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from another client close-by.
In its first years of existence, Forcetech
was a strictly Chinese company,
which means that only customers within
China were able to order from Forcetech.
The year 2011 saw a major change in
that strategy, mainly thanks to the advent
of CCTV-6 as a major shareholder.
CCTV-6 is a movie channel that is available
all across China and which created
its own Internet offspring by the name
of M1905 (www.m1905.com). Hundreds
of movies can be accessed through that
portal, some of which are available even
before their screening date on TV. This,
of course, presented an ideal opportunity
for Forcetech to prove its streaming
software’s worth. Lan Haidong has some
impressive facts for us: “M1905 has two
million subscribers and an average of
400.000 prime time viewers that simultaneously
access movies from M1905. At
those peak times the required bit rate is
in excess of 100 GB per second.”
Lan Haidong adds even more interesting
details: “Each server is capable of
taking care of up to 1000 clients, which
means that for M1905 we adjusted our
streaming software to handle more than
400 serves simultaneously.” With China
1
being such a huge country, servers are
spread out all over the nation in so-called
data centers. “We have some 50 data
centers in the whole of China.” This way
each single client can be guaranteed the
best possible video quality.
Thanks to new shareholder CCTV-6
Forcetech could finally cast an eye on the
international market as well. “Our software
product has currently reached an
extremely sophisticated level and with
M1905 we have a brilliant showcase for
our solution, which lends prove to our
claim that we can easily deal with a huge
number of clients.” Within only a short
time Forcetech was able to significantly
increase overseas sales. “Today we generate
40% of our total turnover outside
China.” Recalling the initial phase of overseas
business, Lan Haidong remembers
that the first overseas orders came from
Spain and Thailand and adds that Thailand,
in particular, has shown a strong
demand for Forcetech IPTV software
ever since.
What is it that Forcetech can actually
provide? “We offer an end-to-end
solution for IPTV, and by that we mean
streaming software, software for monitoring
the stream, management software
192 TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 07-08/2013 — www.TELE-audiovision.com
for subscriber administration, encoders
for feeding video signals into the system
and of course IPTV boxes at the clients’
end.” The other question is the one about
money. Once again, Lan Haidong has all
the details: “A mini system for approximately
100 subscribers will set you back
USD 20.000 at most, plus 15 to 20% of
that amount per year for service und
software updates. If you need to accommodate
1000 subscribers you’re looking
at one-off costs of around USD 75.000.”
Who wouldn’t want to set up their own
IPTV system with competitive prices like
that? As a matter of fact, TELE-audiovision
will test a Forcetech IPTV solution
first hand and you’ll be able to read what
we think of the system in one of the upcoming
issues. Forcetech has definitely
tapped into a lucrative market segment
and major IPTV operator M1905 clearly
underpins the level of excellence Forcetech’s
software has reached.
1. Meet peng Dong. He is one of the
software engineers and works on
optimising the user interface of Forcetech
software.
2. Liu Ming is the Development Manager for
Android systems.
3. Wang Yong is the Development Manager
for Linux systems.