Channel owner Lagardère Active enlisted Arqiva’s services to strengthen its presence in MENA with the delivery of a specific channel offering for children in the region. Gulli Bil Arabi is distributed via Arqiva’s Remote Edge Playout product.

The Internet-fed service, which uses a virtualised backend cloud platform, comprises two outputs – a dedicated high bit-rate stream for contribution purpose and a lower bit-rate one, which powers the Gulli Bil Arabi over-the-top (OTT) platform across MENA, dynamically creating multiple outputs and feeds to each of the 18 countries – including Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

A remote connection links the MENA service’s playout engines – located in Paris – back to Arqiva’s UK infrastructure. Communicating via a cloud platform, a team of UK-based engineers then configure, manage and control the service via a virtual environment – passing schedules and assets in various formats across to the MENA playout engines quickly and efficiently.

“As the world of playout becomes increasingly complex, and as broadcasters look to new and emerging markets, different distribution models will increasingly be required,” said David Crawford, MD, satellite & media at Arqiva. “Our Edge Playout solution helps channel owners – like Lagardère – find a simple path to reaching new territories and extending the value of their content beyond their home region. Offering commercial and operational flexibility and scalability with broadcast-grade reliability, we work with our customers to find the right approach for them; all-the-while guaranteeing service excellence.”

While the current Lagardère solution is only partially virtualised, the service is orchestrated to enable a fully virtualised end-to-end service in future, with all required infrastructure already in place.

“Our work with Lagardère in MENA marks another important step in Arqiva’s virtualisation plans that span the next 12 months,” Crawford said. “Over the coming year, we expect to see an increasing number of partially, and fully, virtualised products and services come to market and are proud that Arqiva is among the first to embark on this journey of technical innovation with our customers and to be able to offer them new levels of flexibility.”

Caroline Cochaux, MD, France & international, for Lagardère Active TV and Gulli CEO, added: “International expansion is one of our core growth pillars, opening the door to a number of long-term development opportunities. Thanks to Arqiva, the launch of Gulli Bil Arabi means Lagardère Active TV division is now present in more than 100 countries, as the channel joins 18 others broadcasting across Middle East North Africa zone. With Gulli Bil Arabi, Gulli is now present in 55 countries.”