Delivery Complications

Inspired Technologies is an all-inclusive technology solutions provider based in Florida, USA. As part of their service offering, the Inspired team helps manage broadband networks for their clients and are brought in for many Fiber to the Home (FTTH) deployments.

Inspired recently worked with a client based in Tallahassee who were planning a new over-the-top (OTT) IPTV service, which included 17 broadcast programs from OTA sources. The client provides video services to their subscribers and as part of this new IPTV service, needed to not only pull down the off-air channels, but also transcode the streams for delivery.

When Nick Routa, Managing Partner at Inspired Technologies, looked at the requirements, he knew that a fair amount of transcoding was required. Initially, for all the off-air channels, Nick and his team looked at a separate tuner for 8VSB de-modulation and then feeding the MPEG-2 streams to a server farm of software transcoders to transcode to MPEG-4 AVC for delivery. With this approach, the server count was significant and the administration of different units with different operating systems was potentially complex.

“Since our team was configuring all the products, I was worried about the user management,” said Nick. “We weren’t interested in that kind of overhead.”

Inca Simplifies the Workflow

Nick decided it was worth looking around for other options and started researching online. He came across a few other solutions for 8VSB reception and transcoding but these all fell short in some way – some were lacking in features, and others had outdated management tools. Then Nick came across the Inca website and found exactly what he was looking for when reading about the 4400 Modular Series with 8VSB Receiver Modules.

A simple calculation revealed that one Inca box could receive and transcode all 17 services comprised of 7x HD and 10x SD programs. Nick liked that 8VSB reception, de-mux and transcoding were all handled in a single 1RU unit. Additionally, the user interface had a modern look and the product included a complete and professional feature set. Nick felt this could be the perfect fit for the client.

“It was the best offering out there,” said Nick. “The other solutions we looked at didn’t seem as polished.”

Rapid Deployment Within 45 Minutes

Nick said he evaluated the 4400 Modular Series with 8VSB Receiver Modules in the Inspired Tech lab before deploying it at the customer site. “We had it in our facility for three to four days first and it worked flawlessly the entire time I had it.”

He added that setting up the product was easy thanks to Inca’s award-winning user interface VidiOSTM for configuration, management and stream monitoring. “It was very straight-forward to configure. I sat down one afternoon and got it running within 45 minutes. Everything was very intuitive, and I didn’t have to reference much documentation which was great.”

The 4400 unit has continued to work like a dream since deploying at the customer site.

“It’s been fire and forget which has been great,” explained Nick. “The only issues we’ve seen have been reception-based. There hasn’t been anything wrong with the product at all. It’s been running flawlessly.”

Inspired Technologies’ client is very happy with Inca’s 4400 and has reported that the service has been performing well. In fact, the client is already looking to add more transcoding and is keen to come back to Inca.

“We look forward to working with Inca on that project as well,” said Nick, adding, “I would definitely recommend Inca. You guys are great to work with and it’s a great product.”