The managed services are set to advance broadcasters’ content preparation and playout capabilities and ensure efficient delivery of content to Internet and mobile media devices in today’s fast evolving TV Anywhere environment.

"With today’s massive growth in global media consumption, broadcasters and media organizations have to process much higher quantities of media in an increasing number of formats if they want to reach their audiences on any screen and any device," said Thorsten Sauer, Head of Broadcast Services, Business Unit Global Services, at Ericsson. "Our new media management services ease that complexity by offering a one-stop solution for the unified preparation and delivery of content. They guarantee that broadcasters and media organizations have the flexibility and scalability they need so they can better focus on their brand, their content, and on delivering a quality viewing experience to their customers."

Ericsson’s media management services comprise two new solutions—Managed Media Preparation and Managed Media Internet Delivery. Together, the two services enable a unique, end-to-end solution allowing broadcasters to deliver content easily and seamlessly to their audiences anytime, anywhere. Importantly, they allow broadcasters to bypass the challenges associated with technology delivery in today’s near-universal multi-screen environment.

The Managed Media Preparation service enables enriched multi-format content for linear playout, streaming, non-linear, and mobile delivery as well as greater efficiency, reducing time to market by handling large amounts of media quickly and efficiently. Through new workflow automation, business process management and enterprise desktop tools the service uses new automated real-time reporting, monitoring and dashboards. This gives broadcasters remote access to tools and services so they can browse and enrich content and metadata at their own desktops in real-time while the content is securely digitized and stored in an Ericsson facility. Additionally, the Managed Media Preparation service reduces time-to-market by handling large amounts of media quickly and efficiently, despite time zone or geographical location, as well as streamlines the interactions between media owners and Ericsson.

The Managed Media Internet Delivery service masters the combination of over-the-top (OTT) delivery and playout to efficiently deliver content to consumers, broadening and enriching the audience viewing experience. This managed service for broadcasters takes away the complexities and challenges of deploying internet delivered catch-up and online TV services to a myriad of connected devices, allowing broadcasters to focus on creating great content. Built as a modular set of services and supporting an extensive device portfolio, the Internet delivery service is a logical extension of the managed media preparation and play out capabilities that Ericsson has to offer.

Visitors to Ericsson’s booth at IBC will have the opportunity to learn how the media management services process content and metadata while managing delivery to linear broadcast, OTT, non-linear and mobile applications, providing a huge economy of scale and wider audience reach. They will also see how the digital library management component of the Managed Media Preparation Service allows content owners, broadcasters and distributors to securely digitize their libraries, remotely access and enrich their content and metadata.

Plus, consumer consumption habits are changing, and an ever growing demand for high quality video and greater content choice is driving many broadcasters and TV services providers to upgrade their existing delivery infrastructures.

Choice, control and convenience are three vital components for service providers looking to increase their competitive positioning by delivering more services and content variety. In recognition of this evolving trend, Sky Italia has selected the Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) AVP 4000 platform to increase its HD channel offering and the cost-efficiency of its output.

    Sky Italia is the first European satellite direct to home (DTH) customer to deploy the Ericsson AVP 4000 compression platform, which is powered by the company’s first in-house programmable video processing chip. The increased efficiency offered by the new Ericsson HD head-end will enable Sky Italia to launch additional HD channels of the same high quality and at no extra cost.

The Ericsson chip has been designed with TV video processing in mind and the dedicated nature of the architecture means that it can produce the highest performance with the lowest power consumption. This will support Sky Italia in its efforts to reduce its energy consumption and deliver more sustainable operations.

The Ericsson AVP 4000 system encoder is built on the company’s own technology and enables operators to remain innovative and responsive by leveraging leading technology and a professional relationship. The Ericsson AVP platform offers the highest performance and broadest capability in the industry on a single platform across all applications, from SD to HD, 1080p50/60 and Ultra High Definition TV (UHDTV), and all codecs MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC and JPEG 2000, 4:2:0 and 4:2:2, 8-bit and 10-bit. The Ericsson AVP family of products offers the necessary performance and control to develop and implement the algorithms required to achieve the highest bandwidth efficiency across all delivery networks.