Features & Benefits

Highest Quality Cross-Platform HTTP Adaptive Bitrate Streaming

• Delivers maximum video quality at all times via adaptive bitrate streaming – a technique that continuously monitors viewer’s bandwidth and device capabilities in real time.
• Seamlessly adapts the data rates, frames per second, and resolution of the video stream as network conditions change. The result is a high-quality user experience in both high  and low speed network conditions, with a fast video load time, minimal buffering and no annoying pauses.

Automated Workflow for Content Ingestion & Preparation

• Utilizes automated, standards-based feeds and web-service APIs to ingest content and metadata from a Content Management System and prepares it for multi-screen delivery. Feeds contain URLs to the videos as well as the metadata and policies that will ultimately populate and provide markers and playlists for the multi-screen application.
• Transcodes video into multiple formats, resolutions, and bitrates for optimized output across all multi-screen device platforms. The Azuki transcoding API also integrates with 3rd party transcoders to leverage existing investments.
• Segments content to support Adaptive Bitrate Streaming during playback. Segments are optionally encrypted as part of Azuki’s best-in-class content protection solution - including digital rights management (DRM), and pushed to Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) for optimal download performance.

Universal Content Protection & Rights Management

Azuki Content Protection:

• Separates the digital rights policy management from the enforcement of those policies, enabling content owners and service providers to use any 3rd party rights manager to define the policies and access permissions for the content. Content protection server and client enforce these policies while thwarting attacks on the device itself.
• Works in conjunction with the native player on any multi-screen device, and is not tied to a specific media format or streaming technology, so providers are free to use native HTTP adaptive streaming, Adobe® Flash®, or Microsoft® Silverlight™.  
• Supports all distribution models – via the Azuki client, including streaming (both Video-on-Demand and Live), download and play (including offline play), and side loading.
• Supports subscription, pay-per-view, and rental models and can leverage location and network information to support blackout zones, country restrictions, and mobile network restrictions.

Flexible CDN Distribution and Delivery

Azuki Media Platform enables:

• Edge video delivery from a variety of services including industry standard CDNs, service provider delivery products, and standard HTTP delivery engines.
• Customer configuration of one or more delivery destinations and utilization of different destinations based on custom business rules.
• The leverage of different billing codes and different CDNs based on premium status, proximity, or provider.

Dynamic Ad Insertion and Markers

Azuki Media Platform leverages markers to:

• Provide dynamic interactivity within video (through time based reference points
• Dynamically insert ads into defined points within a video.
• Consult an ad service and receive a set of ads when video playback is requested, and seamlessly insert the video ads at the indicated time offsets.   
• Customize user experience, based on authorization rules.  For instance, premium users may not be forced to view advertisements. Standard users will receive targeted ads based on demographics, geo-location, and other data, rather than advertisements that were pre-stitched at ingestion and served to everyone.

Mobile Application and Web Development

• The Azuki App development tools create full-featured native mobile applications for Apple, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone 7 devices.  
• Cross-platform client handles the adaptive bitrate streaming, user authentication and content protection (DRM) processing in the end devices.
• Configurable templates provide maximum flexibility and functionality that greatly reduces time to market for delivering multimedia Apps supporting multi-screen platforms.
• Customizable applications maintain brand recognition and provide a consistent user experience.

Horizontal and Vertical Scalability

• Ease of scale to support the largest deployments with all functionality needed for ingestion, preparation and posting of premium video content.
• Horizontally stackable products for greater capacity and redundancy.
• Specialized profile of appliance - via software licenses performing a dedicated function - reduces installation costs by tuning the capacity to best fit the needs for data ingestion and transcoding, content protection (DRM) wrapping, user authentication or session-start management.  
• Hardware is reused and can be flexibly assigned for various dedicated functions as the installation grows or demands change. In all cases, data is streamed directly from the CDN to the end-user. This architecture leverages the low cost and dynamic scalability provided by modern content delivery networks.
• Since the Azuki platform is only involved at the session initiation, it can easily scale to extremely large deployments