Cobalt Integrates with Encompa To Enhance Playout and OTT Services

Cobalt Digital has partnered with Encompass Digital Media, a global technology services company supporting broadcast, cable, and digital leaders, in providing a new service offering - ChannelMark - that interfaces with all major broadcast automation systems to drive automatic, frame-accurate SCTE 104 message insertion. Cobalt Digital's award-winning HPF-9000 frame and frame sync cards with SCTE104-FAST software enable Encompass to implement the entire SCTE 104 specification without requiring customers to modify their upstream traffic and scheduling workflows, which in turn enables a host of downstream features such as automated ad replacement and automated VOD file creation.

Cobalt Digital worked closely with our team to meet all of the technical requirements for frame-accurate SCTE 104 message insertion, as well as for producing encoded outputs with SCTE 35 inside a single 2-RU appliance, says James Heliker, director of media workflow engineering at Encompass. Together, ChannelMark and the Cobalt gear allow our customers to leverage linear content for VOD and OTT in ways that were previously not possible.

Specializing in full-time network origination/playout and live ad-hoc transmission services, Encompass is a global gateway for moving media throughout EMEA, Latin America, the Pacific Rim, and the U.S. The ChannelMark media enrichment service is offered as part of the company's comprehensive channel-playout services.

The Cobalt Digital SCTE104-FAST software incorporated into ChannelMark provides the unique ability to tie real-time events from broadcast automation to specific frames of video in the baseband SDI. In the preparation of linear content for VOD platforms, this capability eliminates the need to capture and manually edit out extra head and tail content surrounding programming, a process that delays delivery of content into the VOD chain for viewing. It also expedites the process of viewership credit by automatically encoding a program with original advertising in place as aired, for C3 commercial ratings provided by The Nielsen Company. Taking advantage of SCTE104-FAST, the Encompass ChannelMark service can automatically mark the beginning and end of every segment in real time, and downstream systems can extract the perfectly marked segments for dissemination to CDN, VOD, and OTT platforms.

Ensuring precise insertion of pertinent data, our SCTE104-FAST frame-accurate SCTE trigger greatly enhances the performance and accuracy of VOD and server-based commercial-replacement systems, says Bob McAlpine, CEO of Cobalt Digital. We've been developing and refining this solution over the past year, and we're excited to see it being implemented by an industry leader such as Encompass to give its customers a competitive edge.

James Heliker will present a live demo of the Encompass ChannelMark solution at the Cobalt Digital 2017 NAB Show booth, N3308.

LINK:	http://www.sportsvideo.org/2017/04/18/cobalt-integrates-with-encompass...
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