Viewcast Niagara Streamlines University of Oklahoma’s Media Delivery

The University of Oklahoma has selected ViewCast’s Niagara Pro II streaming media appliance to enhance its media delivery at the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The college is the center for journalism, strategic communication, and electronic media training at the university, and supports studies in electronic media that involve students desiring to work in television, internet media, and news. The ViewCast Niagara Pro II was selected to simultaneously deliver Adobe Flash content to the university’s OUTV (ou.edu/tv) web users and Windows Media content to AT&T U-verse users through a single interface.

“We wanted to get away from a cumbersome piecemeal approach to streaming media, involving multiple PCs with installed video cards, and requiring significant maintenance and support,” says George Lynn Franklin, station manager, Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Oklahoma. “ViewCast’s Niagara Pro II solution accommodated all of our requirements with a single system. The result is a
low-cost, easy-to-use solution that ensures high-performance streaming with near bullet-proof reliability.”

This appliance offers powerful processors and large memory capacity. With its two independent channels, the Niagara Pro II allows users to capture SDI video and encode multiple full-resolution (D1) streams. The Niagara Pro II encodes, streams and archives professional grade digital video and audio. It provides simultaneous streaming in multiple resolutions at multiple data rates in multiple streaming formats, including Windows Media, Adobe Flash, and 3GPP mobile formats.

“Digital media is playing an increasingly important role within today’s higher-education instruction and communication initiatives, but educational institutions are challenged to simplify the delivery and keep costs down,” says Dave Stoner, President and CEO of ViewCast. “ViewCast’s streaming appliances offer uncompromising quality and simplicity of operation, and the ability to stream a wide variety of digital assets in multiple resolutions, formats and bit rates simultaneously, for a wide range of applications. With greater flexibility to deliver digital assets in different ways, our customers get more value from their digital assets, at a lower total cost of ownership.”

The Niagara Pro II is capable of capturing and encoding live video for streaming to the Internet and to mobile devices; capturing live video for Video on Demand (VOD) applications; and re-purposing video for Internet and Intranet distribution.