Customer profile
RT (formerly known as as "Russia Today") is a Russian publicly-funded television news network, which runs cable and satellite television channels, as well as Internet content directed to audiences outside of the Russian Federation. It is available to 700 million viewers worldwide.
RT International, based in Moscow, presents around-the-clock bulletins of world news, documentaries, interviews, talk shows, and debates. RT operates as a multilingual service with news channels in three languages: the original English-language channel was launched in 2005, followed by the Arabic-language channel in 2007 and the Spanish-language channel in 2009. RT America (since 2010) airing from Washington, DC, and RT UK (since 2014), based in London, offer some locally-focused content for those countries. RT family also includes RUPTLY – a Berlin-based, full-service video agency that delivers original news footage from all the global hotspots.
RT is the winner of the Monte Carlo TV Festival Awards for best 24-hr broadcast, and the only Russian TV channel to garner three nominations for the prestigious International Emmy Award for News. RT’s programs and documentaries have been repeatedly recognized by the New York Festivals and PROMAX BDA awards, among many others.
RT is the #1 TV news network on YouTube, with more than 2.5 billion views and nearly 3 million subscribers. Described by YouTube as ‘astonishing’ and ‘one of the (if not the biggest) news provider on YouTube worldwide.’ RT’s YouTube platform is the core element of the network’s emphasis on multi-media news-delivery.
Business Challenge
RT’s signal is carried by hundreds of operators, which allows some 700 million people to watch the channel in more than 100 countries. In addition to traditional Satellite, Cable, Terrestrial and IPTV delivery, OTT becomes a vital part of RT’s reach with millions of people around the world accessing RT’s content online, via YouTube, the RT.COM website and iOS/Android/WP applications.
This variety of distribution and worldwide coverage requires a very special way of auditing the delivery quality and issues isolation. News channels subscribers are showing zero tolerance to any perceivable impairments or degradation as they have proven to quickly switch to different media. A main challenge was keeping OTT streaming smooth and reliable as that is directly associated with Company’s brand reputation. Problems happen across a very complex delivery path (from Studio to Encoding Farm, CDN, ISP and last mile) but the accountability has been placed on the content provider and not the delivery platform and associated vendors.
RT needed a real-time tool to monitor their distribution quality worldwide 24/7, rapidly detect issues, isolate the root cause and immediately contact CDN partners, operators and other service providers to fix any issue detected.
In addition to OPEX-driven nature of the solution purchase, RT also required solution provider to support launching new and relocating existing OTT-monitoring probes to their new specified country/city across the globe within 72 hours after the request.
Technology Solution
The turnkey solution was provided by Tecom Group, Inc. – an authorized partner of Q’ligent, Inc. in Russia, CIS, Eastern Europe and Turkey. It is based on a cloud version of the Qligent™ Vision. Both aggregation server and OTT monitoring probes are running in a pure virtual cloud environment, monitoring quality of service and quality of experience for OTT and Internet TV, compliance recording and on-line streaming, rule-based alarming, and instant notifications (GUI, SMS and e-mail).
As OTT/Internet TV does not require a physical connection to the signal – the monitoring probe software runs in a virtual cloud while Tecom Group’s staff managing the location of the virtual node instance to get access to the public internet via the datacenter located in the country/region/city of customer interest.
With a cloud-monitoring approach applied, distribution of Vision probes were able to be rapidly reallocated to the point where problems were reported without any costs associated with traditional hardware movement from country to country.
Business Value
With Qligent™ Vision in place, the reaction time of any fault was decreased from hours and days to minutes, resulting in better service provided to the end customers. The amount of outages dramatically decreased and overall worldwide service quality improved.
Deploying a fully automated Qligent™ Vision monitoring system resulted in significant improvements in contracted service compliance (SLA) by operators and CDN/distribution service providers. Also by having the evidence gathered, it provided RT the instruments to charge penalties and avoid paying for any incompliant services keeping in line with their content distribution budget.
RT is broadcasting worldwide and must follow regulations applied in every country of operation. Compliance verification solutions from Qligent addresses the verification of loudness, CC/Subtitles and other broadcasting regulations on a country/territory basis, immediately notifying about any issues detected to protect RT from any penalties or license suspensions due to regulatory compliance.