NATO's 75th anniversary summit is streaming live on its website and YouTube, reaching tens of thousands of viewers through Quortex Play’s targeted, just-in-time cloud services.
NATO's Public Diplomacy Division is live streaming NATO's 75th anniversary summit to tens of thousands of viewers on its website and YouTube. The event is taking place from 9 to 11 July in Washington DC.
NATO has been holding trials of streaming systems, using them at live events ranging from ministerial meetings to the full 14 hours of this year's NATO Youth Summit, to press conferences throughout May and June 2024. High quality, low latency streams were delivered to viewers through multiple channels including YouTube and NATO's website, as well as via secure reliable transport (SRT) protocol to professional broadcasters.
Targeted Streaming
Supporting the streams were Synamedia and its Quortex Play SaaS, with partner DigiNet, a proAV and broadcast supplier and integrator. As these events received positive feedback from NATO communications and operations teams, as well as audiences, Quortex Play is now supporting the NATO 75th anniversary live stream.
Quortex Play is an application of Quortex for targeted streaming using HLS or DASH standards. It is a set of just-in-time services that builds video streams on the fly, using business rules defined by the user and customised for specific groups of viewers.
As a practical example of how Synamedia supports such events, NATO interpreters often translate public events into multiple languages simultaneously. Quortex Play transcodes the audio from those simultaneous interpretations into multiple audio streams, allowing each viewer to choose their preferred language.
Paul Magis, Head of the Communications Technology Centre at NATO, said, "Using Synamedia Quortex Play, we now have a reliable, versatile means of streaming live video through our NATO website and social media channels to audiences worldwide, in their own language."
Pay-as-You-Stream
Other features that impacted NATO's decision to work with Quortex Play include its self-service pay-as-you-stream model and its natural, straightforward web user interface, helpful when preparing a series of streams in advance, launching them in a few seconds. Pay-as-you-stream refers to results, not only to services used. In other words, users are only charged for transcoding when viewers watch the stream.
Quortex Play was developed because moving operations to the cloud can be a challenge and a major expense for an organisation to undertake. Quortex is a cloud-native alternative – built in the cloud from the start – and delivers streams as a service designed for high video quality and low latency. Users do not require cloud expertise but, as well as its simple UI, can use its open, documented API to make operation and automation relatively simple.
Quortex Play workflows – such as encryption and DRM, analysis, per-device encoding and so on – are deployed as close as possible from the stream sources to improve Quality of Experience, video quality and latency. Synamedia has its own worldwide delivery network as well, for more assurance of the user experience.
Real-time Analytics for Optimisation
Quortex Play's analytics give NATO the flexibility to optimise its streams in real-time to match viewer demand. For example, during a recent live stream, analytics revealed that a high number of viewers were watching on a low bit rate in Ukraine. On-the-fly reduction of the resolution made it easier for those viewers to access the NATO streams.
Julien Signes, EVP of Video Network at Synamedia, said, "NATO is a pioneer in live streaming, showing other political and governmental organisations how they can open their events to a wider audience. While many organisations have used YouTube as their only channel to date, NATO sees the value in also publishing live streams on its own website. By using Quortex Play as a service, they can take advantage of the lower costs, reliability and scalability of cloud, and more closely control the viewers' experience."
Bart Delva, Broadcast Division Manager at DigiNet, commented, "As a Synamedia partner we are aware of the great potential to save costs when using Quortex Play's just-in-time processing to stream video. It has been a pleasure working with NATO using Synamedia's services, and we look forward to supporting NATO in future as well as joining audiences around the world watching the live stream of the anniversary event in Washington DC." www.synamedia.com
