SYDNEY—Telstra Broadcast Services (TBS) and BT have signed an initial five-year strategic alliance agreement to bring together their global media networks and pool their network infrastructure and localized expertise.

The agreement will enable TBS to grow its global footprint by 50% and expand its customer base to more than 170 broadcast and media organizations around the world, the companies said.

“Our priority at TBS is to offer a world-class global content delivery service for our customers, including the largest distribution network with the most flexibility and options for organizations to connect to the world,” said Karen Clark, head of APAC at TBS.   

“We’re continuing to see rapid growth in content demand and ongoing evolution in technology and distribution channels in response to changing consumer behavior. The focus of TBS and BT’s teams and operations on the right customer outcome will ensure our customers have the very best partner to respond to the fast-changing broadcast environment and help them optimize their operations and reach global audiences.”  

The deal gives the customers of both companies access to their unified operations, including their global media networks, via a product offering from Telstra. It brings key Asia-Pacific regions, including India, Malaysia, Hong Kong and other countries into the fold, they said.

Media companies will benefit from Telstra’s high-capacity media networks, generating expanded reach and distribution of their content. This will be supported by an increased local team in APAC and access to the broader suite of TBS products and services, including field services, special events teams and broadcast operations centers in Sydney, Melbourne, Hong Kong, London and Pittsburgh.   

Telstra and BT customers will continue to access the same media delivery service with the additional opportunity to drive greater global reach and visibility of their content, the companies said.

“We're excited about this collaboration and the opportunity to bring our customers greater content, reach and visibility by utilizing the strength of both BT M&B’s and TBS' world-class content delivery networks,” said Faisal Mahomed, director of media and broadcast and UK Portfolio Businesses at BT.   

“This approach builds on the reach of our intelligent media platform, Vena, which continues to add wider networks, in addition to cloud integrations, virtualized services such as baseband encoding, and the recent 5G and LEO developments into our portfolio.”

More information is available on the TBS and BT websites.  

SAN JOSE & REDWOOD CITY, Calif.—Cisco has announced a partnership with Qwilt and Digital Alpha (DA) to offer a new caching service that the companies claim will address the growing demand for high resolution convent over IP. The first customer of this “as a service” offering is BT, the U.K.’s leading telecommunications and network provider. Qwilt is a provider of edge cloud and open caching software technology for ISPs and DA is an investment firm specializing in digital infrastructure technology development.  

The new “Open Caching” service is an open architecture developed and endorsed by the Streaming Video Alliance that aggregates the content delivery infrastructure inside service provider networks into a global CDN with APIs for content publishers and is designed to help service providers easily deploy an edge CDN footprint, offering more control over content flows. It also provides more capacity and consistency in content delivery and performance assurance, the companies said. 

The increase in 4K (and soon 8K) content supporting AR/VR applications across multiple devices over wired and wireless connections is driving the demand for more network capacity, with interview video traffic expected to comprise 82% of all (consumer) internet traffic by 2022 (up form 73% in 2017), according to Cisco’s VNI.

The partnership combines Qwilt’s content delivery platform based on Open Caching, with Cisco’s edge compute and networking infrastructure to deliver the solution as-a-service to service providers of all sizes worldwide. BT, in partnership with Qwilt, Cisco and DA, has deployed this solution to add multiple terabits per second of capacity to meet its growing demand in 2020 and beyond. 

More than 50 global service providers, technology vendors and content publishers have already endorsed Open Caching, according to the companies. 

“At BT we connect for good and streaming video has never been more important than in today’s challenging times,” said Neil McRae, chief architect, managing director for Architecture and Technology Strategy at BT. “Our mission at BT is to ensure our customers have the best experience every time and with record levels of streaming we needed to disrupt the status quo. Qwilt’s pioneering open caching platform together with Cisco’s cloud infrastructure gives BT the first 5G MEC capability in the U.K. to deliver premium quality video and on demand services.”

“Streaming video may be the killer app for the internet, but it doesn’t have to KILL the internet,” said Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president and GM, Mass Scale Infrastructure Group, Cisco. “With streaming video expected to represent north of 80% of traffic flowing through service provider networks in the coming years, content delivery is the first of potentially many services they can deploy from within to monetize their edge footprint in the 5G era. Marking this milestone together with Qwilt and Digital Alpha to enable edge cloud services for service providers, we can change the economics of the internet for the future, partnering with customers like BT to help them manage video traffic more effectively.” 

PORTLAND, ORE.—AWS Elemental was on the championship stage when BT used its live video processing technology to help support its live stream broadcasts of the UEFA Champions League final on June 3. BT offered both a 360-degree virtual reality and 4K live stream via its BT Sport application and YouTube.

For the live streams, BT’s on-site production trucks delivered the VR feeds from the 12 360-degree, 4K cameras set up around the stadium to AWS Elemental Live encoders for processing and packaging live streams. The 4K UHD streams originating from BT’s main channel playout center were also encoded by AWS Elemental Live for live streaming of the 4K content over YouTube Live. AWS Elemental was able to offer high quality bitrate outputs to viewers on browsers, Android and iOS devices, Chromecast and select gaming consoles.

BT utilizes AWS Elemental software to unify its traditional and multiscreen headend for its BT Sport app, BT TV and BT UHD services.

STOCKHOLM—Ericsson and BT Media are teaming up for a pair of projects involving augmented reality and a HEVC 4K broadcast.

First, BT Sport is Ericsson’s first client for its PIERO Augmented Reality software system per its press release. The PIERO AR system launched in April and is designed to enable broadcasters to overlay 3D graphics in real-time during live studio productions and games. The graphics can be created by either a system operator or presenter using a tablet device. The graphics are then projected onto the studio floor in 3D. BT Sport has also signed up to use PIERO sports graphics software, another part of the PIERO product suite, for rugby broadcasts.

Also, Ericsson, with BT Media and BT Sports is demonstrating a live example of a high efficiency video coding (HEVC) contribution link used in the delivery of 4K UHDTV during IBC2016. BT Sport will use the technology to broadcast live rugby matches through BT news link trucks. Ericsson is contributing its encoding/decoding technology that supports HEVC and removes the need for AVC quadrant based HDTV contribution. The signal from BT M&B will be sent to Ericsson’s Playout Center in the Netherlands, and then broadcast live to both Ericsson and BT’s booths at IBC2016.

PORTLAND, ORE. & LONDON—Elemental Technologies has announced that its software is being used to standardized communication services company BT’s traditional and multiscreen headend services. The software will help to unify and expand the company’s BT TV Everywhere, BT Sport App and BT Ultra HD services.

BT utilizes Elemental for video coding (HEVC/H.265) and 4K content processing and delivery, specifically for its BT Sport Ultra HD live sports channel and the offer of Netflix in UHD on BT TV. BT also added end-to-end software defined video (SDV) technology from Elemental to support the launch of five new channels on BT TV Everywhere. For the BT Sport App, Elemental helps deliver live streaming sports content via multiscreen devices.

Specifically for BT TV Everywhere, Elemental manages a unified headend for subscription linear channels delivered to IPTV set-top boxes, as well as multiscreen devices. This includes the Elemental Conductor software, which manages Elemental Live encoder clusters that process channels of standard and HD content for delivery at a standard bitrate; the streams then pass to Elemental Delta for packaging to enable live-to-VOD delivery to connected devices. With this infrastructure, BT says it can scale from 90 to 250 channels and provide live, on-demand and time-shift services.

To help highlight their collaboration, BT and Elemental recently held a special event in London featuring live UEFA seminifinal coverage between Manchester City and Real Madrid in 4K.