Virgin Media is the largest multi-service operator in the United Kingdom, with more than 4.8 million customers across its fibre optic broadband and digital TV network. In 2013, Virgin Media became part of Liberty Global – the world’s largest TV and broadband company.
With the launch of a new conditional access platform, as well as a next-generation set top box, Virgin Media needed an orchestration solution to reliably provision digital TV subscribers, as well as over-the-top services such as video on demand. The solution would need to offer guaranteed delivery of activation requests, handle downstream failures, operate at huge scale, and offer complete flexibility via dynamic rule sets.
Zentive was appointed to design and build a digital provisioning infrastructure to orchestrate activation requests generated by the subscriber management system. The platform offers parallel, asynchronous support for multiple downstream systems such as the conditional access platform and video on demand services. The system also performs TiVo service activations and processes remote record requests.
The platform provides secure and guaranteed delivery of critical service requests, offering protection from any downstream outage. A suite of management tools provides a complete transaction history for diagnostics and problem determination.
Designed from the outset to offer high performance, the solution is capable of processing extremely high volumes of traffic. During maintenance of downstream systems requests are queued and processed rapidly once service is restored.
Ian Mecklenburgh, Virgin Media’s Director of Consumer Platforms, commented, “We have a strong business relationship with Zentive, who are a key partner in delivering the integration for our advanced TV platform. The software they provide Virgin Media was selected because it could be easily integrated into our existing business systems and processes, whilst also providing flexibility over the lifetime of the product”.
