Synamedia and THEO Technologies highlight HESP use cases and open up for proof of concepts with the first HESP solutions.

Last week's webinar about the HESP Alliance and HESP use cases highlighted opportunities for operators and virtual event organizers to achieve a superior viewer experience and cost savings through HESP.

For operators, HESP's fast zapping capabilities enable convergence of their parallel broadcast and OTT workflows into a unified OTT workflow. Moreover, cost efficient ultra-low latency scaling to 1000’s or 1.000.000’s will also highly benefit operators, to avoid spoiler effects from social media or neighbors. The latter is also a key benefit for interactive events, such as online auctions, virtual sports classes, virtual business conferences and online betting. Very often WebRTC is used for these interactive events, to bring ultra-low latency. However, WebRTC is very expensive to scale to 1000’s or 1.000.000’s of viewers. Also, WebRTC typically does not work with standard CDNs, which means either the CDN of the WebRTC vendor has to be leveraged or integration in your own CDN has to happen. This is exactly where HESP excels, as it works with standard CDNs, and can provide for cost-efficient ultra-low latency at scale. Moreover, HESP will improve the viewer experience, through improved adaptive bit rate capabilities and the use of HTTP transmission, which easily reaches viewers, contrary to WebRTC's use of UDP which is more subject to being blocked by firewalls.

Both Synamedia’s packager and THEOplayer have general availability planned for the end of 2020, and are opening up for proof of concepts, for customers interested to experience HESP’s benefits first hand.