Bulk Media Distribution: Hotels & Large Commercial Businesses

PayTV operators are looking to commercial markets for growth opportunities and to offset persistent declines in residential subscriptions due to cord cutting and other competitive factors. Through the bulk delivery of video and related services to MDUs, healthcare facilities and hospitality venues, such as hotels, sports arenas and other large businesses, PayTV operators can reach a largely untapped and potentially lucrative commercial market.

But video service providers must overcome a host of obstacles to make their commercial media delivery offerings profitable. For starters, supporting bulk media distribution solutions in the past often required deploying solutions composed of multiple racks of equipment, a considerable capital expense, as well as expensive in terms of power consumption and other operational concerns. In addition, these often-multivendor solutions were overly complex and unreliable, resulting in frequent service disruptions and the dispatching of technicians to resolve issues at the customers’ location.

Additional challenges include increased security requirements by content owners, who insist that all high-resolution content be encrypted to prevent piracy and other forms of theft. Another significant deterrent to service providers looking to tap into commercial markets is the high cost of delivering a quality experience that rivals what a guest would get at home, and one that could be used by a hotel or other hospitality business as a competitive differentiator.

ATX Networks is helping video service providers break through these market barriers with media gateways that rewrite the rules of engagement in the commercial space by consolidating the functionality of multirack systems into single-box, highly efficient solutions that consume only a few inches of rack space, leading to power consumption savings as high as 90 percent over existing solutions and offering support for all major video and security formats.

ATX’s Visium MD16 and MD8 Multimedia Gateways are powering the commercial bulk delivery operations of some of the largest PayTV companies in the world, enabling hotels and other venues with dozens or even hundreds of televisions to better compete for guest bookings by delivering an in-home experience that rivals residential services. The flexible Visium MD16 and MD8 support a market-leading variety of input and output formats. ATX’s UCrypt family of media distribution gateways, which support an industry-leading number of ingest and output formats, function as transition platforms primarily for cable operators by enabling the delivery of video services to MDU environments without the need for set-top boxes (STBs) at each end point and regardless of the preferred output format.