Video Portals
Video portals are live preview menus that users of video streaming services can use to visually navigate through the services on offer to them. They show either still or moving images that represent the streams or channels on offe, and allow the user to navigate using the keypad of the phone.

Generally, the only way to create the visual element of these portals was through a labour-intensive process using traditional video production equipment, along the lines of:

 

  1. Decode each stream from its transmitted format
  2. Use a TV station type video mixer to mix all the streams into 1 image
  3. Program the video mixer to select 1 audio stream at a time
  4. Use a character generator to overlay text
  5. Encode the resulting audio and video using a streaming encoder

The control is provided by the video gateway or streaming server being configured to respond to the user's DTMF key presses. For example, the menu may be visually presented so that the user presses the 1 key for news, 2 for sports, 3 for movies, etc., and then the video gateway switches the stream presented when the user presses this key. The stream presented will either be another video portal stream, showing for example the available sports channels, or the final stream selected by the user for viewing.
Products such as MComms TV Video Portal remove all need for the manual portal production process, as they connect directly to a streaming server, render the portal screens showing multiple streams, and then send these back to the streaming servers for distribution to handsets.
 
Back to the top
Copyright MComms Design Pty. Ltd. all rights reserved.