Virtualization and the cloud: Why and how?
Day 3 of RadioWeek explored one of the biggest technological shifts in broadcast radio
Streaming and podcast solutions provider StreamGuys has diversified the SGcontrol customer experience through a new application interface program that allows users to create rules and customize functionality for various stream management and content access control applications.
The company introduced SGcontrol at the 2022 NAB Show as a managed service to offload complex stream management and access control functions from broadcasters. The new API also automates SGcontrol programming and functionality, accelerating the deployment of new streams, features and services.
“By unlocking the features of SGcontrol through an open API, our customers now have a powerful development platform to customize their own secure control and management solutions,” says Robert Minnix, product manager for StreamGuys. “The self-management option also reduces the manual configuration stages often required at the managed service layer.”
Geo-targeting and geo-blocking
SGcontrol simplifies media enterprises’ control of how audiences access their content, enabling broadcasters and content providers to improve their market-based monetization initiatives. Applications include geo-targeting by audience location to deliver appropriate regionalized stream variants and geo-restriction to block audience members outside defined regions from accessing content. The new API widens the use case spectrum for SGcontrol customers, including several new custom applications by broadcasters in North America and the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region:
- Music streaming rights: A US-based collective rights management company now uses SGcontrol to automatically redirect consumers to regional streams for more accurate royalty reporting. SGcontrol limits exposure to foreign audiences, eliminating the need to manage regional access in apps and websites while reducing manual reporting overhead.
- Sports licensing restrictions: A regional APAC media enterprise used SGcontrol to restrict geographical access to World Cup content. The customer created rules using SGcontrol’s geo-targeting feature for streaming locally licensed content.
Dynamic ads and tokenized authorization
Eduardo Martinez, vice president of technology for StreamGuys, emphasizes the SGcontrol’s benefits for regionalization, “Producing relevant content for diverse markets with a strong sense of branding and content cohesion from coast to coast remains a challenge,” he says. “SGcontrol’s targeting ensures that a single stream source can be repurposed across all broadcast markets, with dynamic ad insertions specific to the locale eliminating the headache of producing individual streams.”
Tokenized authorization remains a strong use case for SGcontrol, ensuring that third-party or unwanted streaming platforms cannot draw on a broadcaster’s live streams. Integration with StreamGuys’ SGpasskey functionality locks the stream, requiring a valid encrypted token for access. SGcontrol then makes authorization decisions based on information baked into the token at its time of generation, such as username and expiration time.
“Tokenization has become a favored SGcontrol application for owned and operated media companies seeking a robust access restriction solution for their live streams,” says Martinez. “Moving forward, we see the combined power of geographic targeting and SGpasskey as the foundation for a new premium service from StreamGuys.”
