Simplestream reveals preferred technology partnership with Freely

Simplestream Announces Product Enhancements and Freely Preferred Technology Partnership at IBC 2024

LONDON — At IBC 2024, Simplestream is demonstrating new features and enhancements to its award-winning Channel Studio and Livestream Scheduler products, allowing world-class broadcasters, sport organisations and content owners to create new avenues for monetisation, greater audience engagement and increased live viewing figures.

Exhibiting on Stand 5.G60, the company will also highlight its preferred technology partnership with Freely, the new free, live and on-demand streaming service brought to UK households by Britain’s public service broadcasters (BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5, and ITV). Simplestream has expanded its live streaming capabilities by onboarding several channels onto the Freely platform, run by Everyone TV. Fully compliant with Freely’s requirements, Simplestream has made the onboarding process for channels straightforward by delivering a smooth end-to-end workflow including: the acquisition of channels from a variety of sources in multiple formats; encoding and normalisation; packaging into DVB-DASH format to meet technical delivery specifications; implementation of the channel’s own tags; and application of the CDN as standard.

Throughout the show, Simplestream will demonstrate its award-winning Channel Studio. Built to create and distribute live linear channels, Channel Studio now has the capability of allowing operators to combine VOD assets and livestreams as part of the same playlist, scheduled for distribution across multiple platforms. Users can add live event placeholders for the scheduler to identify, swapping to a live input as part of the regular channel programming.

Once the playlist is filled with the desired content for a regular 24 hour slot, the published playlist is automatically syndicated to AWS Elemental MediaTailor to be assembled into a functioning virtual channel while also connecting the scheduled live events within Simplestream’s cloud-based online video platform, Media Manager. With optional server-side ad insertion (SSAI) operators can seamlessly serve unique ads to each user, which can’t be blocked or skipped, providing access to new revenue streams and rich tracking of metrics for ad performance reporting.

The company will also show its Livestream Scheduler, a cloud application that enables platform owners of any size to bring multiple event data management capabilities under one roof, with the ease of use of an intuitive UI. First supplied in 2023 to world-leading Canadian communications technology company TELUS, Simplestream’s Livestream Scheduler has been enhanced to seamlessly distribute live events across digital platforms. Fully self-service, the solution delivers significant scalability, appealing to media companies of any size from large telcos to user generated content.

Licensed to platform providers, every one of their live content providers can access an easy-to-navigate interface to manage both events and streams in a cloud-based environment. The backend acts as a middleware, with a branded UI and the added benefit of reducing the margin of error to a minimum, as well as allowing any platform provider to limitlessly expand the number and scale of content providers providing the live feeds.

As well as the Freely announcement, Simplestream will be unveiling details of a large project for a major new customer. Continuing the expansion of its client portfolio, the company will provide a full set of OTT services across multiple platforms, starting in Q3 2024.