MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoding, H.264 encoding
- Supports VBR encoding for video
- MP2A, AAC, AC-3 decoding, AAC encoding
- Up to 11 Full-HD channels
- Up to 40 SD channels
LIVE & ON DEMAND VIDEO
STREAMER
Customized streaming media server, responsible for streaming live and on demand videos. The streamer is compatible with wide variety of protocols and multimedia container formats. In order to ensure responsive and smooth content delivery, the solution is optimized to support adaptive bitrate streaming to provide end users are served with the appropriate video bitrate according to their bandwidth.
The streamer incorporates a playback recorder, which makes it easy to record and archive live content for on demand streaming (time shift feature).
On demand streaming for multiple users is made possible by caching video files in main memory as long as it’s being streamed by at least one user, avoiding the high latency process of reading video files from hard drives. Consequently, costs for storage hardware were reduced, as mid-range HDDs can be used instead of SSDs.
Main Features
- Live streaming
- Stream recording
- Streaming recorded files
- MPEG-2 transport stream index recording
- Inbound – MPEG-2 transport stream multicast/unicast, HLS
- Outbound – MPEG-2 transport stream multicast/unicast, HLS
- Rewind/trickplay for index recorded materials
- DDoS Secure streaming option (streamer was secured from DDoS or any cyber attacks
CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
CMS
Content Management Systems is middleware, which is used by system administrators to manage customer user profiles, channel settings, channel packaging as well as integrate configuration and monitoring features.
CMS acts as remote database to store user profiles and corresponding parameters such as: channel volume preference, language preference, previous active channel and settings preferences. CMS sends these parameters to STB each time end user logs in. Saving STB settings in CMS provides feature to restore user specific settings in case settop box is replaced with new one.
End user can have multiple STBs located in different places and have the customized settings for each of them. In case customer has multiple STBs, she can load preferred / saved STB settings from CMS to specific boxes. This gives the feature to uninterruptedly continue on demand streaming from the exact moment when switching to different STB.
STB firmware updates are uploaded to CMS and automatic updates are delivered to STBs once newer version is available. CMS supports graceful update feature.
To handle end user requests for timeshifting, STBs connect to CMS, which itself forwards received requests to streamer. Only streamer is authorized to initiate connection to STBs and ignores incoming end user traffic in order to be isolated and prone to DOS attacks.
Technical Details
- Processing millions of requests from users
- Storing user data
- Audio preferences per channel (language and volume)
User Profile Information
- User audio preferences
- Preferred language
- Display settings
- Billing information
- Electronic Program Guide
SET TOP BOX
STB
Set-top box is designed to require minimum hardware resources and ensure high QoE. STB system utilizes tiny Linux image (total size – 5MB including software) created using Buildroot and can be deployed on Single Board Computer (e.g. Raspberry Pi 2).
System is equipped with an advanced UI with multiple language support and content search capabilities, which gives end users full control over delivered content and guarantees intrinsic user experience.
Hardware Used
- Raspberry PI SBC, small PCB attached to Raspberry Pi GPIO, IR receiver, LED lights.
User Profile Information
- Tiny Linux image (only 5MB including software) – built using Buildroot. Qt/QML for UI.
INDUSTRY APPROVED