ATEME TITAN Encoder Helps Virtualise Swisscom’s IPTV Video Headend

Swisscom is Switzerland’s primary telecoms company and also one of its major IT companies, and has chosen to use ATEME’s TITAN virtual encoding system for its MediaCloud project. Following the release of two enterprise cloud products late in 2017, Swisscom has been extending and improving its own cloud services with global Public Clouds from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, enabling it to attract customers interested in the many services available from global providers.

Apart from acting as a reseller, Swisscom positions itself as a Managed Service provider for AWS and Microsoft Azure on site.

The MediaCloud project’s main aim is to build one of the industry’s first IPTV virtualised video headend systems based on video transcoding to manage the numerous TV input formats. Alongside this, Swisscom wants to adapt the output video channels to meet the requirements of its own consumers.

Swisscom transcodes live TV channels with TITAN, ATEME’s virtualised and containerised transcoder. Using TITAN enables Swisscom to upgrade its MediaCloud project with cloud-based processing that makes their system more agiles, and also controls costs. Various advantages may result from this, including lower operating costs - TITAN, as a pure software-only encoder, is both simple to operate and simple to integrate due to its hardware abstraction.

This type of bstraction means ATEME TITAN can emulate certain platform-specific details and make standard operating system calls to hardware, thereby gaining direct access to the user's hardware resources. Its flexible architecture means TITAN can run on private or public, and on- or off-premises cloud infrastructure, with the same success and value for the user.

A true virtual video headend, it also runs on any COTS or virtualised server, supporting quick deployment of good quality live channels. “The ATEME team helped build an IPTV virtual video headend that supports rapid channels set up and tear down, and affords the agility to keep up with consumer demand and systems changes,” said Bruno Haug, Head of TV Development, Swisscom.

“For example, the new virtualised headend can onboard a new channel in a few minutes, allowing it to match consumer demands rapidly by adding popular new programming, dedicated channels for big events, channels upgrades to 4K and new compression standards to support the newest TV-watching devices.”  www.ateme.com