Polymedia Live Ingest

A unique software product to acquire video contents and to encode them into multiple output formats

Providing functionalities of video recording for intranet browsing and Internet catch-up TV services or of live rebroadcasting.

Polymedia Live Ingest is a software product specifically designed for bringing television contents to the Internet and the latest generation devices such as personal computers, game consoles, mobile phones and television sets via set-top-boxes. It can be used for feeding Internet TV, IPTV (both VOD and live) and mobile TV services.

Polymedia Live Ingest permits broadcasters, telecom operators and media companies to acquire video contents from live sources, either analog audio/video or Mpeg-2 input encapsulated in TS/MPTS over IP, and encode them into multiple output formats, resolutions and bit rates for reaching the broadest audience possible. Supported output formats include Mpeg, Windows Media Video, Adobe Flash Video and 3GP.

Polymedia Live Ingest consists of a set of integrated services permitting to address the following functions:

• Video Recording. Input video sources can be recorded either in the original broadcast quality or in a lower quality format. The recorded videos can be used either for intranet browsing or for providing a catch-up TV service to Internet users.
• Live Rebroadcasting. Input sources can be encoded live and then can feed external streaming servers for Internet TV, IPTV or mobile TV services.

Both recording and rebroadcasting functions can be configured for a 24x7 continuous operation or activated by a time-based or EPG driven scheduler.

Polymedia Live Ingest is designed for a distributed architecture consisting of:

• an array of Live Ingest Encoding Servers. The Encoding Servers are in charge of the actual ingestion/encoding activities; they can be distributed on as many physical servers as necessary depending on the number of live sources to process;
• one centralized Live Ingest Administration Server (that can be configured in failure recovery architecture) in charge of the configuration and monitoring of the Encoding Servers.

The proposed architecture permits to scale appropriately the Polymedia Live Ingest infrastructure from a single node in case of low level requirements to multiple encoding nodes in case of demanding encoding requirements.