Red Bee Media, in conjunction with TitanTV, Inc., has signed a multiyear agreement with BitRouter, a leading provider of software for NextGen TV/ATSC 3.0 receivers. TitanTV will provide Red Bee’s data to BitRouter for integration into its ZapperBox products  and services to end users, including BitRouter’s provision of DVR listings information derived program schedules while streamlining their content discovery process. 

"We are excited to embark on this transformative journey with BitRouter and TitanTV," said  Jason Marchese, Head of Sales, Market Area Americas, at Red Bee Media. "Our dedication to  delivering top-tier data solutions aligns perfectly with the goals of this agreement as we will  offer viewers an enriched and seamless experience." 

TitanTV's listings service will span all 210 DMAs, providing program listings metadata for over the-air channel lineups. These lineups will encompass TitanTV’s Signal Prediction  Services with predicted channels to be received within a specific DMA, ensuring  comprehensive coverage for nationwide viewers. Furthermore, 14 days of scheduled  program data will be made available for the OTA lineups, enhancing the viewing experience  for users. 

“This collaboration marks a pivotal moment in our commitment to enhancing the television  experience,” said Gopal Miglani, President of BitRouter. “By integrating Red Bee's data and  TitanTV's comprehensive listings service into our ZapperBox products, we enable viewers to  access daily schedules while ensuring a smoother content discovery experience for audiences  across the nation.” 

TitanTV, a valued partner of Red Bee since 2002, provides online  software and information broadcasters including  real-time tools for signal prediction,  MediaStar Scheduler, PSIP Data Services, ATSC 3.0/NEXTGEN TV ESG Data and rich media  services, online guides and more. 

VALNECIA, Spain—Yuvod, a provider of cloud-based OTT and IPTV solutions, today announced a new partnership with global media services provider Red Bee Media. 

Yuvod’s end-to-end, cloud-based streaming platform will be integrated with Red Bee's API services, positioning Red Bee Media as the main integrated supplier of EPG metadata to be included with Yuvod’s turnkey Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution in the U.S. market, Yuvod said. The company plans to demonstrate the benefits of Red Bee, including their flexibility and exemplary customer service, as an integrated metadata supplier in preparation of launching Yuvod’s solution in the U.S. and Canada.

“Video providers big and small must deliver the same flawless, high-quality experience that can be easily accessed without costing a fortune,” said Ricardo Tárraga, co-founder and CEO at Yuvod. “By partnering with Red Bee, we can provide easily implemented access to advanced yet cost-effective streaming solutions that deliver an unbeatable viewing experience for end users, all entirely in the cloud.”

“We’re excited to partner with Yuvod as they expand their offerings in North America,” said Jason Marchese, Head of Sales, Market Area Americas at Red Bee Media. “By pre-integrating Red Bee’s rich metadata, Yuvod’s cloud-based model can provide video service providers the ability to scale their operations and adjust resources to meet the evolving demands of the market while still reducing costs.”

Yuvod’s holistic platform delivers live and on-demand streaming for TV programming and events, as well as time shift streaming, with advanced functionality across multiple devices and applications. It can be deployed in any location and centralizes all operational and technical processes into the streamer’s hands. Yuvod provides a proprietary video platform, media server, middleware, STB integrations, customizable dashboards, choice of content delivery networks (CDN), IP networking, multi-DRM encryption, CRM and billing systems, customizable app design, 24/7 support—available on Android mobile, Android TV, iOS, Smart TVs and more.

MUNICH, Germany—The global media services provider Red Bee Media has installed the Prismon multiviewer system from Rohde & Schwarz. It replaced older SDI systems in its playout facilities in the UK, with a highly flexible, distributed, IP-connected multiviewer network. 

From its broadcast facilities in London and Salford, Red Bee provides playout and disaster recovery facilities for more than one hundred channels in a variety of management and monitoring configurations. 

“Multiviewers are mission critical to our playout centers,” said Robert Luggar, head of broadcast media solutions and platforms at Red Bee. “We need to monitor around 450 streams, so we need scale and flexibility. Today those streams are SDI, but Rohde & Schwarz demonstrated that the Prismon configuration could handle that, but more important could easily be switched to IP in the future.” 

To ensure that each operator can monitor the right signals, Red Bee requires a readily reconfigured multiviewer system, a requirement that led it to choose Prismon from Rohde & Schwarz, the companies reported. 

Prismon is a software-defined multiviewer running on COTS hardware, and capable of handling signal formats up to 4k Ultra HD, both for displays and for individual streams within mosaics. 

Red Bee selected the SDM (Scalable Distributed Multiviewer) and the MCC (Multiviewer Control Centre) options. SDM, unique to Rohde & Schwarz, enables any input to any output, and allows Prismon to share resources across a network, for instance to create a view with multiple Ultra HD signals, beyond the decoding capacity of a single system. MCC provides a single point of control for a network of multiviewers. This gives instant reconfiguration of multiple displays, either in response to the intuitive user interface or on command from a system-level automation system, Rohde & Schwarz reported.

Andreas Loges, vice president media technologies at Rohde & Schwarz, commented “we competed fiercely for this contract against a number of other vendors. We won because we could deliver a drop-in solution, a direct replacement for the life-expired multiviewer, and because our software-defined approach is inherently a hybrid platform, supporting SDI and IP signals, in both SMPTE ST 2022-6 and ST 2110.”

“Broadcasters around the world are facing the same challenge,” Loges added. “Existing multiviewers are reaching the ends of their lives and were built solely around SDI. Because of this hybrid capability, and the power of SDM, Prismon is well positioned for many more large-scale playout centers.” 

The contract was awarded in December 2020 and, despite the challenges of social distancing and staff protection, it was installed, commissioned and put into use in May 2021.

LONDON—PBS39 (WLVT), a Pennsylvania-based public TV station, has opted for Red Bee Media’s Automatic Realtime Captioning (ARC) AI-driven system for automatic captioning creation for planned and emergency live events.

ARC combines Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology with Red Bee’s Studio live captioning platform. The platform is a service-based method of optimizing ASR to bring its accuracy levels to that of human performances, said Red Bee Media.

PBS39 started with ARC as a three-month trial. It was set up with the station’s caption presentation preferences, core vocabulary lists and an integrated activation interface. After the trial, PBS39 signed up for a multi-year contract to use ARC.

The station uses ARC for two main purposes. The first is for planned live content, which can optimize core vocabulary prior to the broadcast. The other use is for emergency live content, where content-specific vocabulary is not optimized beforehand, but the system retains PBS39’s core vocabulary lists, including the names of news anchors, local places and people and important general vocabulary relating to recent news events.

“Our team loves having the freedom to be able to activate closed captioning easily for our live broadcasts whenever we need it,” says Andrea Cummis, Chief Technology Officer, PBS39. “With a growing vocabulary that is adapted to our preferences and needs, the ARC solution delivers near perfect accuracy and thanks to Red Bee we now have an easy and cost-effective way of making our content more accessible to our audiences. We’re very satisfied.”

For more information, visit www.redbeemedia.com.  

LONDON—Red Bee Media has inked a multiyear deal with Fox Sports to provide master control room (MCR) services to broadcasters in the Netherlands, the company announced today.

“We are happy to have gained the confidence from Fox Sports in the Netherlands,” said Red Bee CEO Steve Nylund.

Fox Sports will provide international sports content to viewers via Red Bee’s multitenant IP-based Global MCR Platform in Hilversum, Netherlands. The company also will deliver mobile encoding kits for use at 38 football stadiums to deliver signals from the Dutch premier and second tier league as part of its contribution and distribution services, the company said.

Red Bee will provide two-way fiber connectivity between BT Tower in London, the Global MCR in Hilversum and other Red Bee hubs, as well as fully managed contribution services for Xee Denmark and ESPN Africa, it said. A direct connection between Dublin and Hilversum will also be setup for ESPN Africa commentary.

The company’s multitenant Global MCR Platform includes the latest software-based solutions for video networks, routing, processing, monitoring, reporting and distribution. Fox Sports will deliver all high-end sports content to its audiences via the platform, which offers the broadcaster the possibility of delivering content in 1080p and High Dynamic Range (HDR) quality.

With the MCR Booking office available 24/7, Red Bee will provide downlink and uplink capabilities from Hilversum and Stockholm.

“With our recently launched global IP-based MCR Platform in Hilversum and additional facilities in London, Paris and Stockholm, we have built a highly flexible and futureproof infrastructure that can manage all MCR, distribution and contribution needs for an evolving media and broadcast industry,” said Nylund.

More information is available on the Red Bee Media website.

LONDON—Women’s soccer has found its very own streaming home with the announcement that Red Bee Media and Spring Media will partner on a global OTT service called Wnited. The service is expected to launch in Q1 2020.

Following this past summer’s Women’s World Cup, Wnited will bring viewers content from professional leagues in the Americas, Europe and Asia, as well as national team matches. The service will have both free and paid subscription options and feature more than 300 live matches and video on-demand content.

The service was developed by Red Bee and will be hosted on its OTT platform, which supports high-end viewing on all devices, global reach and low-latency live feeds.

“Women’s football has reached a turning point when it comes to both viewership and media interest and we believe we’re just at the beginning of a steep growth curve,” said Tobias Osmund, CEO of Spring Media.

Wnited has reportedly already confirmed deals with two top leagues to stream matches, and more announcements are expected in the buildup to launch.

LONDON—Red Bee Media has cut the ribbon on a brand new R&D facility that is located at its Broadcast Centre hub in west London called the Red Lab.

The new facility houses a private cloud platform for remote testing and features meeting and collaboration space for broadcast and network engineers. The Red Lab is the first in what will be the official name for for Red Bee Media’s R&D efforts, which will include multiple facilities across the globe. The company already has plans to open additional Red Lab facilities in Sweden and the Netherlands at some point in 2019.

The creation of Red Lab was a result of Red Bee’s customers migrating onto a shared software-based technology stack. Previously running different projects through its multiple hubs, Red Lab is a formalization of R&D activities and creation of dedicated and connected research spaces under a single banner.

Prior to its official opening in 2019, Red Lab was used in late 2018 to test the control of remote platforms in other U.K. hubs and across mainland Europe. This test showed full integration between Red Bee’s media management, playout, distribution and OTT platforms. Red Lab also assisted with the testing of a software-only playout deployment.

SANTA CLARA, CA—Ericsson Media Solutions today announced it has rebranded itself as MediaKind, the home of technologies from companies acquired by Ericsson, such as Aspex, Azuki Systems, Envivio, Fabrix, HyCGroup, Microsoft Mediaroom and Tandberg Television.

“We understand the power of media and how it is evolving. It runs in our DNA, and it’s our passion,” said Angel Ruiz, MediaKind CEO. The goal of the company is to enable MediaKind customers to “create and deliver immersive media experiences,” he added.

Currently, the company serves more than 900 cable, satellite and telecom service providers as well as broadcasters worldwide. In 2017, Ericsson divvied up its media businesses into two divisions: Ericsson Media Solutions, which includes its Emmy award-winning video compression solutions for contribution and direct-to-consumer video service distribution, advertising and content personalization, cloud DVR and TV and video delivery platforms; and Red Bee Media, formerly Ericsson Broadcast & Media Services, which focuses on playout, OTT, media management and accessibility solutions. 

[Read: Ericsson Media Solutions Launches MediaFirst UHD Media Processing And Encoding Platform]

On Jan. 31, private equity firm One Equity Partners announced its intention to become the majority owner of Ericsson Media Solutions. The MediaKind brand will be carried forward when the this transaction is complete, MediaKind said.

Besides Ruiz, the management team of MediaKind includes: Gowton Achaibar, COO and Head of R&D; Heather Andrade-Neumann, Chief People Officer; Arun Bhikshesvaran, CMO; Misty Kawecki, CFO; Mark Russell, CTO and Strategy Officer; Sven Bolthausen, SVP commercial management & sales support; Alex Borland, SVP EMEA sales; Clayton Cruz, SVP Latin American sales; Steve Payne, SVP North America sales; and Ken Yap, SVP North East Asia sales.

More information is available on the company’s website. 

The National Association of Broadcasters said 244 companies will be first-time exhibitors at the NAB Show in April.

The list includes Blubrry Podcasting, Libsyn, Padcaster, Women in Media, Sohonet, Deity Microphones, Red Bee Media and StreamShark. (See the list.) Some have appeared at the show in the past in other booths, such as Audinate, found in the Bosch/RTS in the past; others are likely to be entirely unfamiliar. The show will have approximately 1,700 total exhibitors including 819 from outside the United States.

We asked NAB Executive Vice President of Conventions and Business Operations Chris Brown for some insights into this aspect of the event.

Radio World:What can we glean from the list of companies — what technology sectors seem hottest, and in what kind of new tech areas is the show growing?

Chris Brown: It is a great list of new companies and they tend to reflect the breadth of the show and the trends that are driving innovation. We have companies covering all ends of the content lifecycle from acquisition to management to distribution — with a slight leaning, a little more than a third, representing acquisition and production technologies. From a tech and trends perspective we are seeing healthy interest in streaming technologies, advanced advertising, social media, cloud, storage and IP. Our focus every year is to dig for companies that are developing leading edge technologies or serving particular segments of our audience with specialized products or services.

RW: Do you know which NAB Show exhibitor is the longest-tenured?

Brown: Unfortunately we don’t have accurate enough history (and remember, the show has been around since 1923) to confirm this definitively. But we certainly have a healthy list of companies that have exhibited with us for a very long time; these include companies like Sony, Panasonic, Imagine and GatesAir (formerly Harris Corp.), Grass Valley, Avid and Ross just to name a few.

[Read: An NAB Show Sampler for Managers]

RW: What will be the three largest booths at the show?

Brown: Sony, Blackmagic Design and Canon. Beyond these and others that have been exhibiting for some time, we have a number of other important brands that are emerging with an increasing presence in the show. A couple of good examples would be AWS Elemental and Google. The combination of AWS and Elemental has matched the enormous resources AWS with the deep industry expertise of Elemental to create an entity that is having a major impact on the industry. In the case of Google, not much needs to be said — they play a vital, varied and growing role within the media and entertainment ecosystem. Just two years ago they were not even participating as an exhibitor.

RW: How does this year’s exhibit space compare to last year?

Brown: Between exhibit space and exhibitor activity in meeting rooms and suites, the show will once again cover more than 1 million square feet of activity. It will essentially cover the same area as last year.

RW:What are other platforms at the show where attendees can find up-and-coming companies?

Brown: We have an area of the show that is all about up-and-coming; we call it the Innovation Pipeline, and it covers the companies and trends from inception to full launch. Three distinct areas are included: NAB Pilot’s Futures Park, which represents the true R&D side of the equation, with research and other companies showing technologies that are still in the lab stage. Then there is Startup Loft, an area that features companies that are in their true infancy, with products or services that are baked but only on the market for a year or a year and a half. These are the “garage” entrepreneurs of our business. And as a final phase, there is Sprockit. Sprockit is a program that identifies the most promising young companies in the media and entertainment space and brings them into the spotlight at the show. These are companies that are bringing technology that can revolutionize, even disrupt, the industry.

We also will be featuring a number of technology pavilions that will lean forward and will feature companies that are relatively new to NAB Show. These include our Immersive Storytelling Pavilion (North Hall), the Game Developers Gallery (North Hall) and the Podcasting Pavilion (South Hall).

Ericsson has sold 51 per cent of its Media Solutions business to a private equity company.

One Equity Partners will become the new majority owner of Media Solutions business with assets and staff transferring to a new independent company when the deal closes in the third quarter of 2018.

Ericsson said the new company "will establish Media Solutions as a leading independent video technology company with strong and committed financial support driving continued investment in innovation and growth."

See also: Ericsson Renames Media Services Business Red Bee Media

Angel Ruiz, who will continue to lead Media Solutions as the CEO, said: “The work we have done to integrate and advance our end-to-end roadmap is paying off in strong customer engagement. One Equity Partners brings valuable experience in the media and telecom sectors, and we’re confident that we have found the right partner to further develop and grow the business.”

Ericsson says it will now focus on developing Red Bee Media.

Steve Nylund, CEO, Red Bee Media, said: “Red Bee Media is already today a leading broadcast and media service provider, with a strong customer base among the top tier broadcasters and service providers. Our focus is now on improving and transforming Red Bee Media, in partnership with our customers, to enable our full potential as an independent and focused media services business.”

This article originally appeared in TVB Europe.

STOCKHOLM—Ericsson Broadcast and Media Services business will be renamed Red Bee Media, effective immediately, the company announced today.

Red Bee Media simultaneously will begin being run as an independent business that is fully owned by Ericsson, according to a company announcement.

The change does not affect the Ericsson Media Solutions business, which among other things offers encoders and transcoders for use by television broadcasters, the cable industry and others. In March, the company announced it would seek strategic options for Ericsson Media Solutions and its IT cloud infrastructure businesses.

Ericsson won regulatory approval for its acquisition of Red Bee Media in March 2014. Since then, the company has added other media service acquisitions, including Technicolor’s broadcast services division in July 2012 and FYI Television in January 2016, to the Red Bee Media portfolio.

“The Red Bee Media brand has a long and rich heritage in TV and media and is well recognized across the industry. Adopting this brand will enable us to strengthen our position as an independent and agile media services organization,” said Red Bee Media CEO in a press release announcing the renaming.

Red Bee Media offers its media services portfolio in Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S. The company’s service lineup includes media management, playout, OTT, access services, content discovery, creative services and sports graphics and analysis solutions.

More information is available on the company’s website.