Concurrent Unveils Software-Defined Content Platform at 2018 NAB Show

DULUTH, GA – (April 4, 2018) – Concurrent Technology Inc., a Vecima Company (TSX: VCM), a pioneer in video delivery and storage, will highlight at the 2018 NAB Show how their Software Defined Content Platform is powering the largest entertainment delivery solutions on the planet. With dynamic and adaptable solutions for transcode, storage, origin, and cache, the company’s latest innovations are helping content and service providers intelligently deliver content to their subscribers, at any scale. With billions of streams delivered over two decades, Concurrent has a proven track record of driving operational costs down and increasing revenue opportunities for content creators, producers and distributors.

Concurrent offers a wide range of deployment options – cloud, on-premise, or hybrid – to store, protect, transform and deliver content. Content producers and distributors are looking for solutions to optimize their cost-performance trade-off, customer experience and business profitability. Concurrent’s Software-Defined Content Platform delivers on this optimization, and much more.

Content Storage & Processing

With an open object storage engine and flexible support for file, block and object protocols, Aquari is used by Concurrent’s customers for highly scalable, high performance video storage. Aquari’s workload optimized, software-defined storage interface, AQR, has been improved with enhancements that increase performance and scalability. In order to manage content libraries that span hundreds of millions of objects, internal metadata is now stored in a performance optimized fashion.

To proactively protect customer’s operational performance while scaling storage capacity, the Aquari management system has been extended to allow easy control and monitoring of the state of the storage, highlighting any setting or status that is out of the ordinary. Operators can customize their Aquari storage system’s behavior to their business demands by scheduling and controlling background operations that maintain the health of the system. Overall system capacity and utilization is available at a glance with detailed utilization reports. Operators can see the trend of capacity utilization over time in order to make forward looking decisions. When the time comes to add capacity, a new automated scale-out capability that is optimized for mission-critical, large-scale production video content delivery systems can be used to add hundreds of terabytes smoothly to a running system.

Concurrent’s pure software transcoder, Zephyr, is capable of being deployed as a software-only, pay-per-use solution in either private or public clouds. “Listening closely to customers, we knew that a single cloud provider or a single on-premise solution wasn’t meeting all their requirements,” says Paul Martin, VP Engagement at Concurrent. “What customers were saying to us is they needed multi-cloud flexibility, but with predictable costs. So, we have given customers what they’ve asked for and added the pay-per-use model to our existing licensed appliance solution.” The Zephyr Transcoder can be deployed in a private or customer-managed public cloud account, and integrated via API to any workflow management solution.

Content Delivery

Concurrent’s heritage in Video-on-Demand, including its Technical Emmy for VOD services, gives Concurrent a leading position in today’s era of OTT and SVOD services. Unique features, including the ability to define ABR profile groups, help content providers more efficiently deliver video to consumers, lowering operational cost. ABR profile groups allow operators to control which profile groups are sent to which ABR clients. The feature enables many benefits including optimized bandwidth usage, tiered pricing models, allowing a single ABR asset to be encoded by multiple codecs, and more.

Caching is a critical component of any robust Content Delivery solution. Concurrent’s Laguna Cache is a software-based, high density streaming server with integrated intelligent caching features. With support for a wide variety of content formats and streaming protocols, it supports delivery to mobile devices, smart TVs, as well as classic set-top boxes simultaneously. Laguna Cache can be deployed at the edge for maximized quality of experience and minimized latency, in intermediate locations to save network cost, and at the origin as a shield cache to scale your services without adding origin capacity.

Concurrent’s CDN solutions, including Zephyr Origin, Laguna Cache, Aquari Storage and Zephyr Transcoding, are best of breed, well integrated solutions across multi-vendor ecosystems. In addition to a strong history of third party integrations, these components also integrate seamlessly together to provide a feature-rich, scalable Software-Defined Content Platform for storing, transforming and delivering content.

From Content Management to Content Delivery, Concurrent’s Software-Defined Content Platform supports the most challenging business and technical requirements to help content creators, producers and distributors succeed. To learn more about Concurrent’s software solutions at the 2018 NAB Show, attend the Press Conference on Monday April 9, 2018 at 11:00am PT in room N242 or visit booth# 10530 in Lower South Hall.