Delivering Europe’s leading sports events to worldwide audiences online in real-time

LONDON 12 July 2011 – INTERXION HOLDING NV, (NYSE: INXN), a leading European provider of carrier-neutral colocation data centre services, today announced that iStreamPlanet, a leader in live Internet broadcast services and automated video workflow solutions and applications, has chosen Interxion’s City of London data centre to host its European Broadcast Operations Centre. This will enable iStreamPlanet to deliver live streaming of premium sporting events, including major European Soccer and tennis tournaments this summer, to a global audience on behalf of online rights holders and distributors.

As part of the project, iStreamPlanet has also installed a satellite downlink facility, enabling it to not only distribute live content over a wide range of CDNs, but also to acquire broadcast content via both fibre and satellite. iStreamPlanet is also looking to facilitate live, in-game commentary from inside its studios in multiple languages.

The broadcast industry is seeing an unprecedented increase in online viewers for large scale events (the 2011 Royal wedding was reported to have broken the previous online live streaming record of approximately 70 million, which was set during the inauguration of President Barack Obama) [1]. To cope with this growing demand, content providers must be confident that they can match customer expectations for premium content across a variety of channels.

Interxion’s Content Hubs represent the ideal environment for effective aggregation, storage, exchange, management and distribution of premium digital media content. Content owners can obtain direct in-house cross connects to all necessary IP distribution networks for the optimised delivery of their content, including Tier 1 ISPs, Access Network Providers, Internet Exchanges and CDNs.

Khurram Siddiqui, Vice President and GM Europe, iStreamPlanet, said, “We were attracted by Interxion’s commitment to providing the best-of-breed data centre facilities combined with its unique focus on the digital media sector. As a provider of live streaming services, connectivity and reliability are obviously of paramount importance to us. By housing our broadcast operations centre within Interxion, we can take advantage of a wide array of Tier 1 ISPs, CDNs, Carriers and Internet Exchanges as well as its diverse digital community of digital media service providers – all of which allows us to scale our business while delivering the highest quality of live, premium content streaming and an outstanding end user experience.”   

Jonathan Wood, Head of Marketing and Business Development Digital, Interxion, said, “This new deal further reflects the growing popularity of our Content Hubs. We can literally put content providers directly on top of all the delivery mechanisms they need to optimise the distribution of their content to millions of eyeballs across Europe. We’re really looking forward to working further with iStreamPlanet and being able to offer its unique service to our ever-growing community of premium content holders and publishers within our Content Hubs.

[1] Source: Gigaom