HPE and Swisscom Revolutionize Its TV Network With An Industry Leading Virtualized Media Solution

HPE Virtual Headend Manager solution replaces legacy broadcasting appliances and brings a competitive advantage to Swisscom TV network

 

AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS, September 13, 2017 Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced that Swisscom (Schweiz) AG has chosen to replace their legacy appliances and hardware, running part of their television network, with HPE software-based virtualized headend solution.

 

Implementing the HPE Virtual Headend Manager enables Swisscom to deliver the best service and picture quality to its TV customers, while reducing costs and increasing business agility. By virtualizing the Headend Manager, which processes live TV signals for distribution to Swisscoms IPTV and OTT TV networks, Swisscom becomes one of the first CSPs to transition from legacy broadcasting appliances to software-based IT infrastructure running on off-the-shelf IT hardware.

 

In the face of the mobile revolution and fierce competition from over-the-top (OTT) TV services, CSPs and TV operators need to offer new video services with greater quality and availability, and to reach more consumer devices. To reduce the competitive gap with OTT rivals, traditional TV providers and CSPs are looking to virtualization and automation in their infrastructure and leveraging the cloud to become more agile.

 

"At Swisscom, we build smart solutions today for the Switzerland of tomorrow", said Peter Fregelius, Head of TV & Entertainment, Swisscom. "To better serve our customers who are always on everywhere, we chose HPE to partner with on this digital service provider transformation because they bring unique media industry and virtualization expertise, and do it without locking their customers into proprietary hardware or platforms. HPEs media solution partners have the same mind-set and standardized technology, which has equipped us to serve our customers better and lead the industry in media network virtualization."

 

Redefining the telecom industry

 

The HPE Virtual Headend Manager deployed by Swisscom is an industry redefining replacement for one of the most important parts of the telecoms network, the Live-TV headend. It provides the core technical functions for video management, acquiring and managing video signals and processing them to the platforms like satellite, cable, internet, mobile and IPTV. HPE Virtual Headend Manager leverages common off-the-shelf servers, with a virtualization software layer to manage the media functions that have until now been performed by proprietary hardware. Traditional headends are expensive to maintain and replace, require dedicated infrastructure per channel, suffer from slow provisioning and vendor lock-in of proprietary software.

 

With Swisscoms customers viewing more content on any device anywhere, keeping headend systems updated to manage all technical requirements, such as new compression standards or multiple video standards (SD, HD, UHD), proved to be very costly.

 

The HPE Virtual Headend Manager was designed to optimize Swisscom's TV channel production and align with their operations strategy to reduce operational expenses and move to an open source platform, while ensuring the highest reliability and service continuity. To virtualize the live-TV headend, HPE has developed a multicast enabled OpenStack cloud platform together with Swisscom that provides a scalable pool of resources to spin up new TV-channels in minutes, whereby previously it took weeks. Furthermore, due to the NFV technology in HPE Virtual Headend Manager, it can also repurpose available resources for disaster recovery, if for example a processing node is down, without disruption for Swisscoms customers.

 

"The new Virtual Headend Manager solution that we have developed for Swisscom, helps them to create new Live TV-channels faster and at lower cost", said Dave Sliter, Vice President & General Manager, Communications & Media Solutions, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. "With our strategic media industry expertise, across both video and IT, we are helping Swisscom to create an end to end virtualized media environment."

 

HPE and Swisscom Joint Development

 

HPE worked with Swisscom to define and orchestrate the technology partners that would collaborate to achieve Swisscoms objectives with the development of the HPE Virtual Headend Manager solution. As overall system integrator, HPE took the lead in integrating the partners products to achieve performance optimizations and flawless integration by thorough testing in the HPE Media Lab in Rome, Italy.

 

The current technology partner products include: Red Hat OpenStack Platform for building, deploying and scaling cloud deployments; Harmonics VOS media processing platform for video transcoding and IneoQuests Inspector Live for real-time content quality monitoring. HPE and Swisscom are continuously working on the integration of additional partner products, which gives Swisscom the freedom of choice to produce their channels with a mixture of components from various vendors, breaking up the lock-in into ecosystems of legacy technology.

 

Additional information of HPE Virtual Headend Manager can be found at www.hpe.com/dsp/mediasolutions.

 

 

Availability

 

HPE and Swisscom are showcasing the HPE Virtual Headend Manager at IBC 2017, September 15-19 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands at booth #MS62, Hall #9 along with HPEs Video Performance Platform, Media Workflow Master, Universal Video platform and Interactive TV solutions.

 

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

 

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an industry leading technology Company that enables customers to go further, faster. With the industry's most comprehensive portfolio, spanning the cloud to the data center to workplace applications, our technology and services help customers around the world make IT more efficient, more productive and more secure.

 

Editorial Contact

Alastair McCormick, HPE

alastair.mccormick@hpe.com

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