Imagine Communications has launched its Essentials channel origination option for its Make TV cloud playout solution, part of the company’s Aviator platform.
Designed for channels that do not require high levels of interactivity or support for live workflows, the Essentials option makes operating and monitoring simpler linear channels straightforward and more cost-effective, the company said.
The Essentials option rounds out the Make TV solution’s Standard and Premium channel offerings, which support high-end features and sophisticated workflows. Essentials channels deliver exceptional video, audio, and graphics quality, ensuring that the focus on premium-quality viewing experiences at the heart of Aviator is maintained in even the simplest channel origination applications.
As part of Imagine’s Aviator platform—which combines scheduling, rights management, channel origination, VoD, ad sales, ad placement, ad serving, campaign management, and more into a single cloud platform—Essentials channels integrate with the end-to-end Plan, Make, and Monetise capabilities in a cloud-native implementation that allows media companies to continue to successfully deliver and monetise content to meet changing consumer viewing habits.
The Essentials offering is designed for 24/7 scheduled channels such as movies and episodic content, FAST channels, local and regional broadcast applications. It is also well suited to popup and occasional use channels, as well as business continuity/disaster recovery and evergreen use cases. Essential channels share the same user interface as the more sophisticated Standard and Premium channels, maintaining a uniform operating interface for all channel types in the system.
While the operation of Essentials channels is simple, the underlying technology uses the latest container-based management and deployment connected to a full suite of monitoring and analytics tools. The playout engine that manages frame-accurate playout of video, audio, triggers and graphics runs on a Linux operating system, which drives down channel launch costs and reduces total cost of ownership.
The graphics engine uses HTML5 overlay graphics and supports real-time external dynamic data and playlist data insertion. SCTE trigger insertion supports broadcast and OTT ad insertion, including integration with Imagine’s SureFire broadcast-quality video ad server and other common dynamic ad insertion solutions.
