The Solution

This use case describes how Unified Capture revolutionized Live to VOD for our client RTL Nederland. Unified Capture has increased their video quality by 300% and reduced their publishing time to minutes. As part of the RTL Group, RTL Nederland is a trailblazing multimedia company with a leading position on the Dutch consumer and advertising markets.

A sure way to gain viewer loyalty is by erasing the boundaries between Live TV and VOD. When you’re offering services such as catch-up TV, re-start TV and clip replay , the key is to reduce your Live-to-VOD time, most of which is spent on clip creation and removal of unwanted content such as advertisements. Most of todays processes that make Live streams available for VOD replay are time-consuming, require extra encoders and may even demand manual intervention. As the time-to-view lengthens, you are likely to miss opportunities for monetization. That’s where Unified Capture comes in.

How RTL Nederland uses Unified Capture

RTL Nederland works with multiple locations that acquire, process and broadcast content. In this use case, content comes from Luxembourg, where Media Excel encoders ingest HD Live content over SDI and produce multi-bitrate MSS assets in a redundant and time-synced manner. The encoded content is then copied to Hilversum, where clips are created. The clips stay frame accurate because first and last chunks are re-encoded and start on the exact frame as specified in the frame accurate EPG; separate clips can also be stitched into a new clip. The new clips are fed into RTL Nederland’s catch-up TV service, RTL XL.

Achievements

• Preserved HD video quality from ingest to playback
• Maintained end-to-end quality of service
• Revolutionized content creation and editing workflows
• Minimized use of resources (encoders, hardware, human)
• Leveraged just-in-time automations
• Streamlined content delivery and load balancing operations
• Used one workflow for Live and VOD
• Optimized cost by eliminating post-processing and transcoding equipment

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