Telestream Shows Off Three Products for Video Production, Distribution

Following record first-quarter sales, Telestream arrived at the 2010 NAB Show with three major product announcements: Vantage, Episode 6 and Wirecast Pro.

Vantage
Vantage represents the next generation in Telestream’s Flip Factory technology. It provides an automated system for capture, transcoding, metadata processing, analysis, graphics assembly, and video-file management in IT environments. Three tools — Vantage Workflow, Vantage Analysis, and the new Vantage Transcode — offer deep file-format support for broadcast, cable, edit, Web, mobile, VOD, and IPTV workflows.

“In sports in particular, on-demand content is very time-critical. Time is of the essence,” said VP of Marketing Barb DeHart at Telestream’s booth. “Vantage allows these sports organizations to set up an automated hands-free workflow to reproduce and transcode that content and deliver it much faster than you would with human intervention.”

Vantage enables users to schedule captures, transcode content, analyze that content, and correct any production issues with the video on the backend.

“We’ve got a solid set of case studies out in the UK with some of the football clubs,” said DeHart. “Within four minutes of a goal being scored, they want to have 65 versions of the content distributed out to 15 different portals for mobile distribution so fans can see highlights almost immediately. Vantage can facilitate those workflows.”

Vantage, which was presented with TV Technology magazine’s 2010 STAR Award at NAB, will be available in the second quarter of 2010 priced at $8,500 for the basic Vantage workflow. Transcode can be added for $5,500 and Analysis for $7,500 per server. Transcode is also available as a standalone for $5,500.

Wirecast Pro
The new Wirecast Pro live-video-production and -streaming tool can be loaded on a laptop to broadcast live events and create professional Webcasts from any location with only a computer and an Internet connection.

The latest version of Wirecast features H.264 encoding and a new intuitive user interface. It builds on the advanced video-production capabilities currently available in Wirecast, adding more graphic content, including virtual 3D foregrounds, backgrounds, and scoreboards. Wirecast Pro also has improved audio controls, new format support for On2 VP6, and support for more input devices, such as wireless IP cameras, providing increased flexibility in professional broadcast and sports environments.

“For sports, [Wirecast] is used a lot in high schools as well as [Division II and Division III] colleges,” says DeHart. “It’s a cost-effective way to stream and produce content. You’ve got some graphics capabilities, plus we’re adding scoreboarding and some new graphics features geared towards sports.”

Stretch Internet is one of Telestream’s top sports clients, streaming college sports from around the country with a focus on Olympic sports. Stretch uses Wirecast as its onsite capture device for streaming to the Web and several mobile devices.

“[Stretch has] contracts with a lot of colleges, and they publish all of their sports video,” says DeHart. “They use Wirecast as their on-site switcher to produce the content and then push it out to their streaming servers from there. We’ve gotten great feedback and response from [Stretch].”

Wirecast Pro is scheduled for release in June priced at $995. Wirecast 4.0 is a free update for existing customers or for new customers at $449.

Episode 6
Episode 6 is cross-platform, desktop-to-server software that allows users to pool resources to share encoding work across multiple computers in a mixed environment of Macs and PCs. While Vantage is primarily a broadcast-centric solution, Episode 6 is geared toward Web and mobile distribution.

Combining exclusive One-Click Clustering and integrated file sharing allows users to share work across multiple machines for faster and more efficient video encoding. A new, intuitive user interface with graphical workflow builder simplifies the encoding process. As part of its new deployment capabilities, Episode 6 also automates uploading of completed videos to YouTube.

It will be available in the second quarter priced at $495.

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