Next Level Sports Recruits Encompass Digital Media for Playout, Transmission Services

Encompass Digital Media and Next Level Sports & Entertainment have signed an agreement to deliver the Next Level Sports television channel (formerly Eleven Sports) to Next Level’s major partners in the United States. Encompass will provide sports content ingest, playout, and transmission services, including IP-based distribution to PayTV affiliates utilizing LTN Wave technology.

“As we continue to evolve as a channel, Encompass was the perfect partner to help transition Next Level Sports to IP transport and create a hybrid PayTV/OTT solution that supports the shifting habits of our viewers,” states Andre Gudger, CEO of Next Level Sports. “Due to the thousands of hours of sports content Encompass aggregates monthly, we are able to take advantage of their fiber and IP infrastructure, giving us access to worldwide events for live sourcing for our programming.”

IP distribution offers the ability to cost effectively create targeted/derivative feeds by using fully integrated SCTE decoration services, allowing feeds to be distributed with broadcast SLAs over managed IP network to headends at higher video quality. This new approach offers PayTV programmers a new, scalable way to address a wider range of affiliates, including linear OTT platforms.

“We are thrilled to be growing our existing relationship with Next Level Sports, offering our cloud and physical infrastructure to create an end-to-end workflow solution for live sports acquisition, playout and distribution,” states Peter Ostapiuk, SVP, Sales, North America. “Connecting Next Level Sports to MVPDs and vMVPDs headends across North America by collaborating with LTN on an innovative, reliable, broadcast-quality, fully managed terrestrial delivery network solution is very exciting.”