May 18, 2012 - Livestation, the largest aggregator of live streaming television news, has credited the dedicated hosting it gets from RapidSwitch for helping it cope with a phenomenal growth in traffic during the Arab Spring.

Livestation works with the world’s biggest broadcasters, making their news available in an IP format and streaming it through websites, smartphone apps and even set top boxes. The company is based in Shoreditch, London, the UK’s digital and tech hub.

Demand for news from the Middle East during the Arab Spring protests caused Livestation’s web traffic to surge from less than 1 million to almost 15 million unique visitors per month.

Lippe Oosterhof, CEO of Livestation, says: “The Arab Spring was transformational for us. To deal with the spike in traffic, hosting from RapidSwitch was absolutely critical. Broadcasters like Al Jazeera were relying on us for streaming so it was the only way for us to deliver our service in what was a very, very challenging time.”

Livestation has just won a deal to deliver Sky News via the internet to viewers in the US and Canada. Viewers there can now receive Sky News’ international feed by subscribing to Livestation for $2.99 a month.

Lippe Oosterhof, explains: “Livestation couldn’t have grown as fast as it has if it wasn’t for the efficient and resilient dedicated hosting we get from RapidSwitch. Even before this latest deal with Sky News we had grown by over 300 per cent in the past year alone.”

The Livestation platform is hosted in RapidSwitch’s Maidenhead data centre where a collection of satellite dishes and dedicated servers linked by fibre optic runs delivers high quality signals at the fastest speeds.

RapidSwitch works with a number of live streaming companies which often require tier 1 peering arrangements with plenty of high quality, low latency bandwidth.
Sarah Haran, managing director of RapidSwitch, says: “At RapidSwitch we have one of the fastest and most resilient UK networks for both UK and overseas bound traffic.”

Joe Connor, CTO of Livestation, adds: “RapidSwitch brings Livestation great service stability. Technical support staff are on site 24 hours a day which means we can work on what matters to us, without worrying about the technology falling over.”

View the video case study for Livestation at http://www.rapidswitch.com/casestudies.aspx

RapidSwitch is part of iomart Group plc, one of the top cloud service providers in the world according to the annual Talkin’ Cloud report.

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