An enthusiastic SRT supporter from the outset, Eurovision Services was an early adopter of the protocol when it was open sourced and an active member of the SRT Alliance when it was formed in 2017. Earlier this year, Eurovision Services also announced it had officially achieved “SRT Ready” status with the integration of the protocol into its own solutions.
Recently, Eurovision’s Head of Global Operations & Engineering, Amine Hafnaoui, participated as a guest speaker in a Haivision, Microsoft, and SRT Alliance sponsored SRT Tuesday Webinar, where he shared more about the significant role SRT plays in its operations.
A Global Leader in Live Events Broadcasting
First, a quick primer on Eurovision Services. For those that don’t know, Eurovision Services is the market leader of live events broadcasting and is an European Broadcast Union company – the world’s leading alliance of public service media. With a global presence and delivering over 1000 events each year, Eurovision Services hosts and produces events, contributes and distributes content via its content hub, provides customized services to its broadcast customers and offers digital services such as streaming and OTT platforms.
An Extensive Global Network Supported by SRT
In order to meet the massive customer demand Eurovision Services relies on its private network comprised of three essential building blocks; satellite, a fiber network, and Points of Presence (PoP) with over 200 nodes. These PoPs allow Eurovision to connect to other broadcasters’ networks and to get as close as possible to the live event venues. To increase its global reach and strengthen its footprint, leveraging the SRT protocol and supporting its widespread adoption by joining the SRT Alliance was of critical importance to ensure secure reliable delivery of live content over the public internet.
Delivering Live Content Using SRT
Amine gives a high-level overview of three separate use cases where Eurovision relies on the SRT protocol to deliver live content using encoders, decoders, and SRT Gateways, demonstrating the wide range of possibilities that SRT can support. During the COVID 19 pandemic as live sports are slowly but surely returning to screens and Amine notes that demand for remote production services is higher than ever in order to comply with health and safety requirements and local restrictions. However, due to budget limitations in the media industry, Eurovision Services is seeing a shift from a satellite to an internet-based contribution model and that’s where the SRT protocol is perfectly positioned.