Telestream Monitoring Helps Firstlight Media Lead Breakthrough in Cloud-Native OTT for Live Services

Nevada City, California and Toronto, ON, Canada September 30^th, 2021 –  Telestream, is partnering with Firstlight Media to ensure comprehensive end-to-end quality monitoring of Firstlight Media’s unique cloud native, low-latency live OTT service. The solution combines Firstlight Media’s Gen5 architecture with Telestream fully automated monitoring to enable sports and entertainment services that combine the quality and reliability of broadcast with the agility and personalization of digital.

Broadcasters and content creators need to migrate OTT operations from capex-heavy, hardware-based on-prem systems to reliable, cloud-native solutions to reap market and business advantages. Sportsnet, part of Rogers Sports & Media, has announced that it will be using the Firstlight Media platform as the technology foundation for its relaunched SN NOW sports streaming service.

The Telestream integration is helping Firstlight Media ensure the highest quality for live event streaming at a time when most cloud-based distribution solutions are still confined to VOD workflows. Firstlight Media has created a unique, cloud-native Kubernetes microservices-based architecture that supports an agile and scalable end-to-end platform. Operating on a customer’s cloud platform of choice, Firstlight delivers live, low-latency programs at the highest quality to passionate viewers who have no tolerance for technical issues. Benefits include:

• Setup in 15 minutes or less of live streams via one-touch, automated deployment.
• A 10x reduction in cost using a serverless, containerized architecture.
• Unparalleled reliability of more than 99.99% and scaling to millions of viewers through smart redundancy that encodes and originates content simultaneously in two discrete locations.

Telestream’s Inspector Live and Surveyor products enable Firstlight Media platforms to achieve effortless operations with granular Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics, resulting in a 50% reduction in overhead required to deploy OTT services.

“When we evolved earlier generations of OTT services, we worked closely with Telestream to achieve quality benchmarks,” says Prabu Chelladurai, VP Product Management, Firstlight Media.  “Their enthusiastic support as we’ve led the industry’s shift to platforms based entirely in the cloud will help our customers achieve significant operational, market and business advantages while optimizing QoS and QoE.”

With Telestreams iQ comprehensive quality monitoring at each stage in the process, cloud native streaming solutions are able to find and fix faults fast. By integrating Telestream iQ monitoring solutions into the technology stack, users get enhanced visibility from source acquisition through encoding to origin server output on a single dashboard. As SRT feeds enter the live headend, Telestream’s Inspector Live virtual containerized probes watch the input source quality while ensuring the encoder output is error free. Telestream’s Surveyor product continues to watch quality on the HTTP output side as ABR variants flow through the origin servers on their way out to the CDN. And Telestream’s IVSM ASM provides the centralized management dashboard for a correlated service view.

“Working with companies like FirstLight, we are the market leaders when it comes to live event monitoring in cloud-native Kubernetes environments. Without quality monitoring at every stage of of delivery, engineering and operations are effectively blind to any quality issues occurring in a cloud environment,” says Joel Daly, VP Product Management, iQ Solutions at Telestream. “We’re happy that Telestream’s iQ solutions can provide the visibility and confidence needed as part of this Firstlight Media live event solution.”