EAGLE, COLO.—Eagle County Government Television (ECGtv) provides local residents with news and information including board of county commissioner meetings, regional transit meetings and programming highlighting life in the region.
Like most PEG stations, reaching our community beyond our cable channel to online and OTT audiences via the web and mobile devices is key. We have happily used Tightrope Media Systems’ Cablecast broadcast automation platform for many years, but until last year we had used a different vendor’s tools and services for encoding and delivering our live and on-demand streams. Frustrated with the video quality limitations and high costs, we switched to Tightrope’s cloud-based Cablecast Reflect streaming service in June 2016 and have since enjoyed significant time and cost savings.
The Cablecast platform delivers live and on-demand streams of local government meetings.
EASY TRANSITION
Working with Media Control Systems, we deployed the Cablecast Reflect service in conjunction with Tightrope’s Cablecast Live and Cablecast Pro VOD solutions to encode and deliver our online content. These tools all integrate seamlessly with our station’s core Cablecast system, enabling us to unify and simplify operations for both traditional and online distribution.
The workflow for publishing and delivering online content with Cablecast Reflect continues Tightrope’s ease of use. When we add a program to our cable schedule, we simply check a box to indicate whether we also want it streamed live or published as VOD online. We can also optionally add VOD chapter marks. The Cablecast platform automatically encodes the content and publishes it to our website (www.ecgtv.com). Cablecast Reflect then caches the content to the cloud when it’s first requested, freeing up our local bandwidth while ensuring smooth delivery for viewers.
TIME & MONEY
With our older streaming solution, we had separate broadcast and online workflows, which required a lot more work. In a two-person shop like ours, every minute saved is a big deal. Just as the overall Cablecast platform has delivered a 50 percent time savings for program scheduling versus our previous automation system, Tightrope’s integrated streaming workflow has allowed us make our content available online in half the time when compared to our previous setup.
The monetary savings we have achieved with Cablecast Reflect have been just as significant. We save roughly $10,000 annually compared to the service we previously used, while delivering a better-quality product. Tightrope lets us tweak the quality settings, but we simply use the defaults, which already look fantastic.
Cablecast Reflect’s scalability gives us practically limitless viewer accessibility. As a government organization, it’s critical that anyone who wants to watch our content can do so without issue. Cablecast Reflect works very well, delivering consistent and uninterrupted online viewing experiences every time—even when demand for a video is high.
We also use Cablecast’s included website design features and templates to build pages that are automatically populated with our videos. The intuitive tools make it easy to create pages that look consistent with the rest of our website without having to use a development API. As such, we did it ourselves without tasking our in-house programmer.
Tightrope has really thought about what PEG station operators need and what will make our lives easier.
Josh Stowell is the station manager for Eagle County Government Television, and has been with the station since 2006. He can be reached atjosh.stowell@eaglecounty.us.
For more information, visitwww.trms.comor call 866-866-4118.
