Satline has announced the launch of Seasonal Satellite Server, a seasonal satellite hosting model, aiming to reduce costs for OTT operators and sports networks.
Marking what the company said is an industry first, the European IPTV DVB and SAT>IP infrastructure provider’s new model only charges users for the months they are actually broadcasting. Similar to methodologies in widespread use across the tech industry, the new model is effectively pay-as-you-go, said the company. Servers and infrastructure remain in hibernation, fully configured, during the off-season months. Satellite positions, CAM settings and tuner alignments are preserved, ready to resume service in a single business day.
Commenting, Gleb Sazanov, CEO of Satline, said, “For decades, sports broadcasters have been forced into rigid annual contracts, essentially paying a tax on the months their teams aren’t even playing. We’re finally bringing the flexibility of the cloud to physical satellite infrastructure. If you aren’t broadcasting, you shouldn’t be paying.”
Hibernation is earned alongside active use – every active month banks up to a month of free hibernation. The longer a broadcaster runs with Satline, the more off-season time it can pause at no server cost. There is no annual lock-in and no termination fee, said the company.
“Compute, storage, and CDN all moved to pay-for-what-you-use years ago,” said Sazanov. “Bare-metal satellite hardware is one of the last corners of the broadcast stack still sold on rigid annual term. For a business whose revenue is openly seasonal, that mismatch stopped making sense a long time ago.”
Deployed from data centres in Vilnius and London, the service features multi-tuner DVB capacity built on Digital Devices, Max SX8 Pro tuners with up to 1 Gbps unmetered transit for matchday concurrency, and hardware-level CAM support for encrypted feeds.
