Features & Benefits

Dynamic Video Stream and Service Provisioning Control

• Powers next-generation TV Everywhere services with “just-in-time” provisioning of personalized viewing experiences to millions of users – based on preferences, networks, devices, locations and media-consumption information.
• Empowers users to upgrade/change their TV Everywhere services on the fly, without changing the video stream or impacting the user experience.
• Allows full control of audio/video (AV) delivery services to ensure active, consistent, engaging and personalized user experiences that can be measured, monetized and scaled.

Personalized Multi-Screen Linear TV and VOD Azuki’s One-Pass TVE™ workflow utilizes automated, standards-based and Web-service APIs to dynamically ingest live and VOD content with appropriate metadata, social connections, entitlements and rights information. Azuki’s dynamic and automated content ingestion provides unified, one-time-only content preparation for cross-platform, all-screens delivery.

Real-Time Control of Multi-Screen Entitlements Enforces multi-screen content access and authorization and delivers real-time multi-screen video services entitling with “just-in-time” secure enforcement of dynamic business rules. This enforcement is based on subscriber, content, device type, geo-restrictions, number of devices, usage, Class of Service, parental control and bandwidth management. Enables easy configuration of upsell/cross-sell bundling options based on multiple monetization models, including pay-per-view, purchase, subscription and freemium to premium, as well as subscribers’ mobility, locality, sociality and personality. Delivers next-generation TV Everywhere user experience by detecting, tracking, metering and monitoring multi-screen video services and gaining unparalleled visibility into the entire user experience – to fine tune service bundles, preferences, upsell/cross-sell offers and overall customer care – in real time.

Dynamic Multi-Screen Ad Insertion and Markers

• Provides dynamic interactivity within video through time-based reference points.
• Dynamically inserts ads into defined points within a video.
• Consults an ad service and receives a set of ads when video playback is requested and then seamlessly inserts the video ads at the indicated time offsets.
• Customizes user experience based on authorization rules.  For instance:
  • Premium users may opt not to view advertisements.
  • Standard users will receive targeted ads based on demographics, geolocation, and other data, rather than advertisements that were pre-stitched at ingestion and are served to everyone.

Real-Time Analytics of Multi-Screen Video Consumption

• Fine tunes video services and ad campaigns, delivers confirmation of billable services, and gathers metrics for video quality, performance, social engagement and user-content consumption – beyond what can be collected from the CDN alone.
• Drills down to transaction-level analytics details – on a per-user, per-device basis – to discover:
  • Which devices and operating systems subscribers are using.
  • Changes in bitrates.
  • How long users are viewing content and which ads are viewed.
  • Video traffic patterns, including when playback peak time occurs, to effectively define and measure network and service quality and the associated customer experience.
• Allows customer support teams to easily tap into robust video-session analytics information containing granular viewing statistics by user, device, operating system content and location, enabling them to better assist end users and generate troubleshooting tickets.  

Highest Quality Cross-Platform HTTP Adaptive Bitrate Streaming

• Delivers maximum video quality at all times via adaptive bitrate streaming – a technique that continuously monitors viewers’ 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.

Universal Content Protection and Rights Management

• Separates the digital rights policy management from the enforcement of those policies, enabling content owners and service providers to use any third-party rights manager to define the policies and access permissions for the content. The 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 live and VOD), 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

• Enables edge-video delivery from a variety of services including industry-standard CDNs, service provider delivery products, and standard HTTP delivery engines.
• Allows for customer configuration of one or more delivery destinations and utilization of different destinations based on custom business rules.
• Leverages different billing codes and different CDNs based on premium status, proximity or provider.

Intelligent Device Management Supports, controls and expands device coverage by becoming aware of each device’s specifics and interfaces while presenting a common standardized device appearance to the controlling delivery network and the back-office systems. Eliminates high costs associated with siloed support for device type and ensures the best user experience by unifying support for adaptive bitrate (ABR) techniques, including support for ABR even if it is not supported natively on the device. Measures a wide range of device capabilities and intelligently delivers multi-screen video with maximum performance without overloading the capabilities of the device. Monetizes high-value content with strict and consistent content protection enforcement that meets contractual usage obligation with common content encryption, DRM and user entitlement.

Mobile Application and Web Development

• The Azuki app development tools create full-featured native mobile applications for all platforms.  
• The 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

• Easily scales support for extremely large deployments with all functionality needed for ingestion, preparation and posting of premium video content.
• Provides horizontally stackable products for greater capacity and redundancy.
• Dynamically assigns and changes the software profile of each appliance server.  This reduces installation costs by tuning the capacity to best fit the needs for data ingestion and transcoding, content protection, user authentication or session-start management.
• Reuses hardware 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.