World's Largest IPTV Operator Expands into Connected VOD Services With ATEME Transcoders

Thursday, March 17th, 2011
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PARIS — BesTV New Media, the largest IPTV service provider in China and the world, is providing connected Video On Demand (VOD) services over the Internet with the help of software based transcoders from ATEME. BesTV has already deployed over 50 of ATEME’s Kyrion File Encoders (KFEs) for IPTV services over its dedicated network, and is now using them for connected TV as well, with plans to install more as demand increases.

“We picked ATEME’s transcoder when our IPTV service began because of its superior quality compared with competitors,” said Bobby Lee, BesTV New Media’s Chief Technology Officer. “Since then we have gone into Connected TV and are now using ATEME’s transcoder there too.”

BesTV’s workflow exploits the flexibility of the KFE, with its ability to support multiple formats and bitrates so as to cover both IPTV with its guaranteed performance, and the much more demanding Connected TV over the Internet.

“The same VOD goes out over both networks, but the encoding formats and bit rates are different,” said Lee. “IPTV uses Constant Bit Rate encoding, which is suitable for a telecom network, but it is not as high in quality as Variable Bit Rate encoding, which is what most Internet content uses.”

Apart from the expandability into these new application areas, the ATEME solution scores on scalability, allowing BesTV to continue increasing its customer base across China by expanding the transcoding farm as the need arises. Currently the ATEME transcoders process 300 to 400 hours of video per day for BesTV.

The ATEME KFE is a software transcoder supporting multi-codec, multi-format video processing for delivery over TV, mobile and Internet based services. It exploits ATEME’s widely acclaimed MPEG-2 and H.264 encoding algorithms.