CONTENT DELIVERY Terrestrial, Mobile, Broadband
www.content-technology.com/transmission
MediaHub Australia Provides Key Playout Services for PacificAus TV PACIFICAUS TV IS A PROGRAM of the Australian Government that complements a range of initiatives to enhance Australia’s engagement in the Pacific. Free TV Australia was selected to work with Australian commercial free-to-air television networks and Pacific Partner Broadcasters to supply premium Australian content across the Pacific. The initiative enables additional Australian content to be provided to existing Pacific broadcasters for them to broadcast within their programme schedules. After a comprehensive RFP the winner of the end to end managed services and playout tender for PacificAus TV was MediaHub Australia.
The objective of the PacificAus TV initiative is to make the broadcast rights to a variety of Australian television programmes available to Pacific broadcast partners in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Tuvalu and Nauru. This includes 1,000 hours of content per year for three years including lifestyle programmes, factual programmes, children’s programmes, drama, reality TV and sport. MediaHub CEO Alan Sweeney explained, “Free TV released an RFP to the greater broadcast industry and MediaHub Australia won the tender process. This means we now supply content acquisition, aggregation, playout and distribution services in order to deliver the 1000 hours of content per year to nine Pacific island nations at a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.99%. The core requirement is to provide the functionality to receive content from the commercial metropolitan networks, various production companies and sporting organisations such as the AFL and NRL. We also aggregate this content to playout 5 to 7 hours per day and uplink that content to the Intelsat 19 satellite. All of the content is transcoded and uploaded to the MediaHub ExchangeHub portal for the Pacific Island broadcasters to download the programs as VOD assets.”
The PacificAus TV website portal.
Once the RFP and contract stages were completed, the timeline for on-air was very tight. That said, by using their significant expertise and knowledgebase in the areas of channel management and playout, MediaHub was able to have the PacificAus TV service operational in just six weeks. Free TV’s Shane Wood said, “It was impressive to see the MediaHub team deliver this project so quickly and with such a great degree of flexibility and agility whilst working collaboratively with Free TV, STS, the Australian commercial FTA broadcasters and the partner Pacific broadcasters.” MediaHub’s suite of end to end Managed Services fulfill all of the PacificAus TV broadcast requirements including content aggregation, programme preparation and media management, presentation playout, satellite delivery, transcoding, compliance recording and even the creation of a web portal service for the Pacific Island Broadcasters to download content from. Sweeney added, “We furthered our partnership with Sydney Teleport Services (STS) to provide the satellite delivery of PacificAus TV to the Pacific Island Broadcasters. By using MediaHub’s patented, fully redundant, low latency-high capacity video and data services network, FibreHub, we connect the MediaHub playout centre to the STS uplink earth station which then manages the encoding, satellite uplink, encryption and transponder space.” Since the PacificAus TV initiative went live MediaHub has ingested, added metadata to and QCd over 1500 programmes and over 1000 hours of content from multiple providers into the MediaHub MAM system in under four weeks. Visit www.pacificaustv.com and www.mediahubaustralia.com.au
Optus to Launch “Game-Changing” Satellite, Signs Sky NZ OPTUS HAS ANNOUNCED what it describes as “a giant leap in its satellite business” with the confirmation of a contract with Airbus Defence and Space for a new, OneSat software-defined satellite, Optus 11, to be deployed for Australia and New Zealand in 2023 at the current Optus D1 orbital location of 160°East. Optus has also entered into a revised agreement with Sky New Zealand which will be the cornerstone customer leveraging the new satellite. Optus will be the first satellite operator in Asia Pacific to launch a softwaredefined satellite that can provide both flexible concurrent broadcast and broadband services via a very high throughput satellite (VHTS) design.
CONTENT DELIVERY
The satellite is fully configurable in space, meaning its location, coverage, bandwidth and capacity can be changed in orbit as customer demands evolve – where traditional satellites are limited by on-ground configurations that cannot be altered after launch.
44
Optus Managing Director, Wholesale, Satellite and Strategy, Ben White said: “Optus 11’s software-defined technology marks a paradigm shift in how satellite communication will be delivered across Australia and New Zealand and it will offer unparalleled flexibility for our satellite customers. The ability to re-configure payloads in-orbit is a game-changer. It allows us to adapt to shifting business landscapes and tailor the delivery of services and capacity through dynamic beam-forming technologies. “Optus 11 will add capacity and resilience to our satellite fleet and its unique capabilities will give our broadcast customers the option to tailor their
dynamic video delivery via IP streaming, and our broadband customers can benefit from better performance and higher individual throughputs.” Sitting 36,000km above Earth, Optus 11 will also able to host a satellitebased augmentation system (SBAS) payload – which has the ability to greatly enhance the accuracy and precision of existing GPS and positioning systems across the ANZ region and pinpoint a location to within a decimetre, without the need for mobile or internet coverage. Optus 11 will join five other Optus satellites in orbit and expands Optus’ geo-stationary satellite fleet to become the largest in the company’s and Australia’s history. Optus will also be the first operator in the world to utilise the Ku band (11-14GHz) spectrum for the software defined VHTS in both broadcast and broadband services. Optus 11 will also provide greater coverage than its previous satellites, with a reach from Antarctica to the Cocos Islands and covering a vast majority of the Pacific region. Sky NZ has agreed to a revised contract with Optus that delivers satellite capability for the next ten years, with the ability to flex the transponder capacity taken by Sky over the term of the arrangement with corresponding cost savings, and new functionality. The revised contract maintains the benefits of the existing arrangement including the ability to sub-licence capacity, particularly to free-to-air channels, and to access the D3 satellite to provide redundancy during the remainder of its service life. Visit www.optus.com.au and www.sky.co.nz
