QUINTO AND ELEMENTAL ASSIST THE SEVEN NETWORK BREAK AUSTRALIAN LIVE STREAMING RECORD

The Seven Network used its coverage of Australian Jockey Michelle Payne’s historic 2015 Melbourne Cup Victory, to launch its new 24/7 live streaming platform 7Live.

Yahoo7 Plus7 users nationwide can now view live streams of all three Seven Network main channels;  Seven,  7TWO, and 7MATE,  24 hours a day, every day in both desktop browsers and on a wide variety of mobile devices.

The new services got off to a record-breaking start.  Seven report that Melbourne Cup day saw more than 488,000 live stream views across the day with 346,000 concurrent live streams during the race itself, on the Akamai Content Delivery Network.

The Seven Networks new 24/7 live streaming services are powered by Elemental Technologies Elemental Live streaming encoders and Elemental Conductor Encoder Management Systems, supplied and commissioned by Elemental’s local partner in Australia and New Zealand, Quinto Communications.

In order to provide different, localised, live streaming versions of the Seven,  7TWO and 7MATE services, the Network in fact creates a total of 37 different individual TV services. Presentation output is provided as HD serial digital video to the Elemental Live streaming encoders, for H.264 video with AAC audio encoding and streaming format packaging.

Elemental Live offers very high encoding density, together with industry leading video quality by virtue of its GPU based encoding technology.  An Elemental Live appliance occupying just one rack unit of rack space is able to take in and encode eight high definition serial digital video service feeds, encoding each in multiple different resolutions and bit rates simultaneously.   Seven’s requirement to create a total of 37 different streaming video services is thus achieved using just five Elemental Live streaming appliances occupying only 5 rack units of rack space at the Melbourne Docklands Playout Centre.

With each channel being streamed at multiple bit rates and resolutions to provide streams optimised for a very wide variety of consumer devices and internet connection speeds, these five Elemental Live units perform in excess of 170 individual realtime H.264 video encodes concurrently and plenty of capacity to grow.

Two Elemental Conductor management and monitoring appliances, configured as a high availability cluster for redundancy, provide for the configuration and monitoring of all of the Live web streaming services, from a single intuitive operator web browser interface.   The Elemental Live encoders on-board web servers also serve streams locally to the Seven in house network monitoring in addition to the Elemental Live encoders delivering the streams to Seven’s Internet Content Delivery Network partners.

Elemental Conductor also provides for upstream video router control to route services to backup encoders if necessary for a very high level of system resiliency, and the elimination of any single points of failure within the Elemental Technologies live stream creation system.

Seven West Media Head of Digital Technology and Development, Damian McNamara, commented “I’m very glad to have had Quinto and Elemental as key partners in delivery of our new live streaming services.  Their immense expertise and effort in the field of live streaming video services ensured our recent launch has been a success”.

More Info:
Quinto: www.quinto.com.au