Digital Rapids’ Bring Malaysian Television Online for Media Prima

Digital
Rapids a developer of scalable solutions for content ingest, encoding,
transcoding, protection, streaming and delivery announced that Media Prima
Berhad, the media group in

Malaysia,
is using a complete range of Digital Rapids systems to power Catch-Up TV, their
new online TV-on-demand service.

Catch-Up
TV enables Web users to view previously-broadcast programs from Media Prima’s
four television networks — TV3, ntv7, 8TV and TV9 — online, enabling viewers
to watch current and classic programming on demand at high quality.

Designed
by Digital Rapids and installed by systems integrator Graphics Vision Sdn.
Bhd., the Media Prima Catch-Up TV workflow includes a full complement of
Digital Rapids solutions:

StreamZ
media encoding servers equipped with the Digital Rapids Studio AVC Encoder
ingest, encode, stream and archive live feeds from the four broadcast television
networks in H.264 and Adobe Flash 8 (On2 VP6) formats

Digital
Rapids Broadcast Manager enterprise-level encoder management software provides
centralized control, scheduling and fault tolerance for the StreamZ systems

Digital
Rapids Transcode Manager scalable, automated transcoding software converts
edited file-based source material to H.264 and Adobe Flash formats for
archiving and distribution

Digital
Rapids Copper data delivery software, integrated with Transcode Manager,
provides accelerated, secure and reliable transfer of finished on-demand media
files from Media Prima to Limelight Networks, the Content Delivery Network
(CDN) used for delivering the content to Media Prima’s viewers

The
StreamP portable streaming media encoder is used on a laptop for encoding
remote on-location feeds, and transferring them back to headquarters using
Copper to overcome the performance limitations of remote networks

Shows will
be available free on Catch-Up TV online within no more than 12 hours of their
original broadcast, and after one week will be moved into the archive library
for fee-based viewing. Original content including Internet exclusives,
behind-the-scenes footage, bloopers and contests will also be available to Web
viewers.

“To
meet our goal of becoming the online TV destination of choice for Malaysians,
it was critical for us to carefully choose solutions that would enable us to
deliver a high-quality experience to our audience with high reliability,”
said Paul Moss, General Manager for Network Media Portals at Media Prima.
“Digital Rapids solutions not only met these criteria, but their ability
to work seamlessly together in a complete workflow from encoding through
delivery made them the ideal choice for this project. I’m happy to say that we
already have online delivery down to four hours after a program’s on-air
transmission.”

“Each
of our solutions offers market-leading benefits on its own, but by combining
them seamlessly to form complete ingest-through-delivery workflows, the result
is even more powerful than the sum of its components,” said Brick Eksten,
President of Digital Rapids Corporation. “With Catch-Up TV, Media Prima is
taking excellent advantage of the growing new media distribution opportunities
offered by the Internet, and we’re very pleased to be working with Media Prima
to deliver top-quality content to their viewers.”