Elemental lands transcoding deal for Comcast's Xfinity TVE play

Video transcoder Elemental Technologies today announced it will be the power plant behind Comcast's (NASDAQ:CMCSA) Xfinity multi-screen strategy, transcoding and processing all of the video for the MSO's TV Everywhere play.

The privately held company will handle the huge volume of video data processed to deliver content to multiple devices, including connected TVs and Apple iOS devices, like the iPad and iPhone, and more.

"We are thrilled with this win," Elemental CEO Sam Blackman told FierceIPTV. "It was a collaborative effort with thePlatform folks and is paying off in a big win at Comcast HQ Philadelphia. It's enormously important for us... having the No. 1 service provider in the world select your technology is a vote of confidence that's unique."

The integration combines the Elemental Server file-based video transcoding solution with thePlatform's mpx video management system for multi-screen video delivery. It allows Comcast to reduce its server farm's physical footprint by 70 percent, cuts the number of server racks and trims power consumption and cooling needs.

"The video processing industry has been dominated by a couple of large companies for a long time," said Blackman. "Comcast and other MSOs and media companies want new technology from young, agile companies. This is a great opportunity to have validation that we can compete with anyone in the world."

Blackman said Comcast currently is putting out 10,000 hours of programming a month on Xfinity and requires 18 adaptive bitrate multi-screen outputs for each piece of content. That's a number, he said, that will increase as Xfinity continues to expand.

"One of the keys for Comcast is that Elemental is very scalable," he said. "Xfinity will continue increasing demand for programming, and Elemental lets them scale with that demand."

The Comcast deployment is the first of many coming from the integrated video management system, Blackman said.

In June, Elemental was tapped by digital media services company Avail-TVN to handle the video processing for its TV Everywhere roll out, AnyView.

That fully-managed, multi-screen video service enables service providers to extend the traditional VOD and linear television experience to PCs, Macs, tablets and smart phones. International trials of AnyView currently are underway in several Caribbean markets and will move to commercial deployments in the third quarter of 2011.

For more:
- see this release

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