Products / Services

Platform, storage and transport investments lay foundation for expansion of anytime, anywhere content

Reston, VA, October 4, 2010 - Avail-TVN, the largest digital media services company in North America, has announced plans to invest more than $30 million over the next two years to enhance and expand its video distribution technology, infrastructure and services to support the company’s more than 300 content and service provider customers as they roll out the next generation of digital media offerings. Avail-TVN’s investments will focus on content preparation, aggregation and ingestion; a next-generation distribution platform; and vastly increased storage capabilities -- key areas that accelerate the monetization of digital video on any screen, and increase the titles and formats that will be available.

“The next generation of video consumption – from three-screen access to 3-D – will require a new technology approach to not only deliver these services, but to also make them profitable. Our investment focus is on providing new revenue opportunities for both content and service providers,” said Ramu Potarazu, CEO, Avail-TVN. “We are investing today to increase the quality and quantity of content available tomorrow, make it readily accessible, and create an environment where content owners and service providers alike can quickly and easily deliver new services and richer content libraries to their customers.”

Platform Investments: Digital Media Services Foundation
Avail-TVN is consolidating its infrastructure to enable new advertising models and multiplatform services and rapid deployment of these services by its customers. The company’s move to a single, Super Head End (SHE) architecture provides aggregated linear, video-on-demand (VOD) and pay-per-view (PPV) content from a single source and leverages synergies between real time and time-shifted content to improve efficiencies of existing services such as quick-turn VOD.

Avail-TVN’s real-time content will remain satellite distributed while its next-generation platform will use a hybrid distribution model – a first-of-its-kind network that leverages both terrestrial fiber and satellite distribution to help its customers greatly increase capacity, offer new programming to consumers and streamline costs. This approach allows Avail-TVN to offer new services such as dynamic ad insertion (DAI), time-shifting of linear content, distributed storage, and targeted / localized distribution. With the SHE in place, Avail-TVN is also able to offer MPEG-4 linear services to the entire cable market, which doubles available bandwidth and allows service providers to offer more high-value offerings such as HD and 3-D content.

Storage Investments: More Content to More Devices
Avail-TVN is also making investments in storage technology to enable the industry’s deepest content libraries. This investment lays the foundation for a cloud storage service which allows customers to have immediate access to these vast stores of content, on-demand, to any device, without major storage investments. Avail-TVN plans to have upwards of five petabytes of storage available.

Services Roadmap
Avail-TVN’s platform and storage investments are already delivering new digital media services to content and service providers. In 2010, the company increased the amount of HD content available by over 130 percent and VOD assets by 67 percent; expanded its PPV programming to include seven new channels; and began rolling out MPEG-4 linear video services with cable MSOs throughout North America. Through these services, the company reaches more than 50 million digital subscribers today and is expanding the content programming formats it supports in order to deliver content to any device. From this foundation, Avail-TVN is accelerating its efforts to build and deliver the future of digital media services.

In Q4 of 2010, the company will introduce Out-of-Market Sports packages; local, customized PPV playout; 3D programming; and new services for content providers, including more comprehensive content preparation and TV Everywhere support.

In the first half of 2011, Avail-TVN plans to introduce a host of next-generation services, including multiplatform-enabled ingestion, storage, management and distribution of content to multiple devices from a single source; DAI; as well as additional Out-of-Market sports packages and other advanced services.

Avail-TVN is the largest digital media services company in North America. Working with every major studio and television network, the company offers a full content line-up of MPEG-4 encoded live programming as well as video on demand content in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 to multichannel video providers throughout the US, Canada, the Caribbean and Mexico. The Avail-TVN platform is an open, advanced technology, offering the most comprehensive, end-to-end solution for licensing, managing, distributing and marketing linear and on-demand content to virtually any platform today and is extensible to support the new services of tomorrow. For more information, please visit avail-tvn.com.