Cellcom taps Synamedia to enable World Cup low latency streaming

Video software provider Synamedia has announced that one of the largest Israeli telcos, Cellcom, turned to Synamedia Vivid Workflow as a Service (WaaS) low latency streaming to enhance its FIFA World Cup viewing experience.

With deployment in just three weeks, Cellcom was able to stream matches in full HD with broadcast-equivalent latency on its Cellcom TV streaming service running on Android TV set-top boxes using LL-DASH.

Using Vivid WaaS, Cellcom reduced the previous latency of up to 30 seconds to under three seconds from ingest to playout. This low latency would allow Cellcom TV subscribers to see all the action live ahead of any spoiler push notifications or updates in chats on their mobiles.

At the start of the tournament when there were four matches a day, Synamedia Vivid WaaS supported streaming video on AWS each day for up to 100,000 concurrent Cellcom TV households. The Synamedia solution included support for ABR transcoding, packaging, origination, content delivery using Amazon CloudFront CDN, and redundancy.

According to Gil Hershberg, CTO at Cellcom, “Against the run of play, Synamedia truly turned the game around for us, delivering a customized solution with unprecedented speed. Just like the remarkable football matches we have seen, the Synamedia team displayed great agility and overcame any obstacles we threw at them, even enhancing the video quality to meet our specific requirements.”

Elke Hungenaert, VP of Product Management at Synamedia, commented, “Recognising that football fans in Israel have a choice of satellite and streaming options, Cellcom’s goal was to deliver broadcast-equivalent latency streaming in time for the World Cup in November 22. Live sports streaming is one of the industry’s toughest challenges but Vivid’s flexibility, scalability and efficiency all came into play to create a proof of concept in a matter of days. We then fine-tuned the encoder to optimise image quality and partnered with AWS to ensure a robust, scalable solution to meet Cellcom’s needs and deliver for the fans.”