CASE STUDY

Lumen leverages Net Insight Nimbra Edge to provide SRT & RIST-based video transport solution

Multi-point video transport has become table stakes when it comes to delivering live sports, news, and entertainment. As workflows become increasingly distributed, the ability to deliver reliable, high-quality video to different environments and over different types of networks has never been more important.

Lumen has worked for three decades to make video transport as efficient as possible. Our award-inning Vyvx® fiber network and teleport services bring video feeds reliably into clouds, on premise locations and directly to consumer devices from locations around the world.

As the media ecosystem begins to rely more heavily on less reliable networks, however, Lumen set out to complete its offering. Lumen® Vyvx® Internet Transport is designed to deliver secure, low latency video over the public Internet. It supports the SRT protocol, but also RIST, Zixi and others to carry video over lossy networks reliably and securely.

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Why Lumen?

From content acquisition to encoding, distribution and security, Lumen’s endto-end solutions for media companies can help you deliver secure and lightning-fast experiences to your audiences, all from a single provider. Benefiting from more than 30 years of experience building technology for some of the largest global enterprises, Lumen today serves nine of the world’s ten largest media companies.

Lumen Vyvx® Internet Transport key features

• Packet loss recovery through advanced low latency retransmission protocols including SRT, RIST, etc.
• End-to-end security with AES 128/256-bit encryption
• Video and audio feed timing recovery
• Network health monitoring between endpoints (packet loss, latency, jitter)
• Simplified firewall traversal

Why Net Insight Nimbra?

When building its public internet transport solution, Lumen decided to call upon an industry specialist in high-capacity multi-point video distribution.

With 20 years of experience in crafting contribution platforms, Net Insight was a natural choice for Lumen. Lumen leveraged the company’s Nimbra Edge offering, a live media transport platform that works seamlessly through different IP networks and across transport protocols. Some of the main reasons for this choice were:

An elastic, open platform

Net Insight’s Nimbra Edge is designed to be deployed in any public, private or hybrid cloud environments, which means that it could transition seamlessly between the Vyvx® fiber network to the public Internet use cases. Its microservices architecture scales naturally to customer needs, an important feature for large media companies handling hundreds of live channels.

Support for a wide variety of use cases

Net Insight’s offering is natively adapted for the various contribution, production, and distribution use cases that Lumen customers require. Its ability to both ingress and egress video content was an advantage over more limited options on the market.

Powerful monitoring and management interface

Net Insight’s central console offered a comprehensive view of the video nodes and devices, helping streamline workflows and more easily monitor and manage complex use cases. Advanced monitoring metrics throughout the entire chain and a responsive alarm system helps substantially reduce operational burden for both Lumen and our customers.

Flexible business models

Net Insight’s flexibility in pricing and a pay-asyou-grow model allowed us to get up and running quickly and scale the partnership organically as demand for our SRT solution increases.

“Net Insight has been a pleasure to partner with from day one. The team is extremely knowledgeable about media transport solutions and has been supportive and responsive when it comes to complex customer demands.” – David Robison, Principal Architect at Lumen

First use cases

Vyvx® Internet Transport built on Net Insight’s Nimbra Edge can serve a variety of use cases transporting live linear content from stadiums, studios, and production sites; from or between clouds and on-premise locations; and even directly to user devices.

One of the first customer applications involved a content provider transporting sports feeds to a streaming platform. Vyvx® Internet Transport delivered nearly 100 channels into the affiliate’s encoding platform for processing and distribution over the top. Lumen and Net Insight’s joint ability to ingest channels at scale was a winning combination for this content provider, allowing them to effectively deliver programming into a third party’s public cloud instance securely and reliably.

This use case could soon be extended to include backup services and service scheduling for additional content and channels.

Conclusion

With a combined 50 years of experience in the world of media transport, Lumen and Net Insight have created a powerful offering that responds to new needs in the media industry. By releasing an SRT solution alongside its purpose-built managed Vyvx® fiber and teleport solutions, Lumen has shown its commitment to bringing best of breed solutions for a wide array of media use cases.

For streamlined solutions across the media workflow, Vyvx® Internet Transport can be bundled with other Lumen Vyvx® products including MVNS, Broadcast Fiber Teleport & Satellite Services, VenueNet, CDN, Linear Channel Distribution, and Cloud Connect Services.

For more information about Vyvx® Internet Transport, read Lumen’s data sheet. For more information about Nimbra Edge, read our data sheet.

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