Dalet, Bitmovin Join Forces To Power OTT For Australia’s National Rugby League

Dalet and Bitmovin announced today a new collaboration designed to improve preparation and accelerate delivery of OTT content for broadcasters, sports leagues and teams, brands, and other media-rich companies. The first organization to take advantage of the new technology partnership is Australia’s National Rugby League (the NRL).

The workflow integration, which features the advanced media logistics of Dalet’s Ooyala Flex Media Platform and Bitmovin’s blazing fast encoder technology, provides the NRL with the flexibility and agility to fully optimize their OTT strategy. Deep integration through the Dalet and Bitmovin open APIs enables them to expand existing offerings into new markets and geographies at scale; engage fans through multiple services such as VOD, apps and subscriptions; and augment revenue opportunities thanks to better visibility across their production and distribution operations.

“Dalet’s Ooyala Flex Media Platform, deeply integrated with Bitmovin’s encoding, player and analytics offerings, redefines the economics and the experience of OTT video distribution for brands like the National Rugby League,” states Stefan Lederer, CEO, Bitmovin. “Viewers will be delighted with higher quality and a more diverse range of content. Streaming costs are drastically lowered through better use of bandwidth. With greater transparency across the operations, media organizations are able to make smarter decisions about legacy and future content and video reach.”

“Both our solutions are developed on the principle of openness and provide sophisticated automation for business scalability. This approach empowers our joint customers like the NRL to build integrated solutions and remain in total control of their asset life cycles,” comments Lee McMullan, market director of multiplatform distribution, Dalet. “Efficiency through automation and asset tracking enables digital and marketing teams to tap into archives, orchestrate content preparation, scaling distribution of rich content to a wider audience.”

The National Rugby League  is one of Australia’s most popular and entertaining sports. The NRL telecasts have grown to become the most watched sporting programs on Australian television.

Branching off the NRL is NRL’s Digital division; creating, producing, archiving and live-streaming hundreds of hours of content to NRL’s official website, NRL.com, and the Telstra NRL Official app on smart devices as well as the Telstra TV OTT device.

NRL Digital’s underlying media technology also powers the 16 clubs and two states, as well as NRL operational websites and mobile applications content delivery, enabling better fan and members content experience online.

The combined Ooyala Flex Media Platform and Bitmovin solution made it easier for NRL’s staff to build ad-hoc workflows that could better tap into their rich inventory and distribute more editorial content, imagery and video across the NRL’s websites and mobile applications. Ooyala Flex Media Platform’s powerful and efficient workflow and content management capabilities orchestrated the media catalogs’ encoding, media movement and content discovery to surface near-live video to their audiences.

“When working with video content from varying sources that needs to be published online (live, near-live or on-demand content), every workflow, metadata layer and media processing step adds time and complexity getting content to the audience. By combining the Ooyala Flex Media Platform and the Bitmovin solutions we have been able to reduce complexity and issues, optimising inefficient steps while successfully accelerating our online delivery workflows,” said Quanah McBride, NEL’s head of digital media operations.