LTN Leaf: Disney ABC Television Group

ABC wanted to provide the highest-quality, lowest-latency, mezzanine contribution feeds of its entire affiliate footprint into centralized processing points and “meet me rooms” for the numerous OTT platforms that were carrying the live channels.

Dubbed the “virtual transponder” by DATG, LTN’s flexible IP transport network and high-quality LEAF Encoder provided the perfect solution.

The LTN LEAF combines low latency, MPEG 4 encoding with up to 16 audio channels, closed caption, advanced audio handling features, and SCTE pass-through with patented access technology to LTN’s high performance MPEG transport stream multicast network.

LTN’s fully managed network carries each ABC station at 20 mbits and under 300 milliseconds of latency end to end. This enables DATG to have the highest quality origination feed to centrally process each channel before handoff to various OTT platforms such as Hulu.

LTN gives DATG the ability to start with broadcast quality MPEG transport versus legacy systems that transcoded the content locally to file based streams such as HLS. This enables the aggregation of all affiliates at the highest quality possible and provides additional services such as program replacement, centrally, downstream, ahead of the OTT Platforms.

LTN began the process of activating the ABC affiliates in mid-September. To date, over 170 stations are being managed by LTN’s lossless, high-quality delivery network and 24/7 operations center.

With over 200 stations having varying bandwidth and multiple Internet service providers, a wide range of audio configurations and digital program markers, the LTN team really stepped up to the challenge and met every milestone DATG set."

— Chris Meyers, EVP, Business Development, LTN