A vision for the future of television

Many years ago, we saw the potential for an IP network that could revolutionize the television industry — if it could overcome the internet’s architectural limitations to deliver extremely low delay and broadcast-level reliability for live video, audio, and data flows.

This new network would bridge TV’s analog past to a future of more affordable production, richer content, precise ad targeting, and scalable distribution — especially to the exploding digital platform market.

The network we envisioned would become the backbone for industry-wide innovation.

Now, driven by the breathtaking disruption in media over the past few years, this revolution is quickly coming of age.

We believe we’re in the first moments of a new golden age of innovation and creation. Where we go from here is up to the imaginations — and bold decisions — of media leaders.

It took years for media companies to embrace managed IP transport as a reliable option, but they now use it to distribute even the highest-value live channels and events. But to make the most of new opportunities, LTN® customers now look to us to provide technologies and services that help them manage a broader array of requirements in the anything-is-possible digital world.

In the past two years, we’ve acquired best-in-breed technologies and service providers that leverage our IP network and support our customers’ creativity. These include tools and services to:

• Easily ingest and manage a large volume of live feeds for curation and delivery
• Enrich these live feeds with workflows like graphics, data integration, metadata signaling, closed captioning, and a host of other services in real-time
• Distribute content globally to multiple platforms under the control of our customers’ business policies and rules
• Support dynamic and targeted advertising across all platforms in an ecosystem that grows more complex by the second
• Create, enrich, and distribute FAST channels easily and cost-effectively to any platform
• Create more content with a comprehensive range of remote production services and support

But what happens next is where the true possibility unfolds.

What’s next for LTN

Over the last 14 years, some of the largest media companies have trusted our cutting-edge technologies to help them experiment more, evolve business models faster, and scale content strategies.

But taming the chaos of rapidly multiplying content feeds demands technology unification and automation. Our end-to-end portfolio of technologies is increasingly being used by customers as an integrated omniplatform solution.

In August, we reorganized our company to help media customers across the chain seize the opportunities — and manage the challenges — of a new era in TV and technology.

When media companies start to shed the constraints of expensive technology, manual tasks, and disjointed workflows, there are no limits on how they can scale their content strategies.

This evolution serves our long-term vision of creating tightly integrated services that allow broadcasters, station groups, and other media companies to build and evolve a digital platform delivery infrastructure to move faster and lighter. By developing our technology solutions under a common integrated architecture, our goal is to smooth any friction between our own products for an absolutely seamless experience, to support new standards and protocols, to innovate without sacrificing compatibility, and to connect seamlessly with the myriad workflows and technologies customers already use.

We’re aiming to serve as a unified platform that helps media iterate and progress faster with less risk. (Not to mention, fewer headaches).

To do this, LTN is investing in innovating and integrating workflows and services that enable media organizations to accelerate and scale content monetization through subscription, advertising, and gaming revenue streams. Our technology and operational infrastructure investments include:

• Content aggregation, enrichment, and customization to enable multiplatform distribution
• Frame-accurate metadata integration with video flows to control the monetization of advertising inventory
• Interactive data and video integration for gaming platforms
• Remote production of high-value live events with low-latency, frame-synced live camera feeds from each event venue
• Feed ingest, using any last-mile transport technology, into the LTN backbone network for reliable wide-scale distribution
• One common user interface and user experience to configure, monitor, and report on any LTN workflow or technology, extensible to any third-party or customer workflow and technology

Media companies using integrated workflows to seize opportunity

Some forward-looking companies have started to adopt this omniplatform approach:

Getting more out of regional content in a FAST channel

A leading broadcast network and its owned stations are adding FAST channels with station-only content and monetized via inserted dynamic ads. The group uses the LTN Ecosystem to mark ad breaks, integrate prerecorded and live news video segments through automated workflows, and then distribute the regionalized channels to FAST and other digital platforms.

Extending live content distribution

A top-tier sports league is expanding content distribution to niche markets across Latin America and Europe. Managing live content for various takers — with different languages (or without an announcer track so they can apply their own), different business rules, and different platform requirements is very challenging for live content. Doing this the traditional way — with on-site hardware and technical support staff managing the feeds at every site — wasn’t economically viable. Instead, the league uses an automated workflow via our cloud-based video routing platform to condition live feeds for different takers, without adding hardware or staff.

Testing strategies with pop-up channels

A major media company is creating pop-up YouTube channels with existing assets and some new live content to test new ideas and channel formats with little investment. They’re using our cloud-based playout automation service to pull assets directly from VOD storage and link them to YouTube — and adding ad triggering and markup in the same automated workflow to easily monetize these channels.

When media companies start to shed the constraints of expensive technology, manual tasks, and disjointed workflows, there are no limits on how they can scale their content strategies.

We believe we’re in the first moments of a new golden age of innovation and creation. Where we go from here is up to the imaginations — and bold decisions — of media leaders.