Czech TV has contracted broadcast and multiscreen systems integrator Visual Unity to supply the technical services needed to operate its online and mobile service, iVysilani, for the next two years. “Online consumption of Czech TV content has grown enormously in past years. Ivysilani.cz is a unique platform with more than 2592 days of video,” said Pavlina Kvapilova, executive director of Czech Television’s New Media Division. “Enhancing our streaming infrastructure towards the highest quality, stability and user comfort which is available is a key factor for us to be able to serve this interest and react on changing lifestyle habits of our public.” The new contract, which was awarded through a public tender process, will run until December 2014. Visual Unity’s vuMedia integrated content management and delivery platform is already used by iVysilani for content delivery, live streaming and video on demand services. Under the terms of the new contract Visual Unity will deliver various enhancements to the platform and supply additional back-end encoding, streaming, transcoding and media management services. The new contract will see Visual Unity increasing Czech TV’s live streaming capacity from 60Gbps to 88Gbps in 2013 and 110Gbps in 2014, to support the broadcaster’s 12 live streaming channels. Czech TV has also asked the company to increase storage capacity for its video on demand archive – a service Visual Unity has been providing since 2005. The broadcaster currently has a capacity of more than 70TByte and this will be expanded to over 160TB by the end of 2014.www.visualunity.com
