Singapore – Encompass Digital Media, one of the world’s top digital media services providers and a leader in global satellite and terrestrial connectivity, announced that its Asia Pacific facility will double its current multichannel broadcast monitoring and playout capacity through the construction of a seven million US dollar MEGAPOD. This is the region’s first comprehensive over-the-top (OTT) services facility enabling Encompass continue to meet the growing demands of customers in Asia Pacific.
“For content owners looking to grow in this dynamic region, leveraging technology to deliver content on multiple screens is a significant competitive advantage,” noted Deepakjit Singh, managing director for Encompass Asia Pacific. “Encompass’ new MEGAPOD will allow content partners to provide entertainment-on-demand across a variety of devices and create new options to monetise content as quickly as possible. With this investment, we’re looking to enable efficiencies that will allow the seamless delivery of content to all four screens – television, desktop, tablet and mobile – reliably and easily in real time.”
In addition to being the first-of-its-kind facility built in Asia, Encompass’ state-of–the-art MEGAPOD will also be the largest, fully automated, multi-layered channel playout and monitoring facility of this scale in the region. The facility will enable Encompass to improve its response time with an automated switch-over feature to back-up content. This new facility will also provide a multi-tiered problem escalation and resolution approach. This means that clients will get a fail-safe, higher quality of service from Encompass.
Plans for the MEGAPOD facility were designed and conceived by the company’s in-house engineering team. The project planning took over 18 months and brought together multiple ‘best-of-breed’ products including infrastructure by Ideal Systems and leading technology from Miranda Technologies and Cisco.
Together with the company’s existing facility, the Encompass MEGAPOD will offer clients a robust infrastructure that will offer increased capacity for playout, distribution, digital media manipulation, ad inserts, creative, technical and global archival services. In addition, the facility will also house a post-production studio giving Encompass’ clients an end-to-end solution for creating and delivering content. To date, more than six Tier 1 broadcasters have indicated plans to take advantage of the efficiencies that the MEGAPOD will generate.
