Distributing Coimbra’s End of the Year Live Event to the Portuguese Audience with a Custom OTT Platform

Over the years, MOG has been developing and improving its SaaS Video Cloud services to offer the best digital media technology solutions, from Vizzi OTT-TV Platform to MAM4PRO Digital Media Production.
There’s now a huge need for companies and organizations to improve their online presence and engagement with their public. An OTT platform gives every brand or organization the chance to stay relevant in this new digital era and offers the power to reach their public everywhere.
Vizzi OTT-TV platform is the perfect solution for media companies, broadcasters, content creators, and niche industries, such as houses of worship or education that wants to see their business grow.
For Coimbra’s Town Hall “End of the Year: Special Edition at Home” MOG’s goal was to deliver an efficient and immersive digital experience to the Portuguese audience, on multiples devices, and on social media, simultaneously.

The Customer

Localized in Central Portugal, Coimbra is a riverside city, mostly known for its historic University. Coimbra’s Town Hall is the Government administration of the city, that employs 1000-5000 people.
Coimbra’s Town Hall is notorious for all the festive events that they do around Christmas time: From concerts to street shows, kid’s activities, guided visits, exhibitions, theatre performances, fireworks, and more.
But with the pandemic, all these events were canceled, and the Town Hall had to prepare these festivities a little bit different from the years before and decided to organize an innovative and interactive event, where everyone could participate in the comfort of their homes.

The Challenge

As mentioned, the goal for Coimbra’s Town Hall was to find a different path to continue its tradition of organizing an end-of-the-year festivity for Coimbra’s residents and visitors. It was decided that the event – that counts with multiple music-shows from various artists – would be initially streamed just to social media. However, further on, the Town Hall decided that a more personalized experience was in need, to guarantee an uninterrupted streaming experience, with broadcast quality in mind.
Coimbra’s Town Hall relied on Live Events at the end of each year as a way to generate revenue and attract new visitors, so the development of a platform that could be monetized further on with advertising or other monetization models was also a plus. Above all, by Broadcasting an entire show online, Coimbra’s Town Hall wanted to make sure that everyone could enjoy the event at home, across all standard devices.
Some of Coimbra’s Town Hall requirements were:

• Stream the event directly to Facebook and Youtube;
• Develop a platform able to guarantee a personalized experience, customized with the event’s branding and message (logo, brand colors, web fonts, thumbnails, etc);
• They were expected to receive 2.500 simultaneous views, thus needing a scalable and stable stream;
• Allocated traffic of up to 5TB (about 15.000 hours of transmission);
• Integrated analytics: gather data of the stream’s performance, number of views, total consumption, viewer’s demographics, and more;
• Support for multiple resolutions and bitrates.

The Solution

From the platform configuration to its distribution on the web and social media, MOG successfully delivered a turnkey solution to Coimbra’s Town Hall, with full technical support during the setup, and on the day of the event.
It was set that there would be no user limit to the platform access, and it was assured a stream capable to support 100.000 hours of transmission, so the event could occur without any issues. The video transmission quality standards were also established to 4 Mbps, 1Mbps, and 500kbps resolutions/bitrates.
The preparation included the feed’s reception (RTMP) that was transferred to a local storage deployed on a Virtual Machine, where the media would later be delivered to the right channels: the web video platform, and social media, simultaneously.
When trying to publish the content on social media, the event’s production team identified some difficulties in generating the ideal format for lossless video quality, so to solve that, MOG used MAM4PRO to directly convert the stream into a compliant format, and publish it on the desired channels in multiple resolutions.
MOG’s goal was to guarantee a seamless stream configuration to publish on the event’s customized platform, meaning that Coimbra’s Town Hall only needed to supply the stream source.

In a nutshell, the instance preparation included:

• The feed was received by MAM4PRO (deployed in Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine), and directly streamed to social media in the optimal format and resolution;
• MAM4PRO guaranteed multiple resolutions and adaptative bitrates, designed to match the viewer’s internet connection without interruptions;
• The Live feed was stored in a local storage within the VM, and then transferred to Vizzi web platform through a secure and reliable CDN, assured by MOG;
• Generation of multiple resolutions;
• MOG delivered an end-to-end workflow that goes from media preparation, passing through a self-configured CDN, and ending in a synchronized streaming experience through a customized video front end and social media;
• Assured support for multiple devices and OS, including Microsoft, iOS, and Android, as well as all major browsers.

With Vizzi’s OTT platform analytics, Coimbra’s Town Hall was able to benefit from a diverse range of consumer data, such as the number of stream views, traffic consumption, page visits, and audience demographics (preferred devices, gender, age, location, and interests) designed to give them a deeper overview of the show’s success, and a better prediction of improvements for future events.
Coimbra’s Town Hall will continue to invest in their online presence, with their own OTT platform with the full support and assistance from MOG.

Why Vizzi OTT Platform?

With Vizzi OTT platform, it’s easy to manage, deliver and engage with your audience with a highly personalized platform, fully tailored to fit your brand’s needs and help you reach the public you want.
Vizzi’s analytics allows for deep insights about your audience so you can optimize your offer around the data these reports give you, with extended management tools that’ll give you full control of how you want to display your content and monetize it.
By using Vizzi, Coimbra’s Town Hall could create a new way of boosting their online presence, keep the show on the road, and reach a broader audience.