Martin Persaud
TORONTO—As part of today’s dynamic media environment, our business must process and manage large volumes of content in different formats to accommodate live and on-demand viewing, as well as multiscreen “TV everywhere” content consumption.
With more than 200 websites and our innovative GO video streaming services—including CTV GO, TMN GO and Bravo GO— we continue to drive innovation and are at the forefront of the latest technology trends that help to make and keep us a leader in this space. Canadians have made us the online network destination of choice for news, sports and entertainment. This is evidenced by the fact that our websites streamed nearly 1.3 billion videos in 2013; that’s approximately 107 million streams each month
During the past few years, BellMedia has formed a strong commitment to file-based content delivery across the entire network to enable more efficient workflows and for the past five years, Imagine Communications products have been a critical component in helping us to deliver on this commitment. We currently use Imagine Communications systems at a number of Bell Media stations to improve our ability to deliver live and file-based news and sports content in real time in both English and French language versions from Victoria, British Columbia to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Imagine Communications’ sophisticated line of Velocity ESX editing systems, which are designed to deliver high-quality results in a short time, allow us to do real-time recording, real-time editing and real-time previewing of content, as well as concurrently and efficiently roll, record, ingest, edit, preview and play content across the board.
The Imagine Velocity ESX editor is designed for high-res news, sports and production editing, and allows our editors to operate directly on content that’s been saved on our Nexio SAN. This arrangement allows editors to start working on programs at the very moment ingest begins, as well as on previously stored material, leading to greater workplace collaboration and a faster time to getting content to air. Imagine Communications enables us to deliver on one of our really big initiatives—“TV Everywhere.”
SUPPORT FOR MULTIPLE FORMATS
The software codecs of the Imagine Communications on-SAN editors support the editing of different file formats and their publication to both the web and to mobile devices.
All of our television stations are connected by a common network infrastructure, with a centralized distribution center located in Toronto. As we are equipped with Imagine Nexio server systems, we can exchange files in real time across the network and easily access content from outlying stations. Such an infrastructure enables us to deliver live streaming or file playback for consumers and ultimately allows us to more easily deliver content, whether live or file-based, in a real-time manner for late breaking news and sports across the country. This is something that might have seemed impossible just a few years ago, but it’s now an established part of our business model, thanks to such innovations from Imagine Communications as their Velocity ESX editing systems.
Martin Persaud is manager of Engineering Projects at the CTV Television Network, a division of BellMedia. He may be contacted atmamartin.persaud@bellmedia.ca.
For additional information, contact Imagine Communications at 866-446- 2446 or visitwww.imaginecommunications.com.
