It was clear to them that 1) the amount, availability, and segmentation of content were proliferating rapidly; 2) consumer habits were changing, and viewers had a voracious appetite for high quality content across a growing range of platforms and devices; 3) live and real time events were a huge driver of profitability for all MVPDs and digital platforms.

Javadi, together with fellow IT industry pioneers Malik Khan and Yair Amir, concluded that if they could engineer a global IP based video transport network that enabled media companies to reliably distribute live content in a high quality and real time way to any destination worldwide, it was destined to be a huge success. In May of this year, LTN reported it had delivered the 1 millionth live feed over its proprietary multicast-enabled global IP network.

Today, the LTN Network underpins the company’s fully managed, terrestrial IP-based video transmission solution, LTN Wave, which delivers <300ms latency and 99.999% reliability worldwide. LTN Wave is designed as a flexible, cost-effective and intelligent alternative to traditional video distribution models — providing the quality, reliability and availability of satellite while harnessing the scalability, visibility and monetization potential provided by IP. The solution helps LTN’s clients – major broadcasters, sports organizations and streaming services – to cost-efficiently and reliably produce, customize, and deliver multiple versions of high value content to any global destination with improved efficiency, scale, and monetization.

An accomplished leader in the telecom, networking, and IP tech spaces, Javadi has more than 40 years of experience establishing, acquiring, and growing global B2B and B2C businesses. Prior to co-founding LTN, he held several senior executive positions, including as President of Sprint International, President of Primus Telecom, and Head of Global Services at MCI.

Javadi spoke to The Broadcast Bridge about the challenges broadcasters and content owners are facing today and the need to make sure that technology “serves the purpose and helps tackle real business challenges.”

The Broadcast Bridge: Within the content distribution/contribution area, there are many changes that are happening, and a lot of new technologies are coming into play. How do you navigate this challenging landscape for your customers?

Javadi: To be honest, it's a very exciting but challenging time in the industry. It's exciting for us in the sense that we're innovators and inventors — we keep developing new technology and that's really satisfying. But as technology partners and service providers in a fast-paced media landscape, we need to make sure that we create technology that clearly serves the purpose and helps tackle real business challenges.

The Broadcast Bridge: And that means different technologies to different customers, right?

Javadi: You can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to media technology today. If you look at the media world, first of all, there's a very distinct pyramid. You have the tier one, world-leading broadcasters and major global organizations and then you have the tier two and tier three companies. Scale matters a lot for the big guys, and not so much for the smaller players. Then you have traditional media versus sports leagues and teams. They are more or less in the same business, but they have very different needs and requirements. The third group that is now forming very rapidly is the software-defined digital players — the tech giants like Apple, Amazon, and YouTube with digital platforms that want to push out a lot of content. YouTube is a good example of that — today you can get just about every local television station on YouTube. These types of platforms are rapidly evolving into streaming companies. The world has changed a lot.

The Broadcast Bridge: The idea for LTN was formed in 2008 during a discussion at your dining room table. What problems were you hoping to solve for content distributors then and how? Does the original idea still hold true today?

Javadi: My business partner, Malik Khan, and I started this together. At the time, we felt that video generation and content consumption were exploding. There was a day when just a handful of channels like ABC, NBC, and CBS were consumed by 300 million people. That’s no longer the case. Now you have hundreds of very specialized, very segmented channels. We saw that as the future, and we thought that was going to happen. It turns out the video revolution happened a lot faster and is much bigger than we originally expected.

So that was one element of the equation. The second piece of it was more a question of technology. Both of us come from a networking background and we felt that the legacy networks and traditional distribution methodologies would no longer be able to support this huge explosion of content.

The Broadcast Bridge: Was that because of a lack of bandwidth capacity?

Javadi: Not just the capacity, but the necessity to reach much smaller, niche audiences on a global scale meant that existing local distribution infrastructure was inadequate. That was key because we felt that legacy networks were very hierarchical. If you know networking, you’ll understand that the internet wasn’t originally designed for high-value, live video delivery. That led us to begin building our own network in 2008 that featured a highly automated architecture. It's not a hierarchical network, it’s a flat network, but it needs to be exceptionally intelligent because the entire grid needs to know the state of every flow.

Our global IP transmission network is similar to FedEx’s model of authentication at every step of the signal flow chain. We take the video from content owners at the source, and we monitor that feed very closely as it traverses our network. We know exactly which processing center it will hit, and we know precisely when it arrives. We have deep insights into the state of that flow every second. We also guarantee that from coast to coast, we can deliver live video in 100 milliseconds. Think about that —you can blink an eye and that's 100 milliseconds. It’s roughly half the speed of light, coast to coast.

This is a service-level guarantee we give to our customers. It is not “best efforts.” This is a huge distinction. People in the internet world often think of everything as “best efforts”. I'm going to push it out and maybe it gets to you, maybe it doesn't. Nine out of ten times it might get to you. But we guarantee it through our proprietary network infrastructure and a number of patented error recovery protocols and routing algorithms.

The Broadcast Bridge: Could you tell us a little about the LTN Arc platform? It’s a managed service that handles every aspect of production and versioning for live events.

Javadi: The LTN Network is the foundational layer upon which all of our services like LTN Wave and LTN Arc are built. Think about it like this: the LTN Network is our real-time, live transport grid. If you are interviewing somebody on the West Coast while sitting in New York, it’s just like you and I sitting across the table.

Through multicast-enabled IP technology, broadcasters can now take one feed and deliver it to multiple receivers over the network in a one-to-many fashion. This makes a huge difference because terrestrial distribution was always extremely limited via traditional fiber models. Thinking back to the FedEx analogy, our transport network and services like LTN Arc can essentially take the FedEx package from you at your house, then mark it, stamp it, and insert custom overlays or graphics for different receivers. LTN Arc is a fully managed production solution that enables media companies to repurpose and decorate centralized feeds into customized streams for distribution on multiple channels. Content owners can take one channel and seamlessly create five versions of that channel for different media consumption devices.

As another example, we work with major sports streamers, including one of the top four sports leagues in the US, to take raw live event feeds and create tailored streams with different languages and custom graphics to enable seamless global distribution — whether that’s in Asia, Europe, the Americas, or anywhere else. That's how this really changes the entire structure and dynamic of media distribution. It's a really intelligent network that delivers content anywhere in real time — it’s ideal for live events.

The Broadcast Bridge: How has the media landscape changed? It seems that media companies don’t want to be bothered with the technical side of video processing, like versioning, they’d rather hand it off to someone else.

Javadi: Indeed, many media companies are looking to partner with technology providers to handle non-core activities — areas that are not related to content, sales, brand or relationships. In the old days, media organizations used to buy pieces of technology from various vendors and put workflows together themselves. They no longer have the time or resources to do that.

Businesses don't want to spend a lot of capital building and managing complex technology infrastructures. Why? Because they have to be very agile. They need to stay quick on their feet, and they are under pressure to produce an ever-increasing number of content versions, which are in constant evolution. That’s what's going on in the world of our customers. And we feel fortunate that we have the right tools and the right network infrastructure to help them tackle those challenges.

The Broadcast Bridge: So, LTN Arc was launched in 2022 – what’s new on the horizon for 2024?

Javadi: We continue to build on top of our services all the time. We have to give the customer live and real-time access to see what's going on across every element of the video chain. Monitoring has become a huge focus for us and we're spending a lot of effort on driving customer visibility with monitoring capabilities that are reliable, scalable and easily accessible. With LTN Arc, the customer always sees what's happening in real time. We give them a portal so that they can easily spin up services, change parameters and re-route feeds online. We recognize that customers need to gain deeper insights and visibility into content distribution as it happens, with multiple levels of security.

The Broadcast Bridge: How important is global, cross-platform distribution that can reach every screen around the world and deliver customized, relevant content?

Javadi: Hugely important. The other important aspect of this is that media companies need to insert advertising into their feeds as they try to figure out the most profitable business models. Therefore, they want the advertising to be as targeted as possible. Content providers want to make sure that the sports fan in Brazil who watches Brazilian football is being sent the right, localized, relevant ads. To help achieve this, we embed SCTE markers within video streams to flag commercial breaks or specific timestamps, which in turn facilitates accurate synchronization and coordination of downstream ad insertion across any platform. This has helped automate the complex ad enablement process and means you don't have to delay the game by five seconds just so you can insert the right advertising.

The Broadcast Bridge: What’s your view of low-cost, internet-based delivery methods, like RIST and 5G Broadcast networks. When are they most advantageous and when should a client avoid them?

Javadi: We don't use them within our LTN Network, but we interface and integrate with them for clients all the time and there is value for some lower-tier media businesses.

I think RIST is a very good protocol, but again, it's “best efforts.” High-value content owners need higher standards of delivery. We work with several international public broadcasters that use RIST as part of their distribution infrastructure. We might take a channel that they want to deliver to twelve countries around the world, our platform takes it all the way via LTN Wave and then the last-mile piece of it is a RIST delivery.

5G Broadcast is entirely different. It’s good for very short duration ingest. So, it might be used for a situation like a live news event with a remote camera operator and wireless transmitter. In a situation where an operator can’t really connect to anything, 5G can be a good option. Unfortunately, if they go off the air, they really go off the air. But you know they’ll come back in two minutes. Inherently, 5G is better than all the previous generations of wireless technologies — so it works well, but only for short-duration contribution of content.

The Broadcast Bridge: What about cloud technology? Do you use cloud to distribute content?

Javadi: We do. Mostly because our customers are harnessing capabilities inside the cloud like production workflows. So we will hand off content to the cloud or we take it from the cloud and bring it back, with minimal egress charges.

The Broadcast Bridge: What's the advantage of cloud?

Javadi: The customer gets to simplify and streamline their workflows.

You know, this is really the answer to traditional media technology challenges. Previously, customers had to buy a huge piece of hardware. Now they can say, “Okay, I'll give it to Amazon and do that kind of backend processing in AWS.”

The Broadcast Bridge: This has become a big trend the last couple of years. How much is it going to keep growing?

Javadi: I don't know. I think again back to the point I was making earlier, which is how all customers – whether a sports entity, a big media organization, or a streaming platform – they’re all constantly trying to fine tune their business model. And the business model is driven by, “I have this one live sports event that I used to make 100 bucks out of. Now I need to make 105 bucks out of it.”

So that means they need more versions of the same content. They need to tweak it and they need to cost-efficiently deliver it to a different audience. That’s how we help our customers monetize their content.