MultiChoice partners with Elemental for streaming, VoD

African pay TV provider MultiChoice has partnered with Elemental for the live streaming and video-on-demand delivery of its DStv online service.

The companies said that the streaming agreement will make DStv’s sports and entertainment content available on smartphones and tablets to more than 10 million subscribers in Sub-Saharan Africa.

MultiChoice is also using Elemental to power the launch of its time-shifted satellite VoD service, which will allow premium subscribers to get seven-day catch-up access to MultiChoice DStv Box Office and MultiChoice DStv Catch-up content.

“With Elemental, we were able to adapt to a rapidly increasing volume of content and growing subscriber base while meeting customer expectations around the clock,” said Jean-Pierre Rossouw, head of department, video-on-demand operations for MultiChoice.

For live streaming to mobile devices and the web, Elemental will ingest, process and deliver DStv Online content in multiple bitrates to an Akamai CDN. For on-demand content, it will transcode into MP4 and Smooth Streaming formats for output to GB Lab’s Space storage system.

Elemental said that for its forthcoming satellite VoD service, MultiChoice will use the Elemental Delta video delivery platform to ingest tens of thousands of assets, which will be fed to a CDN for OTT delivery to subscribers.