Media-Alliance succesfully deployed Media Asset Management and Live Censorship System at Intigral in Dubai
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Technologies spotted at Intigral: Harmonic, Miranda, Harris, Cisco switcher, Appear TV, Dell servers & MAM from Media-Alliance.

In an exclusive interview with Vijaya Cherian, Intigral’s team shares the reasons behind adopting an IP-based infrastructure and adaptive bit rate technologies to deliver content across multiple platforms in the Middle East.

The rules of content delivery are changing. IP-based content delivery is quickly gaining favour with broadcasters worldwide and those that embrace the change will shape tomorrow’s media landscape. In the Middle East, Saudi-owned content provider Intigral has taken the lead by not just developing an IP-based delivery platform but by also forging the long-awaited alliance between telcos and broadcasters in the region.

Intigral, which is best described as a digital media content provider that customises, manages and delivers content across multiple screens is already working closely with telco operator Saudi Telecom Company (STC) in the Kingdom. In fact, it enabled STC to launch Invision, Saudi Arabia’s first interactive TV service based on its IPTV capabilities. The service also delivers live TV, Catch-Up TV and video on demand to the TV screens of STC’s broadband customers.

In fact, Intigral’s VP of IPTV and operations Mike Sneesby, says the company was established “to specifically work with telecommunications operators”.

“We are set up to work across the three screens – Web, IPTV and Mobile, but I think this terminology will disappear very soon with these screens diverging and converging and a whole array of different devices becoming available for people to consume content. So from our perspective, our technology strategy is designed basically to support the delivery of content across multiple platforms and multiple networks for telecommunicat-ions operators.

“If you look at our business today, we have our broadcast headend in Dubai and are just about to expand from 50 to 180 channels. The broadcast headend has always been completely digital but is also specifically established to deliver video content in IP format,” explains Sneesby.

Intigral’s IPTV operations are controlled from Dubai, where it has a state-of-the-art broadcast, editing and post-production centre. Thus far, Intigral’s content package to STC has been limited to 50 TV channels, but it is now in the process of undertaking a massive upgrade that will enable it to deliver 180 channels, 30 of which will be HD.

Along with the upgrade, Intigral’s 45 plus technical team in Dubai, will swell to almost 80 to cope with its IPTV operations. The expansion has been contracted to Dubai-based systems integrator Glocom, who successfully designed and integrated the headend for Intigral the first time.

“In the initial build of our headend technology here, we worked in partnership with Glocom as our systems integrator. In the expansion going out from 50 channels to 180 channels, we went through another comprehensive vendor selection process; we trialled a number of different technologies and the engineering team looked at a whole range of factors. In the end, we decided to extend our relationship with both Glocom and Harmonic again to expand our headend so today, we’re running Harmonic’s latest generation of encoders,” explains Sneesby.

IPTV and managed TV services including operational strategy, Graphical User Interface (GUI) management, product management and marketing are only a part of what Intigral does. The company also has two technical teams that take care of content delivery to mobile devices and the Web.

“Our mobile business is based out of Riyadh and we also have a platform for the Web. From a technology perspective, it is all about how these platforms talk to one another, and we have a plan already in place for a number of interfaces between our platforms that will allow us to deliver video content to our mobile consumers and deliver mobile content onto our web consumers.

“The idea is to be able to share content across those delivery platforms but also share data across those platforms. Someday, in an ideal world, we hope there will be a single platform that can deliver to every device. But the reality is that it doesn’t exist today. So what we have instead is an IPTV headend and an IPTV content management system; a mobile content management system and a web content management system. The challenge today is sharing content as well as data between those systems, which we are doing for STC with a number of initiatives,” adds Sneesby.

One reason why Intigral’s method of content delivery is remarkable is because it is both futuristic and opens up a whole segment of the market that has, thus far, remained out of reach for most operators.

Intigral employs broadband whereas most other traditional players rely on satellite to broadcast content.

Here, it could be argued that bandwidth is a huge challenge for IPTV over managed networks. But Intigral has addressed this by adopting adaptive bit rate (ABR) technology, an alternative to providing content over unmanaged networks, where bandwidth is low and inconsistent.

 “Adaptive bit rate (ABR) streaming of video over unmanaged networks is an OTT technology that is being implemented in Europe but has not been implemented in this region as yet,” explains Sailesh Saxena, senior engineer at Intigral.