Appear TV, a global provider of next-generation head-ends for broadcast and IP television, has announced that visitors to IBC will be able to see the first full demonstration of its new multiscreen & OTT solutions based on its leading modular head-end architecture, including Appear TV’s unique range of encoding and transcoding solutions.

“Our customers tell us that multiscreen is becoming a must have, those that have launched with first generation solutions also tell us they have not always met operational efficiency and quality of service expectations,” says Carl Walter-Holst, CEO, Appear TV. “We’re meeting these issues head on by the IBC launch of our hardware-based multiscreen offering that can co-exist with existing head ends solutions or be deployed with everything required from content acquisition through to content delivery in a broadcast quality head-end chassis.”

Discussing Appear TV’s hardware-based approach to encoding and transcoding, Carl concluded: “We use hardware encoding, because we believe it’s the right approach that delivers the operational efficiency required by operators and QoS expected by consumers. The performance advantages of dedicated video processing silicon over CPU processors will make a very significant improvement in video quality in a real time multiscreen environment going forward.”

Appear TV Multiscreen head-end
Many of the larger broadcasters have already started to offer a limited number of on-demand (primarily catch-up TV) services plus linear delivery of a few primary channels. However, we are now entering a second phase in the evolution of this technology which will make the requirement to stream the entire portfolio of linear services commonplace. Additionally, the number of profiles per service will also increase as the higher resolutions of third generation tablets, new computing devices and particularly connected TV’s need to be supported.

The Appear TV multiscreen solution is based on our modular chassis concept which has been designed to help customers migrate from whatever position they are currently in towards an integrated, scalable and fully featured multiscreen solution. The Appear TV solution will utilise 2nd generation encoding and transcoding technology to solve the challenges of transcoding large numbers of services much more efficiently and at a higher quality level than has been possible before.

Appear TV now offers a next generation approach bringing all of the functionality into one place. Its solution harmonizes and simplifies multiscreen, redefining how adaptive streaming solutions should be architected whilst providing the full advantages of hardware encoding and transcoding with carrier class standards of performance.

The Appear TV multiscreen solution is built around carrier class chassis’ populated with modules that handle multiscreen processing requirements including:

• Content acquisition – through modules that can receive satellite, cable, terrestrial and IP/ASI contributed programme services, from Integrated VoD servers or SDI from Studios.
• Pre Processing – through modules that can demodulate, decode and descramble content acquired and service filter programming for onward video processing and remultiplexing.
• HW Based Encoding / transcoding – Any to Any format dense transcoding and high quality encoding in any format for primary and redistribution of multiscreen profiles and bitrates for delivery to all screens in CBR format or VBR with statistical multiplexing.
• Segmentation and adaptive bit-rate streaming – the AppearTV multiscreen solution can hand off the video profiles to third-party segmenters which support the most popular streaming formats including Adobe HDS (HTTP Dynamic Streaming), Apple HLS (HTTP Live Streaming), Microsoft Smooth Streaming and MPEG DASH.
• Protection – the chassis can accept Appear TV designed DRM key handling and Conditional Access scrambling modules to ensure that content and revenues are protected as well as business rules adhered to.
• Delivery – Appear TV delivery modules stream the GOP aligned video outputs for network based IP delivery such as CDN’s or modulating over Cable, Satellite or Terrestrial broadcast platforms and mobile networks.

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