MTV Finland selected Unified Origin to stream MPEG-DASH and HLS using PlayReady Encrypted Smooth content


Amsterdam, The Netherlands 1st of December 2015

Unified Streaming, a leading provider of cross-platform video streaming technologies was selected by MTV Finland, the leading commercial TV broadcaster in Finland to expand the offering of their MTV Katsomo Web TV service.

MTV Katsomo is one of the most successful Web TV services in Finland and they are now using Unified Origin for the advanced streaming of their 24/7 channels, live events and on-demand content. MTV wanted to offer a much broader variety of formats to their customers and selected Unified Streaming to accomplish this in the most effective way. By using Unified Origin, an advanced on the fly packaging technology, it enables MTV to make a controlled transition from a smooth stream based OTT-system to MPEG-DASH and HLS, including pre-encrypted content.

MTV already offered all their content in Smooth with PlayReady encryption. And by using Unified Streaming’s PIFF2CENC solution, converting the content to other formats including encryption was easy. As the name suggests it allows for streaming Common Encrypted (CENC) DASH from a PlayReady encrypted (PIFF) Microsoft Smooth catalogue. It performs the conversion on the fly in a fully dynamic fashion. This solution was very beneficial for MTV, because there is no need to re-package or re-encode the catalog to PlayReady CENC. It also helps them to reduce the amount of disk-space needed, since different video formats can be created on a fly from one source format.

“Using the advanced Unified Origin solution enables us to offer our content to a broader audience instantly by transforming our catalogue on the fly”, says Vesa Kankkunen, Service Manager of MTV. “It’s a very relevant contemporary technology, with which we are ready to compete in today’s fast moving OTT industry.”

Unified Origin offers on-the-fly packaging to all major adaptive bitrate streaming protocols, compression formats, and multiple digital rights management (DRM) systems within a single solution. And because it all happens on-the-fly, it eliminates massive storage requirements. Now you only require one file. To offer maximum flexibility, DRM is supported in 3 ways: playout of pre-encrypted content, encrypting clear content on the fly and playout of pre-encrypted content using another flavor of DRM altogether, which we call trans-DRM. And Unified Origin’s unique feature PIFF2CENC. There are various advantages to this last method, as mentioned before, including: no need for re-packaging or re-encoding, no need for extra storage and a quick time-to-market.

“We are proud to be selected by MTV Finland. Our PIFF2CENC solution was a perfect fit for MTV’s requirements.”, said Simon Westbroek, VP of Global Sales for Unified Streaming. Employing a Unified approach to content delivery with efficient re-purposing of video will give MTV a competitive edge both now and in the future.

About MTV

MTV is a Finnish media company with roots deep in the early days of television broadcasting in the 1950s. Since then the small company has grown into a big media company that broadcasts news and provides entertainment and experiences 24 hours a day.

Finland’s leading TV, radio and online media are all members of the MTV family. MTV’s main websites are mtv.fi and radionova.fi, while MTV’s channels can be watched online on MTV Katsomo and C More channels’ series and films can be watched through Filmnet. MTV also owns the most listened to commercial radio station in Finland, Radio Nova.

About Unified Streaming

Unified Streaming is a leading provider of cross-platform video-streaming technologies. Dedicated to helping companies create and execute smart video-streaming technologies, Unified Streaming products are in operation around the world, with customers ranging from broadcast networks and online content distributors to small companies and webcasters. Unified Streaming solutions fit into existing frameworks (Apache, IIS, Lighttpd, Nginx), thus, allowing for greater return on existing investment. Unified Streaming (USP) provides streaming from one encode simultaneously to multiple players and devices. In combination with various DRM technologies, this enables Unified Streaming customers to significantly reduce delivery cost and boost time to market, in order to address a broader audience.

For more info: www.unified-streaming.com and follow us on @UnifiedStream on Twitter.