How G&L Systemhaus Built a Multi-Tenant Playout Platform on Norsk

The Customer

G&L Systemhaus is a systems integrator serving broadcasters across Europe, building the infrastructure that lets them manage live streaming events for OTT delivery. Its customers are public broadcasters operating complex, highly regulated IT environments — the kind of organisations that can’t simply drop in a generic platform and call it done.

The Challenge

G&L’s broadcaster customers needed a platform that could slot into infrastructure they’d already built, not force them to rebuild around it. As Alexander Leschinsky, Co-Founder and CEO of G&L, put it: “Our broadcasting customers need modular, flexible tools that integrate well into their complex IT infrastructure, including container orchestration with Kubernetes, Single-Sign-On, IT security requirements, monitoring, reporting, and 24×7 operations.”

That left G&L with two problems to solve at once: build a platform modular enough to fit each customer’s existing stack, and handle the underlying media processing — video, graphics, transcoding — without turning that into its primary business.

The Solution

G&L built the Playout Manager, a multi-tenant platform for OTT live event management, around a “Molecules and Atoms” framework. Each function is its own self-contained “atom” that customers can configure and combine into a “molecule” that fits their specific needs:

• Graphics Manager — creates the graphical overlays combined with video via the Compositor
• Compositor — built on the Norsk Media SDK, this is the component doing the heavy lifting: taking in multiple audiovisual sources and graphics overlays, merging them, and transcoding the result into a unified output
• Channel Manager — the organisational layer managing available infrastructure resources
• Distributor — a UI control layer sitting on top of transcoding services
• Access Manager — handles user rights, roles, groups, and application/user authentication

The platform was built for deployment flexibility from day one — on customer premises, in private clouds, in hosted environments, in a G&L-provided cloud, or on G&L’s own hardware — so each broadcaster could deploy it wherever fit their infrastructure, rather than being locked into one model.

The Results

• First deployments landed with two large European public broadcasters, including WDR, one of Germany’s best-known public broadcasters
• Early feedback pointed to a significant improvement over broadcasters’ previous systems, particularly in user interface design and stream management
• Norsk’s coverage of the media processing layer let G&L’s team stay focused on the business logic and integration work that actually differentiated the platform

“With Norsk, we have all the media processing needs covered, and can focus on the business logic instead.”

— Alexander Leschinsky, Co-Founder and CEO, G&L Systemhaus

Why It Matters Beyond G&L

The Playout Manager is a case study in what a modular, “atoms and molecules” build strategy makes possible: G&L could hand its broadcaster customers a platform that looks purpose-built to their infrastructure, without having to build a media processing engine from scratch to do it. That’s the same trade Norsk is built to offer any team building on top of live video — the flexibility to fit your customers’ environment, without the overhead of owning the media processing layer yourself.