Codeshop Helps Netherlands Public Broadcasting Deliver Sports with USP

The Netherlands Broadcasting Foundation (NOS) and Netherlands Public Broadcasting (NPO) bring the 2012 ‘summer of sports’ to the widest Dutch audience possible using Unified Streaming over HTTP

Amsterdam(16 Jul 2012)

This summer not only has the Olympics in London, but also the European Football Championship in Polen and Ukraine and the Tour de France - the worlds's biggest annual cycling event. All of these are prime time with massive audiences expected, on TV as well as online - and much of the content is only available online! 

In the Netherlands, the NOS/NPO is responsible for delivery of public, nationwide televised and online sport events to Dutch viewers.
As an indication, the Olympics will have up to 14 LIVE HTTP streams which should be viewable by 150.000 people simultaneously on all possible play-outs going over 150Gbps. For this a new platform based on Unified Streaming (USP) was developed in cooperation with the NPO.

"USP has proven to be the best choice for flexible and scalable streaming platform able to deliver quality streams to all relevant client apps and devices that our audience use at the moment. Codeshop is a professional organisation able to respond quickly and flexible to our changing re•quirements" says Egon Verharen, manager NPO R&D and responsible for the setup of the new streaming platform.

The NPO has been using Unified Streaming (USP) since 2010 for several new media projects such as the HLS video stream for ‘UitzendingGemist' (catch up tv) on iPhone/iPad. This service provides the public on demand access to recent and archived public TV broadcasts. Secondly, USP is used for Radio events as the Top2000 and the VisualRadio stream.
Features of the the new USP based online platform are:
• many devices with different capabilities, many play-out formats

• layered caching of HTTP streams (meeting the > 150Gbps target)

• content protection and geoip

• DVR for LIVE streams

• realtime statistics of streams

"It has been a great pleasure to work with the excellent people at NPO and NOS. Our cooperation has delivered a well behaved, scaling solution meeting all the various requirements" says Dirk Griffioen, co-founder of USP.

The NOS/NPO effort brings the innovative use of existing, well known technologies as HTTP and the latest content delivery formats to the widest Dutch audience possible.

About NOS
The Netherlands Broadcasting Foundation (Nederlandse Omroep Stichting, NOS) is the largest news organization in the Netherlands and provides independent and accurate coverage of news, sports and international events - in realtime using multimedia channels as www.nos.nl, radio, (connected) tv, mobile applications, social net•works, game consoles and other internet connected devices. www.nos.nl

About NPO
The Netherlands Public Broadcasting (Nederlandse Publieke Om•roep, NPO) is known for television channels Nederland 1, 2, 3 and Radio 1, 2, 3FM, 4, 5, 6 and responsible for nationwide delivery of high quality programming in the areas of culture, education, information and entertainment. www.publiekeomroep.nl

About CodeShop
CodeShop is a leading provider of cross-platform video streaming technologies. CodeShop's products are in operation around the world with customers ranging from broadcast networks and online content distributors to small companies and web casters. The ease of use and reliability of CodeShop's solutions allow customers to shorten their time-to-market. Our solutions fit into existing frame•works (Apache, Lighttpd, Nginx, IIS5/6/7) thus allowing for greater return on existing investment. www.unified-streaming.com