The service provides commercial revenue and brand reputation protection for broadcasters who run their own playout operations or who outsource to a third-party provider and cannot afford expensive dual redundant facilities.

“Our new disaster recovery service is as close as you can get to a free lunch in broadcast technology,” says Mark Beard, Planetcast’s Senior Vice President of International. “Most Tier-1 broadcasters have disaster recovery in-place, but it more than doubles their total playout cost. For many Tier-2 and Tier-3 broadcasters, this means that they cannot afford disaster recovery, and are therefore at risk. To address these issues, we have launched our unique disaster recovery service, that has zero set-up costs* and zero charges* until the service is used. Even when disaster recovery is invoked, our charges are modest and much lower than the reputational damage and financial consequences of a channel being off-air.”

Planetcast International Playout Disaster Recovery solution includes three core elements. MAM.C, an always-on media asset manager that resides within the cloud and manages programme schedules and content. This is linked to CLOUD.X, a full featured cloud-based playout platform. When invoked, CLOUD.X sends content to RECASTER, Planetcast’s dynamic IP transit solution, which in turn delivers a secure internet stream to a broadcaster’s distribution provider.

The Planetcast Playout disaster recovery solution is fully featured, and its core elements, including MAM.C, CLOUD.X and RECASTER, are already in use at some of the Asia largest media companies, including Disney, Star TV and Viacom, where they are used daily to playout content to billions of viewers. This service can also be used to enable the launch of ‘pop-up channels’ and cloud-based content archiving.

“The Planetcast International disaster recovery service is currently being launched as a zero-cost insurance policy for our discerning customers,” said Sanjay Duda, Chief Operating Officer of Planetcast Media Services. “We’re already getting a high-level of interest from the major broadcasters we’ve demonstrated the service to, and for channels without disaster recovery in place, we’re excited to be taking away the existential risk of being off-air for hours or days. The fact that this service can also be used to cost-effectively launch revenue generating services such as ‘pop-up’ channels is an additional customer bonus.”

* subject to terms and conditions.