Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert), the global business research and consulting firm, recently, announced that it has offered content owners and distributors an analysis of the total cost of ownership of cloud-based live encoding services versus traditional hardware encoding solutions.

The tremendous rise in demand for more live content across all connected devices is driving broadcasters of all sizes to evaluate the capabilities of their current live encoding and packaging solutions.  

Frost and Sullivan's analysis noted that cloud-based services such as iStreamPlanet's Aventus offer critical time to market advantages in testing, piloting and deploying new live multiscreen services.

The rapid time to market drives top line revenues that are mostly ignored in TCO exercises. Officials said that the top line increases, together with the bottom line capital expenditure savings, place cloud services in an advantageous place, even for live linear, multi-channel deployments.

Frost and Sullivan's TCO framework revealed various areas that are overlooked in a TCO analysis, comprising personnel costs and costs of upgrading equipment to keep pace with technology—two high cost items that are included in the Aventus service.

"Many industries are moving to the subscription-based economy and we have always believed that this approach provides the best solution for content owners and distributors who are ready to embrace the opportunity in live, multiscreen video services," said Jennifer Baisch, vice president of marketing for iStreamPlanet.

He added: "Aventus customers gain first to market advantage because they have resources at their fingertips to rapidly launch new channels and events without incurring large capital investments. Plus they get the additional benefit of a service that's always up to date with the latest technologies."

A couple of days back, TMCnet reported that iStreamPlanet will work with Level 3 Communications (News - Alert) to provide end-to-end multiscreen services for major media and entertainment enterprises.