2018

2018

14 September 2018, Amsterdam

Winners Brochure

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Celebrating excellence and achievement in the broadcast, video, OTT and IoT sectors

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2018

Contents

03 Overview of 2018 & winners

Selected winners profiles:

04 Skyline Communications

06 Alpha Networks 08 MediaKind

10 2019 awards

CSI Awards 2018 judging panel

Eric Baron, Founder and Managing Director, EBA Performance Ltd

William Cooper, Founder and Chief Executive, informitv

Steve Hawley, Principal Analyst and Consultant, tvstrategies

Philip Hunter, Independent Writing and Editing Professional

Jean-Marc Racine, Senior Vice

President, Business Development – EMEA, Cartesian

Mike Thornton, President, SCTE

Brett Sappington, Senior Director of Research, Parks Associates

Peter White, CEO, Rethink Research

Ian Nock, MD, Fairmile West Consulting

Benjamin Schwarz, UHD Forum communications chair

tucanoRED by

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This year’s winners were announced on the afternoon of Friday 14th September at the RAI to coincide with the start of the IBC exhibition in Amsterdam.

The list in full is below:

Best digital video processing technologyWINNER: Brightcove - Context Aware Encoding

Best network delivery technologyWINNER: ARRIS and Stofa - First Deployed DOCSIS® 3.1 Remote-PHY Network in EuropeHIGHLY COMMENDED: Dejero - CellSat

Best monitoring or network management solutionWINNER: Skyline Communications - DataMiner

Best content protection technologyWINNER: Edgeware - Forensic watermarking

Best content-on-demand solutionWINNER: Alpha Networks - tucanoRED Best interactive TV technology or applicationWINNER: 3SS - 3READY Android TV Custom Launcher

Best mobile TV technology or serviceWINNER: United Cloud - EON

Best internet TV technology or serviceWINNER: Accedo / Telstra - Telstra TV2

Best TV everywhere or multi-screen videoWINNER: Broadpeak - nanoCDN multicast ABRHIGHLY COMMENDED: Kaltura - TV Platform for Cloud TVsBest data & analytics innovationWINNER: ThinkAnalytics - ThinkVoice

Best cloud or virtualisation innovationWINNER: AWS Elemental - AWS Media ServicesHIGHLY COMMENDED: Make.TV - Live Video Cloud for ESL One Cologne

Best IoT/smart home or 5G technologyWINNER: InterDigital - FLAME projectHIGHLY COMMENDED: Telekom Slovenije - Neo smart living platform

Best TV user experience – product innovationWINNER: Accedo - Accedo AR

Best TV user experience - Operator deploymentWINNER: Com Hem - Tv HubHIGHLY COMMENDED: Medialaan and Yospace - Non-Linear Startover with Dynamic Ad Insertion

Best IP playoutWINNER: Harmonic - Spectrum X media server

Best data storage solutionWINNER: Harmonic - Spectrum X media server Best use of AI or Machine Learning in videoWINNER: IBM Watson Media - IBM Watson Video Enrichment and IBM Watson CaptioningHIGHLY COMMENDED: Sky News - The Royal Wedding ‘Who’s Who Live’ Application

Congratulations to all the winners! We are already looking forward to 2019 and some exciting new categories. The CSI team

Winners’ overview

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2018

2018

Best monitoring or network management solution WINNER: Skyline Communications – DataMiner 9.5

In a steadily intensifying competitive environment, where new players and services jostle for positioning and market

share, the user experience is more paramount than ever. Changing dynamics are also bringing new needs for ever more granular analytics capabilities for broadcasters, service providers and content owners.

The true value of DataMiner from multi-vendor network management specialist Skyline Communications is that it provides unprecedented levels of visibility into the user experience.

DataMiner is a network management/OSS platform for the entire operational chain. The open solution guarantees end-to-end integration across any vendor and technology, from service origin to destination, both on premises and off premises.

The new 9.5 release of DataMiner adds a wealth of new features and capabilities across the entire existing software suite. DataMiner 9.5 also enables operators to manage their operations more easily and more efficiently than ever before.

For example, DataMiner Virtualization Engine provides vendor-agnostic virtualization of system resources by breaking every technology asset down to its essential functions. Based on this innovative approach, any product from any vendor, including both hardware and software products and both on-premises and off-premises solutions, can be efficiently and transparently managed as building blocks for the most sophisticated end-to-end services. Indeed, judges were impressed by the openness demonstrated by DataMiner.

“Don’t be put off by the ‘9.5’ tag; this product has heaps of feature innovations built on top of the core

platform. Nice and easy interface.”

“1st Choice - offering analysis capabilities on top of data collection to reduce the noise to an operator. A great product.”

Based on artificial intelligence and self-learning algorithms, DataMiner now provides advanced analytics that enables operators to tap into that wealth of data and gain unique insights.

Alongside this, DataMiner Reports & Dashboards is a new, next-generation analytical reporting and dashboard solution, focused on combining flexibility with ease of use, and allows operators to perform quick ad hoc advanced data analysis routines.

The software solution works across the satellite, broadcast, mobile, telco and cable industry, and is deployed by many of the leading companies in these sectors. Skyline’s impressive customer list includes ABC, Airtel, Al Jazeera, Altice, beIN SPORTS, Canal+, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Disney, Eutelsat, Fox, Globo, HBO, Hispasat, MTV, Telefonica, Telenor, Virgin Media and many others.

“Winning this prestigious award is the result of our persistent efforts to redefine how broadcast and media companies manage and orchestrate their entire operation end to end, literally across any vendor and technology boundaries,” commented Ben Vandenberghe, CEO at Skyline Communications. “Our DataMiner platform provides the much-needed ability to constantly adapt to ever-changing environments and integrate new emerging technologies on the fly.”

Congratulations to Skyline for continuously innovating its DataMiner solution and staying relevant as the need for new requirements accelerates. This has always been one of the most competitive categories in the CSI Awards.

4

Today, the overall broadcast and media industry is facing new challenges. The transitions to all-IP, ever-accelerating

virtualization and new options are just a few of the drivers that redefine the highly competitive landscape. It causes major disruptions to the established value chain, and changes revolve in the first place around ever-shifting business models and workflows.

This translates into major paradigm shifts; the network management and orchestration fabric becomes one of the most strategic assets for any broadcast and media operation. Architectures based on quick-win and vendor-specific point solutions prove to be unsustainable, both in terms of costs and in terms of delivering effective results. In contrast, the new unified end-to-end network management and orchestration platform really thrives and shines increasingly brighter.

DataMiner, with its thousands of deployments around the world, embodies an entirely new approach on the subject.

The cornerstones:

A. Unrivalled data acquisition. With over 5000 integrations for products from over 600 technology vendors, DataMiner offers unrivalled data acquisition capabilities. It is the only solution in the industry that guarantees a full real-time integration of any product from any

vendor. Devops-style version management, the ability to deal with both structured and unstructured data ingest, the proven open-architecture protocol engine and accompanying professional integrated development environment (IDE) are just a few of the key differentiators. And of course, multi-vendor technology only has real merit when it comes from a truly vendor-independent software supplier.

B. AI-powered Augmented Operation. There’s a pressing need for innovative monitoring solutions. DataMiner is the first and only solution that leverages sophisticated artificial intelligence technology, heralding the era of true proactive management. This concept, coined by Skyline as Augmented Operation, provides operators with intuitive and unprecedented insights into the most agile and complex ecosystems. The cutting-edge AI-powered innovations identify emerging issues in a timely fashion. At the same time, the technology drastically reduces the cost of setting up and maintaining the configuration of the network management fabric.

C. End-to-end orchestration. The key to leverage the true power of all-IP and virtualized ecosystems, and to turn agility and flexibility into real competitive assets, is powerful vendor-agnostic, cross-domain, end-to-end orchestration. DataMiner Service and Resource

Manager (SRM) breaks down all resources in your operation into standard virtual functions, and enables accelerated service design, deployment and assurance with simplified, consistent and predictable operation during the entire service life cycle. The game-changing technology adheres to devops principles and enables operators to continuously evolve and adapt to all changes. As such, DataMiner SRM is already the engine of the industry’s most prestigious all-IP ecosystems.

D. Redefined OSS/BSS integration. A tight integration of the technology platform with the business has become a must. Inventory & Asset Management, Ticketing, Planned Maintenance, Self-Service Portals, etc., can now easily leverage the unified end-to-end management and orchestration fabric to provide highly automated all-encompassing and future-proof workflows. This drastically cuts back operational costs and delivers the ultimate customer experience.

While each of these cornerstones individually represent key enablers for the next-gen broadcast and media ecosystem, the real magic happens when they come together in a powerful symbiosis, elevating the unified end-to-end network management platform to new heights. Contact us to learn more about how DataMiner can also lift your operation.

Best monitoring or network management solution DataMiner - the ultimate strategic asset for any broadcast & media operation

2018

6

TV is becoming increasingly hybrid, personalised and interactive, which is placing new requirements

on service providers. Having a flexible back-end

platform is one of the essential ingredients to meet changing consumption habits and this is where Alpha Networks, a Belgian technology company, comes in. Alpha offers a complete hybrid TV back-end platform, called tucanoRED, that enables delivery of any type of content (Web, Live, VOD, Catch-Up, Live to VOD) in a hybrid environment. Alpha Networks claims to offer the most complete hybrid TV back-end platform with tucanoRED. Through its platform, millions of users are daily connected watching they preferred content, anytime, anywhere.

A nice differentiation of tucanoRED is that is designed with a micro-services approach, easing both introduction of new services and scalability of existing ones. Micro-services are relatively new to the TV industry but the inherent benefits, such as shorter development cycles, will see that approach become more popular with broadcasters and operators.

TeleCentro, the second biggest cable operator in Argentina, replaced its legacy solution with tucanoRED for multi-screen delivery. TPLAY also supports advanced features such as ‘continue watching’, nPVR, catch-up and restart, and a unified search engine for all content types.

One of the CSI judges said the “Argentina implementation provides a good case study for the solution.”

Another judge said: “This is a multiscreen TV service delivery platform rather than just a VoD enabler. I like the openness”.

Indeed, tucanoRED boasts quick and transparent integration with new 3rd party systems, such as VoD providers, CDNs, DRMs.

tucanoRED is a modular solution that can work in the cloud or in customer premises, or a mix of infrastructures. This was a worthy winner in this category.

Best content on demand solution WINNER: Alpha Networks - tucanoRED

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2018

8

Best data storage solution WINNER: MediaKind- Video Storage and Processing Platform

Data storage is becoming of increasingly strategic significance from an operational perspective in line with changing consumption and distribution models of video.

Delivering next-generation TV services on any screen is necessary to compete in today’s world of video. As the growth of binge-watching and catch-up TV augments the demand for video-on-demand (VOD) content from OTT services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, TV service providers must constantly expand their on-demand libraries through flexible capacity scaling. Operators know their primary challenge is to meet consumer demand for TV everywhere and avoid churn.

Yet delivering next-generation TV experiences is often complex and time consuming. There are multiple integration points including servers required for storage, video streaming, OTT, transcoding and beyond. This constant growth of content must also go hand-in-hand with a cost consideration – ensuring content (which is moving to larger 4K UHD variants) is processed via the most appropriate media, whether premise, hybrid or cloud platforms.

The platform integrates and virtualises the storage and

processing capabilities of as many Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) servers as needed into a unified, high performance, software- based infrastructure.

Beyond the basic scaling of content, a provider must also consider how protecting these files may impact the scale and cost of storage, especially in cases where there are stringent copyright laws.

Deployed by the likes of Shandong Cable Network, Liberty Latin American and Swisscom, the multi-award-winning Video Storage Processing Platform (VSPP) enables TV service providers to overcome these storage challenges by powering a solution for cloud DVR, on-demand and time-shifted TV services, offering better performance, reduced latency and lower CAPEX and TCO. The simplified architecture and workflow accelerate time to market, translating into revenue for advanced TV services.

Among the features the VSPP supports are; 4K/HEVC, close captions for OTT packaging, DASH CENC/Multi-DRM and CMAF among others.

The 2018 CSI Award for the inaugural ‘Best Data Storage Solution’ marks a recognition of the VSPP’s continued innovation. This year saw the platform develop an open API ecosystem that enables new opportunities to expand existing offerings with next generation immersive content. One of our judges labelled the VSPP and its various advances as: “A very innovative and versatile platform”. Another was impressed by the technology elements and business outcomes of the VSPP: “The quality and financial benefits are clearly explained.”

Congratulations to the team at MediaKind (and the previous team at Ericsson Media Solutions before it) for its work on the VSPP – a worthy winner in this new category.

2018

For the latest updates on the 2018 Awards: @CSIAwards #CSIAwards

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2018

For the latest updates on the 2019 Awards: @CSIAwards #CSIAwards