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Catena

Catena is the Flussonic platform for running a television service on your own hardware.

Channels arrive from your headend, from a satellite dish or from a partner. Catena takes them in, converts them into something every viewer's device can actually play, records an archive so people can watch what they missed, and gets the picture to televisions, phones and set-top boxes. Deciding who is allowed to watch which channel is Catena's job too.

One installation is one web interface: the channels, the machines that carry them, the viewers, and everything around playback.

What you can launch with it

  • Television for the subscribers of an internet provider. Channels on your own network, the programme guide, packages, catch-up, and an application on the subscriber's set-top box.
  • Delivery underneath someone else's product. You keep the portal, the applications and the billing; Catena takes the channels in and gets them to the viewer.
  • A television service for several brands at once. One installation, with separate subscribers and a separate channel lineup for each.

Everything the platform can do — and what is still being built — is listed on the Functional characteristics page.

What it is made of

Catena has two layers, and you can take just one of them:

  • The delivery engine receives channels, processes them, records the archive and serves viewers. This is the layer you connect to a portal you already own.
  • The subscriber service turns those channels into a product: portals, packages, the guide, subscribers and the applications they watch in. This is what you take when there is no operator TV system yet.

If all you need is a single streaming server with no control plane above it, use Sapsan on its own.

How it is arranged

An installation is built from two kinds of parts:

  • central — the control plane. It holds the configuration of every channel, decides which machine runs which channel, collects statistics, and serves the web interface and the management API.
  • streamers — sapsan servers. A streamer ingests sources, transcodes, records the archive and serves viewers. Streamers keep no configuration of their own: they receive it from central.

The smallest installation is one machine running both parts as a single process. Growing means adding machines, not rebuilding what you already have.

Start here