A project by Freecaster, a BCE subsidiary.

Reaching a worldwide audience is nowadays possible thanks to live streaming. The proliferation of connected devices is an opportunity for rights holders to delight fans all around the world, live and on-demand.

Going OTT is another step towards a business environment where more and more content creators get into a direct relationship with content consumers. It shortcuts the distribution and aggregation platforms.

“Since video combines the emotional impact of story with the efficacy of digital advertising, it is a perfect way for businesses to authentically engage with today’s consumers” Oren Boiman, CEO of Magisto
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Selecting the appropriate partner is essential to succeed in this transition. The service shall be resilient and user-centric. It shall be as well evolutive, in such that new features and capabilities can be added over time.

Background

In 2008, YouthStream, the motocross World Championship producer, wanted to extend its reach  beyond traditional broadcast by live streaming the various MXGP and MX2 races. Since then, the service has been developed in a true partnership, offering an ever evolving experience to fans around the world.

Challenge

Although disruption usually takes longer than expected, one should rather start early than fight for catching-up. The motocross World Championship has been distributed worldwide for decades. With the advent of internet distribution, YouthStream desired to develop a privileged relationship with fans around the world, by offering live and on-demand streaming.

By then, streaming technology was pretty immature, and it was of paramount importance to work along a trusted partner that had some experience in the emerging industry.

It was essential to control costs while ensuring service quality and evolution.

In addition the service had to be built upon pay-per-view (or subscription) model, generating new revenue stream for YouthStream.

“Back in 2008, it was pretty a pretty bold move to move our content on the internet. Remember that by then the technologies at hand were pretty immature, could it be from a platform perspective or from the user terminals (not really talking about devices as the iPhone was in the stores for less than one year). It was essential for us to partner with a firm having both experience and capability to grow the service with flexibility and agility. Over the years (10 already), Freecaster has proven to be the right choice. We actually work with them in a true partnership rather than a sour client-customer relationship.” Charlotte Menard, Director TV Department, MXGP.
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Solution

Freecaster (BCE’s partner) was by then already active in extreme sports, having brought a.o. mountain biking and BMX live to the internet.

Beyond the references, Freecaster state-of-mind, showing flexibility, agility and efficiency was essential in selecting the appropriate partner.

Online video continuously develops: encoding and distribution technologies evolve with the evolution towards more quality and efficiency; consumer devices increase in variety and performance. In its offering, Freecaster handle this evolution throughout all stages: transcoding, video player, payment management and website.

Evolution

Over the past ten years, the service has been significantly evolving. MXGP-TV is now benefiting from Freecaster partnerships with major CDN’s ensuring a smooth delivery worldwide, from integration with ad-servers, from a modern statistics module and more recently on anti-piracy service.

The solution relies on Freecaster’s OTT platform. It leverages:

• Efficiency of the Freecaster servicing capabilities;
• Flexibility, speed and robustness of the Freecaster OTT platform delivering live web-streaming services;
• Openness of Freecaster’s media player for enhanced digital experience of the solution end-users.

“You’re never set with online video: the technology keeps on evolving. Our service has to lead the pack across all dimensions: platform robustness and capabilities, video quality, customer experience etc… The Freecaster team always strives to find solutions to our issues: developments are done swiftly when required, integration with third party services are completed when more convenient. Being pragmatic is essential to succeed. And when this pragmatism is based on trust, we have a winning team.” Charlotte Menard, Director TV Department, MXGP.
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