Public service broadcaster, RTÉ can stream over 2.5 million video streams and more per month as part of its RTÉ Player service, thanks to a recent communications project by Complete Telecom. Following a network design and deployment of two x 10 Gigabit Metro Ethernet telecoms links, the communications infrastructure meets the demand for over 177 per cent growth year on year in RTÉ Player Traffic, with plenty of scope for more.

Launched in April 2009, RTÉ player is a free online catch-up and live TV streaming service, which lets world-wide broadband users watch a variety of programmes for up to 21 days after they are broadcast on RTÉ One and RTÉ Two Television.  Content available includes all RTÉ News and Current Affairs programming, flagship entertainment programming, documentaries and a range of arts and music programming.

Changing online audience behavior

Media consumption habits have radically changed over the past number of years, with a huge volume of programming now online.  RTÉ recognised this change at an early stage and launched RTÉ Player to meet requirements for a variety of programming, on demand.  “Consumers have fundamentally changed the way in which they interact with RTÉ online,” explains Jonathan Lundberg, infrastructure manager with RTÉ.    “Complete Telecom supports the transition of our viewers to more video on demand with the upgrade to 10 Gigabit metro fibre services.  With extra speed and bandwidth, we can deliver a wide variety of online programming with higher quality video streams and easily support the huge growth in RTÉ Player traffic in a cost-effective way.”

Assessing Return on Investment
In view of RTÉ Player’s exponential growth, IT staff had a decision to make in terms of how to deliver the service into the future.  Prior to this upgrade, RTÉ Player was hosted offsite and delivered via 1 x Gigabit links, also provided by Complete Telecom.

Complete Telecom were particularly strong in the areas of network architecture, quality of service level and technical support.  We’re confident that the quality, speed and bandwidth of their telecoms services will help us to extend RTÉ Player to other platforms in the future. – Jonathan Lundberg, infrastructure manager, RTÉ

IT staff at RTÉ performed a full Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis on how much it would cost to deliver RTÉ Player by continuing to outsource or by taking the service back in house to one of its own datacentres and upgrading the telecoms links.

“In looking at the business case, we identified potential cost savings of around 87 per cent over five years in comparison to staying with our existing setup,” explains Lundberg.  “The decision to upgrade our telecoms links and move the service in house is supported by the fact that we have exceeded our 2 Gigabit limit on every day since the upgrade and have avoided the need to hand off traffic to third parties incurring additional costs.”

Redundancy and Performance
With a worldwide audience, round the clock service uptime was a critical requirement for RTÉ.  “The upgrade also offered RTÉ an opportunity to build in greater resiliency for the service by taking two individual telecoms links, with the added bonus of the incredibly low latency on the Complete Telecom fibre network,” explains Ray Hill, director at Complete Telecom,   “If one link goes down, online traffic is seamlessly routed to the other avoiding network downtime and guaranteeing round the clock video streaming service for RTÉ’s worldwide audience,” he adds.

RTÉ Player has proved to be an extremely successful project for the RTE publishing team and the public service broadcaster is looking at new ways to extend the service and bring its programming to an even wider audience.  Complete Telecom has played an integral part in delivering this quality service as Lundberg explains.  “Complete Telecom were particularly strong in the areas of network architecture, quality of service level and technical support.  We’re confident that the quality, speed and bandwidth of their telecoms services will help us to extend RTÉ Player to other platforms in the future.”

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