Cgates goes live with Synamedia to future-proof OTT growth
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Joseph O'Halloran
| 18 January 2022
Aiming to support live and time-shifted viewing on set-top boxes and OTT platforms, leading Lithuanian telco Cgates has gone live with Synamedia video network solutions across the entire data plane of its pay-TV services.
CGATES TV synamedia 18Jan2022
The deployment is designed to ensure that Cgates has the flexibility and scalability to meet its future growth plans while optimising the delivery of high-quality video streaming across all platforms and is primed for the next stage of its growth.

Synamedia claims that by using its video network technologies for its entire delivery ecosystem, Cgates can give subscribers an immersive and consistent high quality viewing experience across its TV mobile app and its pay-TV service including its new Android set-top boxes.

During the first part of the engagement, Cgates went live with Synamedia virtualised DCM to support the encoding of its 200 cable channels, in HD and 4K. Cgates chose the DCM because it maximises picture quality while minimising hardware requirements through VIVID Compression. By optimising bandwidth and latency with content-aware encoding, Cgates is said to be able to offer a superior viewing experience to subscribers, even at peak times.

Complementing the virtualised DCM, is Synamedia’s adaptive bit rate (ABR) headend, including packaging and storage for VOD and catch-up, as well as Synamedia’s private CDN supporting both HLS and MPEG-DASH.

An important factor in Cgates’ deployment decisions was the cloud-native architecture of both the virtualised DCM and the ABR headend so that it could have the flexibility to deploy on-premise then move to a hybrid or cloud models as required. Both also share the same interface that simplifies configuration and uses Synamedia Video Services Manager (VSM) to provision and manage cloud resources.

Commenting on particular items that the deployment has delivered, Cgates CTO Marius Dabrisius said: “We we wanted a special feature for when time-shifted content is presented to the player. None of the [other] vendors we were talking to had this feature…Synamedia’s engineering team developed the feature for us in less than a week.” Cgates is now working with Synamedia on future enhancements including low latency for live sports streaming, and disaster recovery.