Agarik's TV Control Room - pivotal technology for video-to-mobile delivery - ensures the broadcast of 60 channels on SFR's Vodafone live! Portal
Speed, flexibility and reactivity from Agarik are at the heart of SFR success
Paris,
November
21, 2006 -
In November 2004, French operator SFR launched its very first television mobile phones channels. Since February 2005, Agarik has been chosen to provide consulting assistance in the encoding services.
Agarik's role has since increased considerably, to the extent that Agarik is now the only SFR supplier for the TV control room. Agarik manages 132 video streams providing 60 channels broadcast through its Vodafone live! Portal, with access to three major bundles of services: SFR, CANALSAT and TPS.
For Marc Baudy, SFR TV-Video Manager, Agarik's reactivity is a key factor in the success of the project: "Agarik successfully delivered a brand new service when we asked them to set up the first TV channels. Since then, Agarik has also quickly provided additional capacity to support the volume increase created by the current channels. In parallel, expertise and responsiveness provided by Agarik have enabled us to offer our customers innovative new services in very short time frames."
Speed, flexibility and reactivity from Agarik are at the heart of SFR success
Agarik has provided SFR a powerful platform composed of 150 pieces of equipment including servers, a switch and a firewall. This platform ensures a high reactivity and modularity level: a 15-channel bundle can be added in just five days.
Agarik's services for SFR
Real-time encoding
First, Agarik receives and decodes the channels and then, compresses them into a single format for 3G mobile phones.
Download platform availability
Agarik offers SFR's broadcasting partners the ability to download their video content straight from a dedicated platform. Then, with the help of a special interface, users can autonomously select the videos from a channel that can be looped afterwards.
Relay
Some of SFR's partners directly encode and broadcast their video services to mobile phones. As a single entry point for all live transmissions, Agarik concentrates all the video streams.
Value-added Live Services
At SFR's suggestion, Agarik is studying the development of live video broadcasting services (live events) and enabling their deployment. Thus, the channel "En ce moment sur TV Live" (¿Right now on TV Live') shows brief sequences in real-time from the SFR bundle programs.
Stéphane Dujardin, Agarik Project Manager in charge of the SFR TV control room explains how the provided service has evolved: "In March 2005, we welcomed the first seven channels to be broadcasted through the Vodafone live! Portal. Since then, the number of channels has grown exponentially and we now manage almost 20 times more streams! Until the beginning of this year, we were capturing and encoding TV channels broadcast via satellites. Since then, we offer SFR other services such as a dedicated platform for video content downloads and pre-encoded videos relay. At the same time, we have created a specific new channel 'En ce moment sur TV Live', which broadcasts live extracts from the SFR bundle programs."
About Agarik
Established in 1997, Agarik is a recognized player in the hosting and outsourcing services market in France. Since 2001, the company has recorded an average annual growth rate approaching 40%. In 2005, Agarik recorded revenue of €5 million, and this is expected to exceed €6 million this year.
Its portfolio of solutions ranges from renting hosting space to complete outsourcing of on-line services. Agarik's expertise supports over 150 customers - including IT services companies, major groups, small and medium-sized businesses, and public sector bodies - in terms of infrastructure and network management, system supervision, third-party application maintenance, operational and security services. Its customers include SFR, Dassault Systèmes and Canal Plus Active, among many others.
Agarik employs over 40 people. Its technical teams - who account for over 80% of the workforce - are all located within 100m of its main hosting datacenters. They administer the systems within these datacenters (1,300 items of hardware, including 900 servers) and maintain them in full operational order 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The company is committed to the most rigorous operational and restitution guarantees (Service Level Agreements) in the industry.
Agarik has its own dedicated Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) in the Paris area, including 100km of fiber optic cable linking seven datacenters (soon to become eight), including its two production datacenters (Redbus and Neuf Télécom).
Recently, Agarik acquired Soft2You, thus strengthening its expertise as an Application Service Provider for Microsoft technologies.
In July 2006, Agarik became a subsidiary of the Bull Group.
For more information, visit www.agarik.com
|
