CASE STUDY

QVC – short for ‘Quality Value Convenience’ – is a television shopping channel founded in the United States and operating in the United Kingdom too. It broadcasts, worldwide, to more than 350 million households, specialising in shopping for beauty, fashion, jewellery, and more.

QVC chose Simplestream to replace a plethora of vendors and to power the live stream for its programming with a flexible infrastructure encompassed in a unified solution. Among the main objectives were improved operational efficiency and increased return on investment.

Simplestream deployed a highly customised version of Media Manager, to allow QVC to easily control every single aspect of the live and on demand workflows. With the ability to leverage the Live2VOD service, QVC can benefit from automated operations to generate clips and replays of the live broadcast, populating rerun-focused channels as part of the weekly schedule. Most importantly, QVC can manage complex multi-channel and multi-territory live streaming from by using a single system.

In detail, the solution includes:

• Ingest of 17 live streams in the UK and Germany.
• Fully automated catch-up generation for all streams, including EPG metadata ingest, and 7-day retention of the on demand assets.
• Automated product-focused clips generated via a dedicated API, available across all QVC platforms.
• On demand content available within five minutes from broadcast.
• Cloud-based storage of all video assets.

With industry-leading ‘time-to-live’ of less than five minutes from broadcast to on demand content, Simplestream provided QVC with a flexible architecture to fully automate live streaming and on demand services.

QVC provides their audience with a multi-device, tele-retail experience, leveraging best-in-class products provided by Simplestream to create frame-accurate clips from any source or format, manual or automated publication of content to several platforms, and most importantly an opportunity to maximise viewership by selecting specific settings for scheduling and publication through Media Manager.