Setanta Streams Sports Programming Online

Written by Ryan Lawler

Thursday, April 23. 2009 at 07:55 AM EDT Post a comment

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Setanta Sports has launched a new live and on-demand video subscription service that will enable users to watch its cable and satellite channels online, while also giving them access to archived on-demand content.

The service, called Setanta-i, is designed to act as a complementary service online to the programming it shows on cable, satellite, and IPTV services throughout the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Africa, Australia, and Ireland.

In addition to English Premier League football (soccer) games, Setanta offers programming that includes Rugby, Aussie Rules Football, Hurling, and other appropriately weird sports that ex-pats and equally weird Americans like to watch.

The service allows those with access to the company's programming to watch live and on-demand programming online, while enabling those who don't live in markets that Setanta reaches to also access the content.

For $14.99 a month, or $149 a year, subscribers can view the live, linear channels that Setanta has in their home markets. Because rights differ from region to region, the number of stations that the company operates and the availability of certain content differs by geography. As a result, Setanta has built five dfferent versions of the service, one for each market that the company has rights to operate in.

In addition to the linear programming, Setanta has a good deal of on-demand content available, as well as DVR-like functionality to record certain content that can be watched on-demand later. The platform offers a full electronic programming guide for available content, but also enables deep search capabilities, to make it easier for users to find the content they want.

The Setanto-i interface and video player were built with the Microsoft Silverlight rich Internet application (RIA) platform, which is delivering multi-bit-rate streams of up to 1.8 Mbit/s using the Swarmcast Inc. multisource video streaming technology. The site uses Irdeto (formerly Entriq) for content management and content protection technology.