SmartMEDIA CDN. Purpose & Benefits
April 24, 2024
Smartlabs product feature updates for 4Q22
November 30, 2022
We are happy to reveal a comprehensive list of Smartlabs solution and product updates for 4Q22.
New features will enable additional performance, provide support for the most demanded and compelling functions and devices, as well as improved state-of-the-art UI and apps.
SmartTUBE
Service Delivery PlatformSmartLabs is pleased to announce the release of the new version of our Service Delivery Platform — SmartTUBE 8. We plan to release this update before the end of this year. However, some components and applications are already available as beta versions. Stay tuned!
Amazon Fire TV & Roku Support
We are delighted to announce support for the Amazon Fire TV and Roku device families. Operators will now be able to expand the audience for their TV services by attracting millions of active users of these platforms, as well as increase the satisfaction of users by offering support for additional devices. Try our demo SmartTUBE apps for Amazon Fire TV & Roku now!
AVoD Support
SmartTUBE now fully supports AVoD — a type of VoD allowing subscribers to watch content for free, but with mandatory watching of advertisements. Ad blocks may be inserted before the movie starts, during the movie playback or at the end.
You can use the SmartTUBE Ad Decision System or a 3rd-party VAST service to manage advertising campaigns, upload creatives, specify targeting parameters, screening period, age restrictions, and so on.
AvoD is supported by the SmartTUBE apps for Android TV, LG/Samsung/Hisense Smart TV, and Web.
For more details on AVoD support, please see here.
Push Notifications for Mobile Devices
In addition to our own notification mechanism, SmartTUBE mobile apps now support PUSH notifications using the Apple and Google infrastructure. Henceforth you can inform your subscribers about promotions or technical works, even if the SmartTUBE app is not running on a device. For this purpose you can use the SmartTUBE Admin Console or OSS/BSS API.
Subscription Licensing Model and Product Offering
The most-popular licensing policy is now a subscription-based model that is dependent on the number of active users. By choosing this model, operators can also use the SmartLabs Сloud solution. The transition to a modern model will simplify the interaction between the operator and SmartLabs in software licensing issues, guarantee long-term cooperation and uninterrupted access to all the latest platform innovations.
Totally Redesigned SmartTUBE Mobile Apps
The modern users are very demanding on the UX and UI of streaming apps. So we listened and we totally redesigned the UI/UX of our apps for mobile Android and iOS devices, aligning them with the latest trends in the streaming industry. Also we rebuilt our iOS app. From scratch. The new version features improved performance, a more user-friendly interface and state-of-the-art visual style.
New Features for Big Screen Apps
The SmartTUBE apps for big-screens devices also got new cutting-edge features that take the UX and visual style to a totally new level. Operators may add these new features to the Home screen at will and configure them using our standard mechanism.
New Configurable Features
- Main menu as text instead of icons
- ‘TV Channels’ ribbon with program posters instead of channel logos
- Faded top banner with trailer playback (starts with a slight delay)
We also added the profile selection screen, opened by clicking on the icon on the Home screen. This way, users can switch profiles more quickly — without going to the settings menu.
SmartMEDIA
Content Delivery Platform
NVIDIA GPU Based Encoding
The SmartMEDIA now supports highly cost-effective NVIDIA GPU-based encoding. Taking into account factors such as hardware cost, power consumption, rack space, redundancy, and transcoding quality, we can conclude that the NVIDIA NVENC-based solution is much more cost effective than an Intel QSV-based solution in most cases. Tests of the SmartMEDIA Transcoder have shown that the price per transcoded channel in a NVENC-based solution can be up to 36% cheaper!
For more information about SmartMEDIA Transcoder, please see here.
On-the-fly Encryption
Another game-changing feature of the SmartMEDIA Content Delivery Platform — on-the-fly encryption! This will allow you to stream HLS/FairPlay to iOS devices and MPEG-DASH/Widevine to other devices, storing only one copy of the content! Thus, you can save disk space and hardware, while providing your subscribers with a quick launch of content playback on any device type.
SmartCARE
QoE Monitoring Solution
In order for operators to control the video quality and performance of each node of the streaming system, we are constantly working to improve the SmartCARE UI and the quality of data provided. So we have expanded the amount of analyzed data, improved the algorithms of Abnormal Clusters (AI-based identification of a problems’ cause), added support for new alarm events, and much more. The upcoming version of SmartCare will also present new dashboards with increased readability.
