Spain’s ANTENA 3 Rely on Viewcast’s Niagara Pro II for Streaming Needs

ANTENA 3, a major commercial communications group in Spain, has upgraded its streaming media platform with the purchase of Niagara Pro II systems. The Niagara Pro offers powerful processors and large memory capacity with two independent channels to capture SDI video and encode multiple full-resolution (D1) streams.

“ViewCast has been a reliable provider of superior-quality video capture technology,” says Miguel Rodriguez Prieto, Sub Director of Systems at ANTENA 3.  “As our applications for streaming media have expanded and evolved, ViewCast has been quick to respond with another high-performance, easy-to-use solution for webcasting, mobile streaming and Internet TV. The upgrade to ViewCast Niagara Pro II encoders is consistent with our continuous efforts to offer our audiences the best access to content over the web.”

Antena 3 has employed ViewCast solutions since 2006, when it obtained the rights to transmit the UEFA Champions League soccer tournament over the Internet. Since that time, ANTENA 3 has used ViewCast’s Niagara 4115 series to stream all its live events. Now, four years later, ANTENA 3 will upgrade its Viewcast gear in response to the rapidly growing Internet TV market.

“The video-over-IP market in Spain and Portugal continues to develop at a rapid pace, and our relationship with ANTENA 3 has allowed us to increase our visibility in this region by providing the local industry with the technology infrastructure it needs to deliver cost-effective, professional-quality video over IP and mobile networks,” says ViewCast President and CEO Dave Stoner. “We appreciate ANTENA 3’s faith in our technologies and look forward to supporting the company’s streaming media needs for many years to come.”

The Niagara Pro II comes standard with ViewCast’s exclusive Simulstream and Niagara SCX control and management software; both pre-configured and ready to use. These applications allow users to manage their streaming workflow from a single, user-friendly Web interface and enable a single video source to be streamed simultaneously at multiple resolutions, at multiple data rates, and in a variety of streaming formats, including H.264, MPEG-4, Adobe Flash, Windows Media (Silverlight compatible) and 3GPP/3GPP2 for mobile applications.

Richard Spellman of Ambient Media, ViewCast’s Master Distributor in Spain said, “I’m delighted that ANTENA 3 has chosen to upgrade its streaming platform with the latest ViewCast systems. ViewCast has a reputation for ease of use, high quality video and rock-solid reliability. In addition to recent technologies, such as H.264 video and Advanced Audio Coding, we can now add the ability to schedule streaming sessions to ViewCast’s growing list of benefits.”