CASE STUDY

Launched earlier in 2022, TVL is Vårt Land’s brand new TV channel, the largest Christian TV channel with distribution in Norway. The channel collaborates with Christian organisations on parts of the content offering, as well as broadcasters and content owners such as BBC, All3, Spiegel-TV, and a number of other entities operating in Europe and North America.

Vårt Land’s TVL – by leveraging an existing partnership with professional video equipment reseller Mediability – chose Simplestream to deliver the HTML-5-based online platform for distribution of live and on demand content. The brief included the development of a new website to increase reach in the target market as part of the launch, with a strong backend for seamless management of content. Finally, TVL required automated Live2VOD functionalities to generate on demand assets within minutes from broadcast.

Simplestream’s end-to-end proposition included the deployment of proprietary content management system (CMS) Media Manager, pre-integrated with Mediability’s DiNA, a powerful tool for storytelling and editing. The video on demand content is ingested by Simplestream from the source, and sent to an S3 bucket, with subsequent categorisation and normalisation pre-distribution.

Media Manager also powers the automated Live2VOD module, with live streams ingested from Mediability. The workflow, in this instance, needs to observe a number or ‘rules’, such as specific publishing windows, or the skipping of ‘repeat’ content when coming in from catch-up as opposed to a categorised series. To achieve this balance, Simplestream utilises the Live2VOD clipper against the EPG data (provided by Provys).

It was also key for Simplestream to deploy the website in Norwegian, by implementing a new language for the Media Manager Languages & Localisation module.

The deployment of Media Manager as an OVP was key for TVL’s operators to be brought up-to-speed as soon as possible with the use of the interface to manage pages, categories, carousels and the on demand assets generated from live broadcast. Additionally, the seamless operation in deep linking metadata and thumbnails through to third-party platforms such as Facebook, granted TVL with an array of options for further customisation of the look and feel.

On the frontend, Simplestream developed a highly responsive website, smooth and easy to access both from desktop and – web-mode – from mobile devices. This element responded to the need of cross-platform usability for the specific target market.