Flumotion Allies with NTT Europe
Spanish streaming media specialist Flumotion is making good on its plan to be a European leader in multimedia streaming services and online video platforms by striking a strategic partnership with NTT Europe, a subsidiary of NTT Communications, the international arm of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation.
In particular Flumotion technology will be integrated with NTT Europe's CDN and power its new live and on-demand Smart Media Delivery offering.
"Smart Media Delivery services cover the entire streaming value chain, which provides companies with an end-to-end solution that is easy to set up and manage," states Jean-Noël Saunier, CEO of Flumotion. "The WebTV offering enables them to increase advertising revenues, viewership and frequency as well as creating communities and loyalty around their content and brand."
Interactivity and Timeshifting
The service offers interactive functionality such as contextual commenting, multi-camera players, visual seeking, and timeshifting. Complete solutions include iPhone live streaming, where Flumotion provides both multiple bit rate encoding as well as adaptive bitrate streaming as a service, eliminating the need for third-party providers.
The contextual commenting function in Flumotion's WebTV service
The Smart Media Delivery services are officially launched this week and target media and entertainment companies as well as corporate clients. The first clients will be announced in the second half of April-the services for new clients already include the new release of Flumotion WebTV which will be officially launched on April 18. .
NTT Europe's European Tier 1 backbone network uses parent company NTT Communications' Tier 1 network infrastructure and data centres. Other telco partners include Telefónica and British Telecom.
While NTT Europe has been providing streaming services to clients like UEFA for live events such as the Euro2008, Flumotion counts broadcasters such as Cuatro, Antena3, COPE as well as corporate accounts such as Nestlé as its clients.
Flumotion has been collaborating with NTT Europe since 2007. In Spain, NTT Europe has been a reseller of Flumotion's streaming services and a part of the Flumotion Streaming Platform has been hosted in NTT Europe data centers in Spain.
"As a natural progression of this successful collaboration in Spain, NTT Europe has decided that Flumotion was the ideal technology and service partner for NTT Europe to start offering multimedia streaming services all over Europe," says Sion Wynn Jones, Product Manager, NTT Europe Online.
From Content Management to Video Player
Flumotion spent two years in R&D working on an open source streaming platform capable of serving live and on-demand video and audio in mainstream formats (Windows Media, Flash, MP3 and MPEG to Dirac, H264, or AAC+) from a Linux server.
On top of the streaming platform, Flumotion created a WebTV Player, designed to integrate live and on demand video content onto websites. It can be re-skinned and embedded and includes a Media BackOffice for content management. The concept allows users to create unique visual and interactive experiences including lean forward and lean back viewing options.
Its Media BackOffice enables publication, distribution, advertising and subscription based monetisation and syndication of content.
"We are aiming to deploy our end to end streaming technology in networks around the globe," confirms Saunier. "We have made a significant investment in developing our own multi-format technology, and we have been one of the first streaming platforms to support HTML5. We also support open formats, which has made us the preferred partner of organisations such as the Open Video Alliance."
Flumotion says it strongly believes that the exponential rise of HD content consumption requires the participation of ISPs and telcos.
"In order to offer an optimal video experience to a large scale audience, a sustainable business model has to be created," says Saunier. "This can only be achieved if all parties-telcos, video platforms and content providers-work together."
Flumotion, headquartered in Barcelona, is one of the three companies forming the Fluendo Group, which specalises in multimedia services.