MOG provides the Coimbra City Council with an OTT platform

MOG successfully provided a turnkey solution to the Coimbra City Council that allowed the large Christmas events to be shared with an audience that on this occasion, due to the pandemic, could not travel to the riverside city.

Coimbra, the Portuguese riverside city is known for its historic University and for the great festive events that its City Council organizes at Christmas. But with the pandemic, all these events were canceled, and the Municipal Chamber had to prepare these parties a little differently than in previous years and decided to organize an innovative and interactive event, in which everyone could participate in the comfort of their home.

Thus, they looked for a different path to continue their tradition of organizing a New Year's Eve party for the residents and visitors of Coimbra. It was decided that the event, which features multiple musical shows by various artists, would initially be broadcast only on social media. However, later, the City Council decided that a more personalized experience, to guarantee an uninterrupted streaming experience, taking into account the quality of the broadcast.

The City Council relies on live events at the end of each year as a way of generate income y attract new visitors, so developing a platform that could be monetized later with advertising or other monetization models was also an advantage. Above all, by streaming an entire show online, Coimbra City Council wanted to ensure that everyone could enjoy the event at home, across all standard devices.

Some of the requirements of the Coimbra City Council were stream the event directly to Facebook and Youtube; develop a platform capable of guaranteeing personalized experience, with the brand and message of the event (logo, brand colors, web fonts, thumbnails, etc.), have a scalable and stable flow; and ensure traffic of up to 5TB (about 15,000 hours of transmission). Furthermore, the solution to be adopted had to have integrated analytics with the collection of data on stream performance, number of views, total consumption, demographics of viewers. Finally, you would have to ssupport multiple resolutions and bit rates.

The solution

From the configuration of the platform to its distribution on the web and social networks, MOG successfully provided a turnkey solution to the Coimbra City Council, with full technical support during the configuration and on the day of the event.

It was established that there would be no user limit for access to the platform, and a flow capable of supporting 100,000 hours of transmission was ensured, so the event could occur without problems. Video transmission quality standards were also established at resolutions/bit rates of 4 Mbps, 1Mbps and 500kbps.

The preparation included feed reception (RTMP) which was transferred to local storage deployed on a virtual machine, where the media would subsequently be delivered to the appropriate channels: the web video platform and social media, simultaneously.

When trying to publish the content on social media, the event production team identified some difficulties in generating the ideal format for lossless video quality, so to solve this, MOG used MAM4PRO to directly convert the stream into a compatible format, and publish it to desired channels in multiple resolutions.

The objective of the MOG was to ensure a cseamless flow configuration to publish it on the event's custom platform, meaning that the Coimbra City Council only had to supply the source of the stream.

The feed was received by MAM4PRO (deployed on Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine), and transmitted directly to social networks in the optimal format and resolution. Guaranteed multiple resolutions and adaptive bitrates, designed to adapt to the viewer's Internet connection without interruptions. Additionally, the live stream was saved to local storage within the virtual machine, and then transferred to the Vizzi web platform via a secure and reliable CDN, secured by MOG. The content was generated in multiple resolutions.

MOG provided a workflow end to end that goes from the preparation of the media, through a CDN autoconfigurada, and ending in an experience of synchronized streaming through a custom video front-end and social media. On the other hand, the Portuguese company guaranteed compatibility with multiple devices and operating systems, including Microsoft, iOS and Android, as well as with the main browsers.

With the analyzes of the OTT platform of Addictions, Coimbra City Council was able to benefit from a wide range of consumer data, such as the number of stream views, traffic consumption, page views and audience demographics (preferred devices, gender, age, location and interests), designed to offer them a deeper insight into the success of the show and better predict improvements for future events.