Anevia Scales Up Indonesia’s MNC Now for Multi-Screen OTT

With 2.5 million subscribers, Indonesian pay-TV operator and content provider MNC Group is expanding its OTT services through its MNC Now platform. Anevia’s OTT NEA-DVR and NEA-CDN systems will support multiscreen functionality, live TV, catch-up TV and VOD services for 160 channels on MNC Now.

NEA-DVR is a multiscreen TV origin/packager that MNC Now will use to launch broadcast-quality, full-HD live, time-shifted and on-demand TV services quickly and with low latency. It handles all the packaging, streaming and recording to prepare and deliver cloud DVR, catch-up, time-shifted and live channels to targeted devices including smartphones, tablets, personal computers and set-top boxes. Subscribers can schedule their own recordings through a regular electronic program guide or instance-based program.

NEA-DVR is used in a cloud DVR system as an ingest server, to store live content, or as a playback server, to package content and stream it to the network. Data is shared among at least four NEA-DVR servers with embedded distributed storage, a hyper-converged environment that gives higher streaming performance and availability in case of failure.

NEA-CDN, which includes CDN selection, will allow MNC Now to load-balance the traffic across multiple CDNs, thereby improving the quality of service. This means both better video quality and less waiting for the video to arrive. Entirely cloud-based, NEA-CDN allows deployment to be automated, and can efficiently scale up for peak viewing and then down again afterwards.

This functionality comes from using video-caching algorithms, such as content awareness, to improve caching efficiency and hit-ratio. Cache hit ratio measures how many content requests a cache can fill successfully, compared to how many it receives. Hits occur when a file is requested from a cache and the CDN has a copy of the file in its storage. A cache hit results, and the information, images, video or other data is sent to the browser.

Otherwise, the request has to be passed to the origin server and wait for the original file, but for optimal performance, a CDN should be able serve content from a server close to the end user. Combined with Anevia’s ability to share files as small chunks, between live and cloud DVR services, NEA-CDN can improve content delivery performance and optimise network use.

NEA-CDN may also be built on an elastic cloud infrastructure that can match varying viewing demand by temporarily scaling up during peak events. For managed mobile and IPTV networks, Anevia uses multicast ABR / LTE broadcast delivery – that is, extending multicast ABR systems across 4G LTE wireless networks - so that streams with extreme demand can be played back immediately by an unlimited number of viewers, at the same time. The result is low latency, broadcast-quality content with a consistent QoE, even during the highest peak periods.

The scalability and performance of Anevia’s software gives MNC a chance to increase in scale and reach millions of customers. In fact, NEA-DVR makes it possible to scale up infrastructure by adding nodes to the cluster, a simpler kind of integration between streaming and storage, again, due to embedded distributed storage. The Anevia system is also open to integration with MNC’s current configuration of third-party and in-house developments.  www.anevia.com