Telestream has announced a strategic collaboration with Skyline Communications. The development initiative focusses on the integration of Telestream’s cloud-based video monitoring solutions, together with Skyline Communication’s DataMiner network management, orchestration and operations support solution.
Skyline’s multi-vendor DataMiner connects with any third-party product, appliance and cloud service to provide end-to-end infrastructure management and deployment, service orchestration and process automation. With the latest initiative, the two companies have integrated the new Telestream Cloud Stream Monitor service to provide on-demand, cost-effective flexibility for validating and troubleshooting live as well as on-demand video streaming services across the globe.
For the first time, DataMiner orchestration can be leveraged to automate OTT service deployment – on-premises and in the cloud – and Telestream content monitoring at the same time, with the monitoring system deployable on-demand, wherever needed, across over 70 global cloud locations. DataMiner uses the Telestream cloud API to control the dynamic deployment and takedown of monitoring resources to match its ability to control end-to-end video deployments. The new Telestream cloud capabilities empower users to spin upstream monitoring in the cloud, on-demand, under manual or automatic control from DataMiner. This facility is valuable for live events, where premium monitoring is critical, but may only be needed for the duration of the event (schedule-aware monitoring). An additional upside is that the orchestration of the Telestream Cloud Stream Monitor service is always aligned with the actual OTT service configurations (context-aware monitoring). It also provides for supplemental geographical troubleshooting on-demand, scheduled periods of monitoring for premium content as part of live channel schedules, or for synthetic testing of video-on-demand HLS or DASH assets anywhere in the world.
“We have created a first in this integration since no other vendor has the breadth of cloud support or feature-scope comparison provided by the Telestream cloud stream monitoring service,” commented Ken Haren, Director of Product Management at Telestream. “The current DataMiner integration can schedule post-CDN monitoring as and when needed, and we’re excited about extending this to include contribution (transport stream) monitoring in the near future. There is nothing that competes with the Telestream cloud stream monitor service when the contribution and edge are combined.”
In developing this integration, Telestream and Skyline Communications are addressing the challenge presented by the migration of video services to the cloud for streaming of live or VoD services. The companies are focusing on a dynamic and growing community of service providers, content providers and broadcasters looking to send streams into the cloud for video processing and distribution as OTT streams.
“This is an exciting time for streaming services leveraging the cloud for contribution and distribution,” said Steven Soenens, Skyline’s VP Product Marketing. “The new Telestream service combined with the automation provided by DataMiner provides a truly on-demand deployment, orchestration, monitoring and troubleshooting operational environment to match the transient nature of the video services we are seeing today. We are very much looking forward to seeing customers leverage the combined solution, including the more than 1500 existing DataMiner customers.”
The new service integration extends the Skyline and Telestream monitoring partnership, which already includes the Telestream IQ solutions and Prism solutions for waveform and SMPTE ST-2110 analysis.
“This integration will enable users to work in new, more efficient ways,” explained Haren. “Static monitoring is perfect and critical for more permanent video services, but for transient video services, the overhead of deploying and configuring monitoring can be cost prohibitive or may simply not be possible given time and resource constraints. The new capability not only provides on-demand monitoring with a few mouse clicks, but also charging models to suit, with extensive geographical coverage that would not be possible otherwise.”
The new Telestream Cloud Stream Monitoring service can also deploy transport stream monitoring, leveraging Telestream IQ QoS and QoE solutions. This allows video providers to dynamically deploy monitoring for SRT or Zixi feeds, either as contribution streams to the cloud, or across the global cloud backbones for global transit of transport streams as a satellite replacement or augmentation strategy. The transport stream monitoring has the same global reach as the OTT monitoring service across multiple public cloud providers.
