CASE STUDY

UKTV is an award-winning, British multi-channel broadcaster owned by BBC Studios. Home of various entertainment channels such as Dave, Drama, W, and Yesterday. UKTV spans comedy, entertainment, natural history, factual and drama, delivering live and on demand programming to audiences through its owned and operated on demand service UKTV Play, as well as many other platforms such as Sky, Virgin Media, FreeView, Freesat, Amazon Fire, and more.

UKTV chose Simplestream to aggregate and simplify its live streaming operational workflow. It was key for the broadcaster to rely on a tech partner that can package the live streams from linear channels to provide an embedded player for the UKTV website to distribute and play the video assets back.

Simplestream deployed the live streaming and player modules, as part of Media Manager, to allow UKTV to enhance its live streaming capabilities. The ability to process video assets at any stage, from downlinking to encoding, was key for UKTV, enabling a simplified workflow.

More interestingly, UKTV can leverage Simplestream’s expertise to manipulate video packaging, adapt APIs for seamless integration on a wider range of devices and bespoke DRM solutions, making the service even more fundamental.  

‍

Simplestream provided UKTV with a solution that allows for flexible packaging of video streams for live distribution. The objective of working through a simplified workflow was reached by the broadcaster by accessing Media Manager to oversee the downlinking and encoding operation, with the ability to embed the video player on a set of existing applications. The ability to enhance the distribution of live programming is also made possible by the integration with Simplestream’s API.