iView, you view, we pay

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 08 September 2010 15:10

IT Industry - Development

Managed service provider Hostworks is gearing up to offer a service that will offer video streaming for its clients, and manage the payments and subscriptions side of the house, with NineMSN likely to be an early adopter of the pay per view service.

A wholly owned subsidiary of Broadcast Australia, Hostworks is already providing the technical underpinnings for ABC’s iView service.  What it is gearing up to offer later this year are the tools that will also let it manage billing and subscription for video downloads effectively allowing it to serve up pay per view video.

Shane Baker, general manager of sales and marketing, said that the organisation was already having conversations about this service with NineMSN which is its longest standing customer. In May NineMSN renewed a multi million dollar contract which will see Hostworks provide hosting services to the end of 2013.

According to Mr Baker; “This is the direction that Hostworks is taking for the media content industry and it is highly likely to have a B2C (business to consumer) result.”  He added “we see Nine MSN taking up those services through their new contract”.

“We are right in the middle of conversations with partners about how we might bring that to market,” according to Mr Baker. Adrian Britton, head of technology, strategy and innovation, agreed that “this is very much a high priority for us.”

Originally an application service provider Hostworks is moving to recast itself as a cloud or utility computing provider. It does however seek to differentiate itself by offering services around the raw compute power.

It currently runs two main data centres in South Australia and NSW and leases multiple 10 Gbps pipes from a range of different telecommunications providers to provide resilience. The company claims it can offer up to 99.999 per cent service level agreements although more routinely offers 99.9 per cent SLAs.