The company is claiming a “significant expansion” of sports genres, with an increased number of highlights generated automatically by SMARTLIVE.

SMARTLIVE and Tedial’s Evolution Media Asset Management (MAM) solutions now include a new module that allows content – including clips, highlights or historical media – to be published to social networks with one click.

At IBC last month, Tedial showcased its technology partnership with Speechmatics, integrating the latter’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with SMARTLIVE. Operators can use this technology combination to search for comments made during a match or live event and manually generate the speech-to-text from the commentary track.

In addition, Tedial’s new SMARTLIVE bundled solution can be deployed on top of a customer’s production environment, providing sports broadcasters with a solution that can be set up quickly.

Actus’ data-driven platform allows media companies to automatically tag, organise, and categorise video recordings so that relevant content can be retrieved quickly and clips created for social media and the web.

Companies can use the platform to intelligently monitor and search for content in ways that go beyond channel name, date and time, and extracted and manually entered metadata.

The media monitoring offering enables searches for spoken words, for text that appears in videos, and for logos and logo changes. It can also detect advertising and search for faces via facial recognition.

The technology is part of the ongoing improvements Actus is making to its compliance solution, which offers reports on loudness, SCTE, closed captions, automatic configuration options and OTT monitoring. Actus has also added AI capabilities to its Clips Factory clips creation workflow.

“AI is a game changer for media monitoring, as it opens up an entire new range of workflows and automation options,” said Raphael Renous, CTO, Actus Digital.

“With our AI media monitoring platform, tagging and clips creation is an instantaneous process based on comprehensive content analysis, and we’re excited to bring that unique value prop to our customers.”

The offering is designed to help video service providers overcome the challenges of delivering features like multiple camera angles for live sporting or music events, synchronised on a single screen at low latency.

US-based VisualOn showed various use-cases for multi-stream playback, including on the Android TV platform. The functionality is underpinned by the company’s stream synchronisation playback timing technology.

MultiStream Sync, which is patent-pending, matches the internal clocks on set-top boxes and mobile devices with video streams to display multiple HD feeds on one screen.

The VisualOn’s broader Media Platform offers low latency video through buffering techniques and proprietary bitrate adaptation algorithms. The company says it can reduce latency to 3.5 seconds with digital rights management (DRM) protection included.

“As operators strive to make OTT video as good as – and even better than – legacy Pay TV providers, they are looking for innovative features that can unlock an enhanced viewing experience,” said Michael Jones, SVP and Head of Business Development at VisualOn.

“Features like MultiStream Sync may seem simple to the viewer, but they require extensive engineering talent to perfect despite imperfect conditions; this is the cornerstone of VisualOn’s expertise.”

VisualOn demonstrated MultiStream Sync with the help of various partners: Harmonic for its low latency encoding solutions; Synaptics for its VideoSmart solutions system-on-a-chip (SoC); and Wildmoka for powering the automated live sports replay on an Android TV set-top box.

P+ (previously Perseus Plus) adds compression efficiency gains and a range of new features including mobile encoding, AI-powered optimisations and a new cross-device SDK integration framework.

It also incorporates encoding and decoding for the MPEG-5 Part 2 low-complexity enhancement video coding (LCEVC) standard, development of which is expected to be completed next year.

“P+ represents the culmination of years of research and advancement” said Guido Meardi, CEO and Co-Founder at V-Nova. “We have implemented a broad range of new features and optimisations.

“Most importantly, it includes the world’s first implementation of MPEG’s most exciting new standard, MPEG-5 Part 2 (LCEVC), a brand-new approach in video compression, demonstrating its benefits and ease of adoption.

P+ is available as a containerised transcoding microservice, as an SDK for x86 (Linux, Windows), ARM (Android, iOS), FPGA and HTML5 scripted decoding, pre-integrated into a number of open-source options (including FFmpeg) and also directly from the V-Nova Platform in AWS.

LCEVC is designed to be codec agnostic and promises higher compression efficiency while reducing encoding costs. V-Nova said the standard is “set it to transform the codec landscape” and that operators and broadcasters will be able to deploy it immediately due to its software-based approach.

London-headquartered Simplestream has built an accessible video platform and responsive website for Channel 4 that is designed to handle multiple live concurrent streams and on-demand video.

The website is now live with video-on-demand assets and will start to air live events from this month, starting with the World Para Swimming Championships on September 9^th ahead of next summer’s Paralympic Games.

Built on top of Simplestream’s Sport Video Platform, the offering will be able to handle up to 16 concurrent live streams and adaptive bitrate encoding for up to 10 profiles.

“The time difference between some of the Parasport and Paralympic events in Tokyo 2020 and the UK means that our digital offering is more important than ever for our coverage,” said Pete Andrews, Channel 4 Head of Sport.

“Basing our Parasport online video offering on the tried and tested, low latency, accessible Simplestream Sport Video Platform solution meant that we could work with Simplestream to spend more time and energy on editorial features that make our offering better.”

The website is integrated with Channel 4’s Freewheel and Adobe Analytics platforms, includes DRM support for FairPlay, Marlin, PlayReady and Widevine, and content is automatically optimised for different device types.

Simplestream Chief Commercial Officer, Dan Finch, said: “Four years ago, a video platform of this scale and complexity would probably have been handled as a bespoke engineering project.

“The power of the cloud and our modular, white-label approach to building video platforms means that we can build ambitious live and VOD video projects for major broadcasters such as Channel 4 at a fraction of the time and cost, with all the technical and operational support and back up expected around such high interest sporting events.”

The company now has access to more capabilities – such as ad insertion and subtitling technology – across more formats, allowing it to evolve its TV services with more interactivity and mobility.

“To effectively build our offering, we rely on high-quality solutions that can cope with up to 100,000 simultaneous streams,” said Chris Attard, Senior Manager of TV systems at GO. “Edgeware presents an end-to-end solution, which means there’s no need to go elsewhere. It’s a one-stop shop with no risk and that’s very important to us as we continue innovating TV.”

Johan Bolin, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Edgeware added: “GO has clearly demonstrated its commitment to constantly elevate its TV offering and provide services that its customers love. This has already been a long and fruitful partnership, and we’re delighted to be able to continue supporting GO in its journey towards the next era of TV.”

GO has been an Edgeware customer for nine years. It first deployed its IPTV solution in 2010, providing customers with features such as catch-up, rewind, record and live TV pause. The operator currently claims a base of more than 100,000 pay-TV subscribers.

“Google Cloud and Blackbird working closely together on solutions for the sports, news and entertainment industries delivers enormous productivity gains for companies,” said Ian McDonough, CEO of Blackbird.“Using Google Cloud’s industry-leading infrastructure, Blackbird enables media partners to rapidly clip and professionally edit content. Blackbird’s Google Cloud implementation also delivers efficient publishing to multiple destinations directly through the cloud, without the need for download.”

Blackbird is available via web browsers and is used by brands in the sports, eSports, news, entertainment and enterprise sectors.

Part of the Edgeware Cloud Service that was launched in April 2019, StreamPilot uses a patent-pending technology to granularly control every session between the client and the CDN, providing quality of experience by monitoring and switching between CDNs if required.

StreamPilot is client and CDN agnostic and Edgeware says that it supports all live or on-demand media formats, including DASH (for Android clients) and HLS (for Apple clients). It also features an open API to enable automation and integration and offers insights via a dashboard about CDN performance indicators like load, performance and cost.

“StreamPilot opens up a wide range of possible applications that can utilise the insights gathered from the video sessions,” said Johan Bolin, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Edgeware.

“StreamPilot’s unique location, sitting in the control plane between the client and the CDN, makes it possible to test new concepts, measure outcomes and rollback changes in real time. Furthermore, StreamPilot can be used to enforce rights and policies and block illegal distribution.”

The Danish company has selected Agama’s full-coverage assurance solution, which it will apply across all platforms, including OTT, cable and IPTV.

Agama’s solution provides information about service performance and customer experience, from service creation in the head-end to delivery across networks to individual customers’ apps and devices.

“We view Agama as a reliable long-term partner, and with its analytics and assurance solution we get a complete view of the distribution chain in real-time, as well as access to in-depth data and insights,” said Peter Bukhave Hansen, Senior Vice President of Nuuday.

Agama CEO, Mikael Dahlgren, said: “YouSee is determined to give their customers the very best TV experience and we are very proud that they are trusting Agama as their partner in this. We look forward to continuing to support them in assuring service quality and in their work to create high-quality flexible TV offerings.”

Nuuday is a subsidiary of Denmark’s TDC Group and offers digital customer experiences and entertainment through brands such as YouSee, TDC Erhverv, Telmore, Fullrate, Hiper, Blockbuster and Firmafon.

Sweden-based Agama helps service providers to implement a data-driven way of working to assure optimal service quality, improve operational efficiency and increase customer understanding.

Beeline has used the Kaltura TV Platform in Kazakhstan to replace its legacy Pay TV service in a bid to expand its reach.

TV Internet Doma Service lets Beeline Kazakhstan customers access live channels and video-on-demand via set-top box and connected TVs with a single user experience.

The Kaltura-powered cloud TV service also includes a search and recommendation engine and provides users with a range of options, including subscription-based or transaction-based packages.

“This cutting-edge Cloud TV service is the second opco via our global partnership with Veon Group, and we look forward to many more,” said Shay David, Co-founder, President and General Manager of Media and Telecom at Kaltura.

The Director of Beeline Kazakhstan’s Media Department, Sergey Leshchenko, said: “TV Internet Doma Service is an excellent new way for us to provide our end-users with added value by delivering a new-age TV experience to every user.”

Kaltura is a video technology provider that offers live and on-demand solutions to a range of companies and organisations. The firm was founded in 2006 and its investors include corporations like Intel and Nokia.

Veon is a NASDAQ and Euronext Amsterdam-listed global provider of connectivity and internet services that is headquartered in Amsterdam.