Kontron to stage scalable cloud HEVC delivery and transcoding with Intel, Vanguard Video and Vantrix

Eching, Germany, September 5, 2013 — Kontron today announced its participation to join Intel at its “TV from Cloud to Home” booth during the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) to demonstrate live video delivery in the cloud with partners Vanguard Video and Vantrix.

As both traditional mobile service providers and cable operators continue to position themselves for growth with HD multiscreen content delivery, the challenges are becoming increasingly complex due to 4K television to the home and Ultra HD/HEVC to the mobile device. At the forefront is their constant battle to meet growing content demand as cost efficiently as possible, as audio and video codecs require high performance and scalability at the lowest CAPEX and OPEX. The most convincing response has been to deploy most supporting functions for media delivery in cloud infrastructure.

The massively scalable distributed processing of the Kontron SYMKLOUD Media modular platform, featuring 3rd gen and 4th gen Intel^® Core™ i7 processors, forms the basis of this cloud option. It is being employed at IBC to simultaneously run live H.265/HEVC encoding from Vanguard Video and exceptionally high density video transcoding from Vantrix. The Intel-based SYMKLOUD platform from Kontron was also provisioned for cloud management using OpenStack.

IBC attendees from the cloud service provider, broadcaster, and content delivery network market will see and learn firsthand:

$1·         The economics of 1080p Real-Time H.265/HEVC encoding on Intel-based standard hardware

$1·         The scalable performance and cost-efficiency of cloud transcoding; up to 144 live transcoded 1080p videos per 2RU using only 750 Watts, or 5.2 Watts per channel

$1·         OpenStack provisioning and virtualization of graphic engine cores for multi-application development such as video transcoding

Benoit Robert, Kontron Executive Director, Product Management, Communications Business Unit said, “The Kontron SYMKLOUD Media platform has pushed the density envelope with 18 4th generation Intel^® Core™ processors, plus integrated switch and load balancer, in one compact 2RU high-21-inch deep footprint. Its timing is perfect just as advances in multiscreen video codec technologies need even more video channel throughput at the lowest power consumption. We are excited to have the cluster-friendly Kontron SYMKLOUD platform support our partners’ H.264/H.265 encoding/transcoding solutions.”

“Intel continues to build a strong media processing roadmap to help our customers achieve their business and technology goals with our products,” said Steve Price, general manager, Intel Communications Infrastructure Division. “The newly released 4th generation Intel® Core™ i7 Quad-Core processor will enable our ecosystem to lead the way with innovative cloud transcoding and H.265/HEVC solutions.”

“To date the intricacies of HEVC have required much more processor power than H.264,” said Irena Terterov, Vanguard Video CEO. “However, the harnessing of 4th generation Intel^® Core™ technology and Kontron system expertise into the scalable SYMKLOUD platform has shown us the tremendous cost versus performance potential to make HEVC in cloud infrastructure very viable. Clients will possess improved cost controls and power efficiencies, even when faced with wildly fluctuating traffic volumes that require on-demand resources.”

“While HEVC is in an early evolution phase, it will quickly become the de facto codec as the Ultra HD era catches on, driven by both the production and consumer side of the business,” said Jean Mayrand, Vantrix CTO. “We are just scratching the surface of what can be accomplished with cloud-based video delivery, media processing, etc. and are working on how to better support providers to provision all of this in today’s cloud infrastructure for the best overall channel performance per watt. We are leading the way with our work with Intel^® and Kontron.”

Visit Kontron, Vanguard Video, and Vantrix at Intel^® Booth 106, in Hall 14, during the IBC event,
RAI Amsterdam, September 13-17, 2013.