Unlocking new affiliate partnerships with our cloud-based content interchange

The broadcaster is one of the world’s leading media and entertainment organisations. It is renowned worldwide for its production and distribution of content across a diverse range of broadcast and streaming services, as well as for its ownership and management of major entertainment and news brands.

Our customer offered its collection of premium linear channels to various European affiliates. However, dealing with traditional distribution methods sometimes meant a lack of flexibility, limiting the company’s reach. As time went on, the broadcaster wanted to switch to a more adaptable distribution method. The introduction of our Arqade service broadened our portfolio of distribution solutions, giving our customer a new way to deliver content to end affiliates

Our innovative cloud-based media distribution service, Arqade, offers lower costs, ample flexibility and quicker setup times than traditional methods. Our solution aligned perfectly with the shared vision between Arqiva and the broadcaster to create a ‘global storefront’ for its channels, offering effortless and immediate access to international affiliates.

Recognising the benefits, the broadcaster shifted its channels to cloud-based playout, selecting Arqade as its preferred platform to manage its international distribution.

Our customer discovered that they could simply contribute their channels and authorise access to their affiliates, onboarding new partners easily. Arqade is used to set the source and delivery destination of channels. It then processes the content in the required formats, ready for customers.

In a matter of minutes, the channels are available for distribution to the new affiliate.

This streamlined process allows channel owners to onboard new affiliates easily and quickly – wherever they are in the world, making life easier for affiliate sales teams.

The transition led to immediate results for our customer, paving the way for new distribution partnerships with affiliates in Australia and New Zealand. The platform also facilitated deals with smaller affiliates that weren’t commercially viable with the cost of traditional distribution channels. With Arqade, the broadcaster could distribute its channels to affiliates who then paid for access, lowering distribution costs.

The newly onboarded affiliates also benefited from Arqade. In registering for the platform, affiliates gained access to other distributed content, opening a doorway to new content deals.

What’s more, Arqade leverages cloud providers’ global network connectivity, ensuring high resilience and availability for both the broadcaster and the affiliate. This enhanced reliability safeguards against network outages that could disrupt media distribution.

Consequently, by making many of their channels available in Arqade with fibre-based delivery for disaster recovery, our customer’s service outage recovery times dropped from several hours to mere minutes.

Arqade illustrates that a managed media distribution service using global IP infrastructure can effectively distribute our client’s content worldwide. As a testament to the true innovation of the platform, this cloud-based solution is resilient, flexible, and cost-effective and paves the way for broadcasters to get ahead of the competition.