Seven steps to distribute more feeds to more places

The world of contribution needs both more, less and better:

More feeds to more affiliates and more subscribers.

Less hassle, cost and un-monetised feeds.

Better targeting and distribution plan.

You might be the rights holder of one of the three cycling Grand Tours. Or you could be a broadcaster who’s acquired the rights to one of those events for a certain region. Or you could be a smaller entity. Each of these has different needs overall but when it comes to distribution, you essentially want the same thing: more viewers via more feeds to more regions, countries and affiliates.

With these seven steps, let’s see how we can help you distribute more feeds to more places without breaking the bank.

1. Define which feed to which audience

Your event includes a lot of different content, matches and games. Not every audience or type of audience or affiliate will be interested. As always, you might say.

Now, what’s also true is that there’s a lot of content and feeds that are not your main ones but that would interest a targeted audience.

Let’s look at an example. There’s a game from Wimbledon on an outside court, featuring a Dutch player who’s ranked 257th and isn’t a hot property. Well, ask a Dutch broadcaster what they think.

The Curling World Cup first round? Ask a Canadian broadcaster if they’re interested in following the Canadian women’s team.

But why is it so important today?

Well because this has happened.

And this

https://www.statista.com/statistics/722871/broadcasting-rights-fees-premier-league-england/

If you’re an event owner/organiser, well done! But that means that because you sell to affiliates or partners at a higher price, your service needs to meet some standards.

If you’re a broadcaster, you want to increase your ROI and you want to do so as quickly and easily as possible.

Now you want more feeds to more places, either as a service you’re offering to broadcasters and affiliates, or as an affiliate who wants to be able to show specific content relevant to your audience at the right time.

2. Collect your feeds

Some things never change. When it comes to covering events, you’re always going to need to get the feed from where the event takes place to where it needs to go. And we’ve been doing that for a long while now (good news, you’re at the right place; this has been our core business for the past 20 years – thanks for the confidence).

As a matter of fact we did it for the Total Africa Cup of Nations very recently in 4K with VOD content too!  SNG, fibre and the cloud: we have you covered and our contribution team will do what they do best and make things happen.

Now, we can mix the contribution means and have feed one over satellite and feed two to four over 4G or fibre or public internet.

3. Provision your distribution

What if we provide you with an interface so you can decide which feeds go where and affiliates can decide which feed they want to take? At Globecast, we can do this for you using our contribution and distribution expertise. Of course, if you want to take the lead and do it yourself, we provide a customer portal.

What we’re saying is that both those broadcasters can now choose the feed they want to receive. Globecast cloud routing allows affiliates to request only the feed(s) they need to save bandwidth costs.

And remember, we’re talking about premium quality video.

If you’re saying to yourself “This is going to cost me a fortune”, hold on…

4. Manage the cloud

That sounds scary, but truly, it’s not. Once your feed(s) is configured so it’s routed to where you want, we send the signal from the venue to the nearest cloud POP, selecting the most appropriate of those with which we work.

And as the feed provisioning is carried out at the portal level, well, we can route the required content through the cloud to where it’s needed. A software-defined network is the phrase, a phrase that we like. Cloud routing is, of course, only part of this.  As well as ensuring the IP routing configuration, there’s also handling cloud ingest and cloud egress, managing that end-to-end process. The quality still has to be there and that takes skill and effort from us.

5. Deal with the last mile

We can help with this too because cloud providers don’t deliver to your doorstep J. We deliver the signal from the nearest POP to your premise, completing the distribution of feeds either via a private network or local internet. Yes, it’s the internet but only for the last mile.

On top of that, we can handle affiliates issues/management with a dedicated helpdesk.

6. Engage your audience

What if you could even get more from your newly monetised feed?

Like making it available via streaming, or test out a service by creating a pop-up channel, reaching globally or maybe only in one region or country.

Or you might want to create clips to reuse on social media or to deliver to other affiliates. Here’s an example: Major international sport owners and organisers A.S.O. signs multi-year agreement to use Globecast’s Digital Media Hub for content sharing

You can use our Content Marketplace – part of our modular Digital Media Hub suite of services – to exchange highlights of your event with even more affiliates. How does that sound?

As mentioned, we can create a pop-up channel, taking your budget into account, because really, that three-week event is worth a dedicated, region-specific channel where you have the rights. And it’s an OPEX not CAPEX model.

Improving ROI is, of course, central to this and we have a wide range of options to help you; any option that provides more options to your audience is worth exploring with us.

7. Expand your audience

So, the feed’s delivered and, if you’re the rights holder, your job is done. Great!

If you’re an affiliate, you might add graphics, overlays, commentary and so on. We have playout solutions that may well help so the event can be enjoyed by the right audience at the right time in the best quality.

But can it really be enjoyed to the max?

Yeah, because we’re talking broadcast quality; we’re talking 15 Mbps feed; we’re talking secure transmission; we’re talking end-to-end quality and as cost-effectively as possible.

And you know how important great content quality premium can be:

• What’s important to consumers?
• The games are live: 51%
• With very high image quality: 35%
• Why do they pay for a TV subscription?
• To access sports 34% US, 35% UK
• Most desired
• Stream more than one game 36%

Source: Statista

If you want security or to move to the next level of security, your feed can even be encrypted.

So here it is: seven steps to distribute more feeds to more places with our Globecast Managed Cloud Network. What do you think? If you want to discuss this further, don’t hesitate to come to meet us at IBC or even or start a discussion online.