Geo was selected through a competitive tender process on the basis of its dedicated fibre offering, which enables ITV to scale up its bandwidth requirements as it grows its revenue streams. The nature of dedicated fibre, as opposed to industry-standard shared platforms, also guarantees ITV of a sub-2ms round trip between sites, a key requirement to meet their low latency goals.
“ITV’s strategic priority is to drive new revenue streams by exploiting our content across multiple free and pay platforms,” said Andrew Ioannou, ITV’s Director of Strategy - Technology, Platforms and Business Delivery. “A robust network that eliminated single points of failure and reduced our business risk to its lowest possible level was critical to us. Geo’s fibre follows unique paths away from standard routes which guarantees diversity.”
Geo’s network was already present in the key sites on the network: ITV’s Gray’s Inn Road head office, Equinix’s LD5 in Slough and BIS’s flagship data centre in Greenwich, meaning that deployment times were kept to a minimum and the managed service project could be rolled out in just 12 weeks.
“Media companies are facing a tough market today and need to deliver high bandwidth content using a range of channels to engage a more demanding audience. Dedicated fibre is critical to companies such as ITV with aggressive growth strategies, as it provides long term capacity for bandwidth-intense content without the need to compress and decompresss,” said Chris Smedley, Chief Executive at Geo. “Our fibre will provide ITV with the stable infrastructure required to realise its vision.”