Zattoo will receive the Emmy Award for Technology and Engineering 2020, honouring the TV streaming provider for its developments in the field of mass-market, cloud-based TV transmission technologies.
The Emmy Award, one of the most prestigious television prizes in the United States, is awarded by the National Academy of Television Arts & Science (NATAS). The Technology & Engineering Emmy Award recognises developments and innovations in 10 different technical disciplines related to television. NATAS honours companies, organisations and individuals for their technological breakthroughs that have a significant impact on TV technology.
Zattoo will receive the award in the category ‘Pioneering Development of Large Scale, Cloud Served, Broadcast Quality, Linear Channel Transmission to Consumers’. The award winners are selected each year by dozens of industry experts and peers. In addition to Zattoo, Sling TV and Sony PlayStation Vue are also awarded for their achievements in this category.
“We are very pleased that NATAS recognised our pioneering work in the field of TV streaming. For 15 years, Zattoo has been working successfully to give users a contemporary TV experience of the highest quality,” said Niklas Brambring, CEO of Zattoo. “As a European company, it is a special honour with this Emmy to be among great pioneers like Apple, Netflix or YouTube. This shows that we are able to keep up internationally and is an incentive for us to make our product even better.”
NATAS is honouring Zattoo above all for its innovations freeing television from old restrictions on transmission. These includes building a scalable internet-based TV platform that can serve millions of viewers simultaneously and does not rely on third-party content delivery networks (CDN).
To solve this, Zattoo has developed its own CDN technology, tailored to unicast TV distribution (linear and non-linear). It can be deployed on off-the-shelf hardware on-site or in the cloud. It also provides a central control system that can take technical and business factors into account to decide on the best way to distribute the load. One of the biggest advantages of this approach is the ability to deploy the distribution infrastructure even within a network operator’s closed networks, allowing TV channels to be broadcast over an existing network designed for the internet, according to Zattoo.
Recipients of this year’s Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards will be honoured at a banquet at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas on April 19, 2020, during the National Association of Broadcasters’ annual conference.
