Channel 4 Chooses M2A Live to VoD

London, 2 September 2016: M2A Media is delighted to announce that UK broadcaster Channel 4 has selected its Live to VoD service for fast delivery of on-demand video from live broadcast events.

Channel 4 has employed the service to reduce its video processing and delivery times to a matter of minutes, allowing it to make live content available to its All 4 On-Demand viewers faster than ever before.

M2A Media’s cloud-based services are integrated into the Channel 4 on-demand workflow to capture, package and deliver video from live streamed broadcast events.

The workflow includes;

Removal of linear advertising breaks from the video
Addition of log points for the insertion of on-demand advertising breaks
Delivery of multiple formats and DRMs for on-demand platforms

A key driver for this project was Channel 4’s ground-breaking coverage of Formula 1.

Andy Bell, Channel 4’s Video Engineering Manager for All 4 said:

“Formula One is all about speed and our viewers want to be able to watch our F1 action on-demand as soon as each programme is over. With M2A Media’s Live To VoD solution F1 fans can now see the whole race, from start to finish, on-demand only minutes after the chequered flag.”

The M2A Media Live Capture service integrates key components from Unified Streaming Platform, a leading provider of cross-platform streaming technologies.

The live transcoded video stream is ingested in eight bit-rates into Unified Origin with a 24-hour cache.
The ingested video is frame-accurately trimmed to programme boundaries
Unified Origin produces MPEG-DASH, HLS, Smooth and HDS VoD, DRM’d with Widevine, Playready, Fairplay, Access and Marlin
Prepared assets are then delivered to Channel 4’s origin for onward distribution to its OTT platforms

M2A is dedicated to helping companies migrate their media processing and media workflows to the public cloud. All of M2A Media processing takes place in the Amazon Web Services environment and its products are offered with a complete set of RESTful APIs making it easy to integrate them into existing scheduling and content management systems.

The M2A Media microservice architecture provisions services as needed, thereby reducing overheads while guaranteeing throughput and availability. This flexibility means customers reduce delivery costs, complexity and elapsed time.

Key benefits include: