Three and a half years ago we ran into Amagi, a tiny company out of India at IBC, which promised to change the way advertising was inserted into pay TV. It says it will introduce a new version of that system at NAB in the US this week.
Amagi billed itself at the time as the largest company reselling advertising, meaning that it buys ad spots in national TV channels, and then resells them regionally for far more money – simply by replacing the ads with something different in each region.
It had seen a wider opportunity to bring the technology to Europe, and has since taken it even further afield. It can insert regional content into a TV channel, either a single advert break or a 3 hour change of programming by using what it calls a reliable ‘bar code.’
In effect this is really an invisible and inaudible water mark in the content, used to signal a different advert, but it can also be used by broadcasters to run a separate program, “for instance a satellite delivered TV channel may only want to cut in 3 hours of coverage in one country, out of the entire continent.”
Amagi calls its process Cloudporting. The service delivers replacement content over the internet, getting it there ahead of time, and terminating it in a storage box, which also looks out for the unique watermark. The replacement content is then spliced into it into the stream, just before the channel goes to local playout.
We imagine the same could be done to splice one program to a cloud OTT version of a TV channel, where often content owners will not allow certain programs to go to certain devices because the protection on them is not sufficiently robust.
Currently when people try to do this they use a sequence of audio track triggers, but some tracks can be missed. The Amagi system delivers the trigger to splice within the first 25 frames of any given video so that no network scheduling change is required.
Amagi now claims that Cloudport will allow TV networks to launch new channels without traditional satellite or fiber broadcast infrastructure at a fraction of the cost using content preparation servers installed at a broadcast station, plus a secure cloud storage and distribution system, and Amagi edge servers deployed at headends.
Amagi’s Cloudport 2.0 has end-to-end broadcast workflow in the cloud including media asset management, quality control, subtitle edit and management, and automation and scheduling.
Srividhya added, “Given the huge demand for OTT products in the marketplace, we have built in OTT-readiness into Cloudport 2.0. It is now possible to create Internet-specific, broadcast-grade linear TV channels that can be played out on variety of devices and delivery networks”
Amagi has also been carefully integrating its system into third-party scheduling, automation and asset management systems.