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24 March 2021,Brussels, Belgium – NEP, the worldwide outsourced technical production partner for content producers for live sports, entertainment, music and corporate events, has selected KevlinX to facilitate their evolving support of cloud-based remote live productions.

The broadcast industry is evolving, and NEP is evolving as well to help content producers adapt to new production challenges and trends that have accelerated during COVID and are expected to grow in the future. As the market shifts, customers are looking for a known leader capable of delivering new types of workflows and more remote workflow solutions. NEP is investing heavily in its people and technology to become the global leader in innovative, end-to-end solutions including centralized (remote) production.

Headquartered in Amsterdam, KevlinX has a focus on building high-quality,sustainable and energy-efficient data centers in the key growth markets of Europe. With a specialty in the broadcast, media and gaming market, KevlinX is working with NEP and their media clients to create the first low latency, high proximity broadcast datacenter in Brussels, specifically for live video productions.

There has been a recent evolution of how live sports events have been managed for broadcasters. Traditionally when a sports event was being live broadcasted or streamed, the whole production crew would travel to the event, and through the use of an Outside Broadcast (OB) truck, much of what is required for a live production, such as mixing, graphics, replays and commentary, would be done locally at the event. With a move to centralized production,much of this can now be bought in house at a lower cost and with the versatility of having more resilient workflows available. But this means reliable, high bandwidth and low latency connections are required to remote applications. Thisis where KevlinX enters the equation.

The move to a remote production set-up also means the adoption of more cloud-based services. By utilizing KevlinX’s sustainable data center, NEP can host platforms in the cloud allowing remote workers to manage productions from any location, with adoption being accelerated by the recent Covid pandemic where people are being forced to work from home.

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Geert Thoelen, Technical Director, at NEP Belgium comments “NEP has decades of experience in live productions with over 2,000 highly trained and experienced technical engineers working for a variety of broadcast clients and projects across our worldwide network. However, with the move to remote production coupled with IP cloud-based workflows, this major digital transformation redefines all of our working practices. There are major benefits to do this in terms of both cost savings and improving the quality of our service and broadcast output.  But actually, there are other benefits such as improving the quality of the working day for our employees where they don’t need to spend long periods away from their families.”

Barro Luitjes, CEO at KevlinX, explains further “Being perfectly located in between Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris, the KevlinX data center has the shortest latency to all the important Internet, Cloud and Media hubs in Europe. What this means for our partner NEP is that we are delighted to offer a large-scale datacenter that provides a media based eco-system with fast connectivity to many international services and cloud partners, which is ideal for their distributed working practices. In addition, both NEP and KevlinX provide a common goal of sustainability by facilitating cloud-based services for the media production workflows that are good for the climate without the need to send people around the world.”

Thoelen concludes “Cloud-based services have already proved to provide versatility and agility to our customers where we can spin up additional resources to cover peak demands as and when required. Also worldwide events can be delivered more reliably and cost efficiently over our worldwide IP-network and well-spread satellite-linkhubs. We are delighted to be working with KevlinX to give us a sustainable datacenter for our next generation of cloud-basedmedia workflows. For NEP that is especially important for major live broadcasting events, often with audiences in the many millions where reliability, quality,and low latency connections are non-negotiable as we are under constant exposure in real-time from our customers and viewers alike.”

About NEP

For over 30 years, NEP has been a worldwide outsourced production partner supporting premier content producers of livesports, entertainment, music and corporate events. Their technical services include remote production, studio production, centralized production, audiovisual solutions, host broadcast support, premium playout, post production and innovative media asset management solutions. NEP’s 4,000+ employees are drivenby a passion for superior service and a focus on technical innovation.Together, they have supported productions in 88 countries on all seven continents. https://www.nepgroup.com/

About KevlinX 

KevlinX builds and operates a pan-European platform of high performance, concurrently maintainable Tier III Datacenter campuses across selected major growth markets in Europe. These facilities are specifically designed and built for large scale enterprise, government and cloud companies requiring flexible colocation or dedicated wholesale space with the highest standards in redundancy, security and energy efficiency.

See what is on offer at - www.kevlinx.com

Contact: Robert van Beurden – Robert.vanbeurden@kevlinx.com

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