Background: Deutsche Welle (DW) is Germany’s visiting card in the world. It produces radio and television programmes that are not only broadcast in Germany but worldwide – in German and in many other languages.
The task: Several radio and television programmes of the German international radio broadcasting service are to be transmitted worldwide for various end devices. Deutsche Welle also wants to deliver vodcasts and podcasts, as well as on-demand streams across the globe. For legal reasons, some content may not be transmitted at specific times in selected regions.
Our solution: We realise the radio and television programme reception redundantly using various satellites. To ensure higher fail safety and user information in case of a possible failure, the signals are routed redundantly via two cross bars. Deutsche Welle can, for instance, perform switching operations as well as switch to alternative signals using a web interface. In addition, StreamingTimer, our in-house development, automatically monitors whether signals are still present or whether a receiver may be down. In this case, the system automatically requests the backup receiver signal via the connected cross bars. The signals are transcoded in Windows Media, Real, MP3, and 3GPP. We use the CDN of Akamai and Limelight, as well as our own servers to broadcast the streams and downloads worldwide. This allows video streams to be blocked at specific times using a time/country matrix during delivery in selected countries.
In addition, we also individually process usage data for a detailed network-wide log file analysis.
Overview of our services:
• Redundant programme reception and encoding,
• Delivery via Akamai, Limelight, and our own servers
• StreamingTimer, our in-house development: controllable redundant cross bars with web interface and signal monitoring,
• Individual log file analysis.