Dias Media Group is the largest media conglomerate in Cyprus and operates the three television stations (including Sigma, the leading television station by market share in Cyprus), 5 radio stations, 2 newspapers, 4 weekly periodicals and 9 monthly periodicals, as well as 2 online news portals and 1 online video portal.

To support these various properties, Dias had a fragmented and heterogeneous media environment involving both internally hosted servers and a variety of third party providers.

This existing fragmented environment had certain limitations including limited features in some areas (e.g. no ability to do real-time geo-filtering for licensed content, no ability to handle live video streaming events), was difficult to manage across multiple vendors and platforms and absorbed meaningful IT resources to maintain and support the internally hosted platform particularly in situations of high load.

Phase I

Sigma started using VideoPublishing.com for its SigmaTV.com on-demand video portal that contains hundreds of episodes of premium network TV content from internally produced series. The flexibility of our encoding platform allowed Sigma to encode in a lower-resolution appropriate for local bandwidth speeds and integrate into their new on-demand site. The management console and client-side tools allowed basic content management tasks to be handled by non-technical staff. And the scalable CDN infrastructure underlying VideoPublishing.com had handled very high usage periods relating to key events with ease.

Phase II

Sigma is also leveraging VideoPublishing.com live streaming service to further promote its live television stream to multiple properties while using the real-time geo-filtering to enforce licensing rights and obligations as appropriate for content.

Furthermore, the live recording and splicing functions have completely changed the workflow of how video assets move from live streaming to being available on demand, reducing time to publish by over 70% and saving significant amounts of post-production time and labor.

• • Sigma continues to expand its lead as the most innovative media group online in Cyprus
• • SigmaTV.com has been a huge success for on-demand streaming of local shows and expanded the audience to international (Greece, UK) and expatriate audiences
• • Streaming quality and features have improved relative to the more fragmented platform
• • Sigma IT and application development staff have more time to focus on application specific issues rather than the mechanics of digital asset management and delivery
• • Greater reuse and syndication of existing assets across multiple properties
• • Faster time to deployment of time-sensitive content (e.g. news) to online properties
• • Reduces the burden on post-production to produce content for multiple properties in a timely manner