Media Delivery Operations must ensure their content is delivered and monetized more efficiently and effectively than ever before, in an increasingly complex and competitive Media Market. This is much easier said than done, given there are more methods of producing, acquiring, and distributing content than ever before, and consumer choice is practically endless.

Media Businesses are therefore in the midst of managing the business, operational, and technological transition from a linear TV world to a multi-platform distribution world that spans traditional TV, Direct to Consumer OTT, VOD, and Social Media. It is business-critical to deliver more personalized content to smaller, more localized audiences. It is also critical to offer advertisers excellent access to the right audiences at the right time.

From the technology perspective, it is crystal-clear that Media Businesses want operational simplicity (“no unnecessary friction for my business”) and robust performance (“it just needs to work”) at the best ROI (“I want to pay the best price for the solution I really need”).

Technology businesses working in Media Delivery are therefore working to support their customers to be more efficient, more effective, and ultimately more profitable. Some companies are still specialized in specific areas such as MAM or Playout or Advertising Management or Multi-Platform Distribution, but very few have the full understanding of the media value chain in its entirety with the capability to assist in a broader way. This end-to-end workflow integration is normally achieved by joining together multiple technology providers, which requires more effort and introduces extra technical and operational complexity. This level of integration is more efficiently achieved by having a modular solution design from a single technology provider that has all the experience to develop and support a full Media Capture-to-Distribution solution.

TeclaSystem – Revolutionizing The Media Delivery Value Chain

In the rapidly evolving world of media and telecommunications, TeclaSystem stands out as one of the few companies to offer modularly-integrated Capture-to-Distribution solutions.

Since its foundation in 2018, TeclaSystem’s vision is of a Media Technology business that is built for the modern age. Despite being a young company, TeclaSystem’s know-how is built upon many decades of experience from its core team. This extensive background fuels an innovative approach, ensuring the delivery of forward-thinking solutions in media asset management, capture, playout, and multi-platform distribution that encompass IP and cloud-based technologies.

TeclaSystem’s vision also includes a strong link to the successful past and present of linear broadcast TV. Customers can transition effectively and efficiently from traditional technology and operations to modern workflows. Even more, TeclaSystem supports hybrid business models, giving customers a smoother transition to more modern and effective media management and distribution approaches.

Three foundation stones underpin the modularly-integrated Capture-to-Distribution approach:

1.  A Policy For Hybrid.

TeclaSystem decided from the beginning that software must work in any hardware environment – on-prem servers, public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid environments. TeclaSystem’s policy offers customers the ultimate new-build platform or transition-enabling platform. So far, multiple types of media delivery solutions have been deployed, fitting the customers’ strategies and achieving targeted results.

This Policy for Hybrid involved immediately qualifying leading cloud hyperscalers including AWS, Azure, Oracle, and Tata and creating strong hardware manufacturer relationships by partnering with HPE and Dell on a global basis. This policy also involved building a modern, single, cross-platform web-based UI and building solutions that could span any mix of deployment types for a single customer. TeclaSystem’s solutions were designed to scale up or scale out, to meet any type of customer need. 

2.  Design For Simplicity

It was also decided from the beginning that TeclaSystem software would be a single integrated stack, built for modularity, in which all features would be available and configurable for customers. It was important to have a highly scalable, simple, resilient software environment even for the most complex customers, without the complexity of customer-specific code branches. This Design for Simplicity, with a strong emphasis on quality at its core, is fully targeted at delivering the best possible system reliability, customer service, and development speed. 

3.  Cross-Technology Know-How

TeclaSystem’s team is highly aware of the last generation of technology that Media Businesses use today, while simultaneously working on the front line of identifying and implementing the latest technologies and workflows that may benefit customers’ businesses. A defining factor about TeclaSystem’s solutions is that they are truly end-to-end, spanning all core types of broadcast production ingest formats and all core types of distribution formats.

At the same time as having a cross-technology competency, it is critical to have deep know-how in each core product area. For example, in the MAM area (TeclaSystem’s MediaHive product) while MediaHive supports all traditional MAM requirements, it also supports cutting edge requirements like remote management of audio-video content and AI-integration for automated editing and transcription processes. As a sign of maturity in the MAM area, MediaHive also supports very specialized content management workflows and allows customers to design their own.

How A European Media Group Found New Benefits With TeclaSystem

One of TeclaSystem’s customers is M-Three Satcom, a company that is part of a European Media Business group with multiple divisions spanning media production & distribution and advertising sales, operating in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian language regions. M-Three Satcom utilizes multiple TeclaSystem products and solutions (see Figure 2).

M-Three Satcom required a new system to deliver three HD 24x7 linear channels in Spain, with all the associated MAM, compliance recording and monitoring systems, which TeclaSystem designed and deployed. The customer requirements were aimed at achieving a dramatic uplift in their broadcast reliability, overall advertising revenues and business profitability through maximising tailored advertising on a regional basis while automating ad insertion with maximum self-service functionality for the Advertising agencies. They also wanted to leverage a multi-national team to best effect, by running MCR Operations in Spain and Playout Operations in Italy. The channels themselves, plus live channel streaming, as-run logs and historic data, had to be easily available to the Advertising agencies in Spain for validating ad delivery.

To fully meet the customer’s requirements, TeclaSystem deployed four of its core modules (see Figure 2): 

• MediaHive MAM for managing all video content, advertising content, graphic templates and regionalised ad insertion, with access provided to Media Operations and Advertising Agencies.
• Dynamo Playout for delivery of channels, all secondary events, and automatic conformance of outputs to all destinations.
• Video Logger for recording and storage for the required 6-month retention time, with customer access to export content as required for further checks.
• Panorama Plus for an RTMP feed for the Advertising agencies and monitoring channel delivery.

Extending From MAM & Playout To Streaming Delivery (OTT And Social Media)

The investment in a TeclaSystem solution means M-Three Satcom have the option to add other TeclaSystem modules for additional functionality that will easily integrate with the existing MAM, Playout, Logging, and Monitoring systems, simplifying the overall technology stack.

As Emanuele Porfiri, TeclaSystem Solution Architect, explains, “Broadcasters need technology partners that will help them thrive in a hybrid model of traditional linear broadcast and IP-based delivery for many years to come. They rely on an operationally simple and cost-effective path to ensure they maximize their profitability during this transition. TeclaSystem makes it possible to have all the features of today’s linear broadcast operations for today’s core business, while easily integrating OTT and Social Media delivery with broadcast delivery. The founding team at TeclaSystem have worked in a wide range of broadcast and IP projects over the last 20 years, which has led us to today – with a solution and an approach that can fit any type of broadcaster requirement.”

Finding A Step-Change In Delivery Efficiency & Ad Revenues At IBC2024

We are halfway through the 2020s. OTT is the future, but traditional linear broadcast is still the core. Media Businesses know how to produce the best content, but the increasingly granular distribution of content in every conceivable business model demands a higher level of flexibility and expertise.

At IBC2024, Broadcasters will continue their search for solutions that provide greater efficiency for the hybrid, multi-platform world they operate in, and that can maximise advertising revenues. New-generation companies with decades of broadcast and media distribution experience in their team, just like TeclaSystem, should receive special attention in this search.