Mediakind Enables Live Streaming Of Champions Soccer League

Altice France’s SFR, France’s second-largest telecoms operator with 25 million customers, has extended the deployment of MediaKind’s Video Storage and Processing Platform (VSPP) solution to deliver live OTT coverage of a major European soccer competition, the Union of European Football Association’s (UEFA) Champions League (UCL).

In August 2020, MediaKind’s highly scalable VSPP solution enabled SFR to deliver premium sporting content to its highest live streaming audience. Over 1 million concurrent streamers watched the final of the UCL competition through the SFR service. The simplified, flexible architecture of VSPP provides a resilient and efficient live streaming platform that can support multiple services, networks, and devices, offering massive scale-out and high performance.

The SFR deployment includes MediaKind monitoring services, which allow SFR and MediaKind experts to remotely access the VSPP platform to perform proactive observation of performance and identify and mitigate potential areas of risk to the streaming output. SFR continues to deploy MediaKind’s solution and services to enable streaming coverage of the competition during the current European soccer season.

Christophe Delaye, CTO, SFR, said: “As the shift towards streaming content intensified last year, we understood the demand for OTT would quickly translate to the live sports space too. Working with MediaKind offered a wonderful opportunity to test our growing competency in the live streaming space by delivering one of Europe’s most important sporting competitions to our subscribers across France. By leveraging the power of MediaKind’s high-performing VSPP solution, we have been able to scale our platform and provide stable, high-quality live coverage of European soccer to our largest-ever OTT audience.”

Damien Montessuit, SVP global sales, MediaKind, said: “We are delighted to continue our longstanding relationship with SFR. Ensuring reliable, low latency streaming to large volumes of concurrent traffic is a significant undertaking, even for the most robust networks — every second counts. Through the capabilities of our video-optimized VSPP solution, we were able to protect the quality and integrity of SFR’s live sports content and deliver it to the screens of a record-breaking audience in France. Enabling this high-scale live OTT streaming of one of Europe’s most important soccer competitions is not only a success but also a significant achievement for all the technical teams involved.”

MediaKind VSPP is a unified solution for live, cloud DVR, on-demand, and time/place-shifted services, offering better performance, reduced latency, and lower CAPEX and TCO. VSPP provides CBR and ABR streaming services, allowing users to build a unified cluster with a single ABR recording copy. The solution removes content duplication and provides savings on storage of up to 30%, enabling service providers to quickly deliver a full range of next-generation TV services efficiently and cost-effectively.

VSPP harnesses a geo-redundant self-healing architecture for multiple use cases — including a rolling buffer for replay services, nPVR assets, and archive content — to allow for layers of content protection. The solution extends content durability and availability by providing a continuous streaming experience, even when the original content is corrupted by external (source, network) or internal (hardware or disk fail) factors.