Thomson has today announced the launch of version 4.7 of its Sapphire Video on Demand (VoD) solution, offering operators the tool they need to maximize viewing quality and increase their subscriber capacity.
The Thomson Sapphire family of MPEG video servers recently was awarded Best content-on-demand solution at the International Broadcast Conference (IBC) exhibition in September. Each Sapphire server is tailored to provide a cost-effective solution for ad insertion, program play-out, recording, playback and on-demand applications. The new release brings a number of additional features to improve viewing quality including jitter free streaming, IP packet loss recovery and support of variable bit streams.
With Sapphire 4.7, Thomsons streaming accelerators guarantee that video streams have zero jitter. Lost packets are retransmitted, even in the case of burst packet loss in the network, so there is no negative impact on the video quality received. Sapphire release 4.7 supports the recording and streaming of MPEG transport streams without transmitting empty packets. This reduces the actual video streaming bandwidth needed, thus maximizing service eligibility in the network.
For leveraging operators bandwidth resources and extending capacity, Sapphire Cluster Manager is now available for managing groups of Sapphire VoD servers located either in points of presence or nodes. Sapphire Cluster Manager implements provisioning and load balancing, whilst optimizing streaming of content depending on its popularity.
This can lead to reductions in the VOD system storage cost from 50 to 80% said Hervé Congard, Director of Thomson’s Network Tools and Applications product line. The release of our Sapphire 4.7 in addition to the Sapphire Cluster Manager is turnkey solutions for operators to optimize their network resources whilst providing the highest viewing quality of service to satisfy their subscribers expectations.