NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Media workflow and processing provider Telestream has tapped Benjamin Desbois as CEO.

Debsbois, currently the company’s chief growth and strategy officer, will take over as CEO on July 1. He succeeds Dan Castles, Telestream’s co-founder and longtime CEO, who will shift to executive chair of the board as part of a planned transition.

“Telestream has always been built on trust—trust in our people, trust in our products and trust in the customer relationships that have defined this company for nearly three decades,” Castles said. “Benjamin understands that foundation deeply. He knows our customers, our markets and our technology, and he brings the leadership experience and industry credibility needed to guide Telestream into its next chapter.

“I am confident he is the right person to lead the company forward and I look forward to supporting him and the team in my role as executive chair,” he added.

Desbois has held leadership roles across the media and entertainment technology sector for over two decades, Telestream said. As chief growth and strategy officer, he was tasked with advancing Telestream’s go-to-market strategy and reinforcing its position as a trusted partner to broadcasters, content owners, sports franchises, postproduction teams, service providers and enterprises, the company said.

Desbois has also served as Telestream’s chief revenue officer, a job he left in 2023. He later held senior executive roles at Backlight, Avid Technology and Dalet, where he led commercial, product and strategic initiatives focused on media workflows, customer transformation and business growth, the company said.

“Telestream has an extraordinary legacy, and I am honored to take on this role at such an important moment for the company and the industry,” Desbois said. “Dan and the team have built a company with deep customer trust and exceptional technology. As AI and cloud reshape how media is made and delivered, my focus is to build on that foundation while accelerating our innovation in intelligent, AI-driven, and cloud-native workflows, ensuring our customers have the agility and confidence they need to thrive in a changing media landscape.”

Castles will continue as Telestream’s CEO through July 1 and the executive leadership team will also remain in their current roles, the company said.

As executive chair, Castles will support Desbois and the company’s board and executive leadership team on strategic direction, customer relationships and long-term value creation, Telestream said.

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has announced a strategic collaboration with Grass Valley to enable deeper interoperability between Telestream’s workflow automation, processing, and monitoring solutions and Grass Valley’s AMPP (Agile Media Processing Platform).

Telestream Vantage for file-based workflow orchestration, Pulse for end-to-end observability and Telestream UP for cloud-native media processing are being integrated with AMPP, Grass’s software-defined production platform enabling live and distributed workflows across on-prem, cloud or hybrid environments. The integration supports modern media operations, giving customers greater flexibility to build scalable, hybrid infrastructures without vendor lock-in.

The collaboration builds on existing integrations between Telestream Vantage, DIVA and Grass Valley solutions, extending these capabilities to include Telestream UP and Pulse within AMPP-based workflows.

“Media workflows that were created 10 years ago are now becoming a constraint to forward progress,” said Charlie Dunn, vice president of Product, Telestream. “By working with Grass Valley, we’re helping customers bridge live production and file-based processing within a unified, open architecture. This collaboration is about giving media organizations the power to streamline existing workflows and deploy them in the most cost-effective environments, with the flexibility to scale as the business grows."

“Open, interoperable workflows are now a requirement for modern media operations,” says Adam Marshall, chief product officer for Grass Valley. “Our continuing collaboration with Telestream further extends the AMPP ecosystem, enabling customers to connect live production, playout and file-based workflows within a unified, hybrid architecture. By integrating capabilities such as orchestration, processing, and monitoring, we are giving media organizations the flexibility to build workflows that scale, adapt, and operate efficiently across any environment.”

The companies said their strategic partnership “ensures robust interoperability within customer environments, combining Grass Valley’s leadership in live production, content management, and playout solutions, with Telestream’s strength in workflow automation and observability.”

Grass Valley’s Framelight X plays a central role in this vision, enabling the full content lifecycle—from capture and access to editing, collaboration, and publishing—within a browser-native, story-centric environment. Rather than relying on fragmented toolsets, Framelight X brings content into a unified workspace where stories can be shaped and delivered faster, with less friction.

Built on AMPP’s open and extensible architecture, Framelight X integrates with best-of-breed technologies across the content lifecycle—storage, graphics, AI services, automation, and distribution. Telestream’s workflow automation, processing, captioning, and quality control capabilities extend this ecosystem, ensuring that content moving through Framelight X can be automatically processed, quality-controlled, and delivered across platforms, at scale.

Telestream’s ability to integrate across the media supply chain, from ingest and processing to QC, metadata, and delivery, positions it as a key enabler of hybrid workflows that span multiple systems and environments. Grass Valley AMPP enables flexible deployment models, allowing customers to optimize for performance, cost, and operational requirements. This alignment ensures that workflows can scale dynamically while maintaining visibility, control, and consistency across distributed environments.

Both companies are aligned around a hybrid-first approach to infrastructure, recognizing that media organizations must operate across a mix of on-premises systems, private infrastructure, and public cloud environments.

NEVADA CITY—Media workflow tech provider Telestream has expanded Telestream Cloud Services with the introduction of UP, a new cloud-native solution designed to support global ingest, orchestration, review, and real-time monitoring in modern production environments. With UP, Telestream extends its cloud portfolio beyond high-scale cloud processing and hybrid workflow extension, addressing the growing operational demands of distributed, IP-based media production.

In making the announcement, Telestream noted that cost pressures, audience fragmentation, and increasingly distributed production models has pushed media organizations to adopt cloud solutions rapidly but unevenly. Some companies are extending trusted workflows into elastic cloud environments. Others are building cloud-native production pipelines from the ground up.

UP furthers Telestream’s mission to deliver a unified global ingest strategy that spans live, camera card, and file-based workflows. With cloud capture and monitoring plus system-aware metadata, technical teams can achieve precision, flexibility, and speed, no matter the format, source, or operational environment.

“Media companies are modernizing in different ways and at different speeds,” said Charlie Dunn, executive vice president, products, Telestream. “Some are evolving established infrastructure. Others are launching fully cloud-native operations. Our approach is to give customers flexible options, whether they’re scaling global processing, extending existing workflows, or operating real-time production entirely in the cloud. With UP, we’re expanding our cloud services to address the operational layer of that transformation.”

The launch means that Telestream Cloud Services now includes three distinct offerings:

• UP – A modular, cloud-native service layer for ingest, orchestration, review, and monitoring
• EDC (formerly known as Encoding.com) – API-first cloud media processing at scale
• Vantage Cloud – Extending Vantage workflows into cloud environments for hybrid operations

Each service addresses different operational requirements.

UP expands the portfolio into cloud-native operational control, supporting ingest, workflow automation, collaborative review, and live signal monitoring in distributed production environments.

EDC provides highly parallel, API-driven AI analysis, transcoding, QC, captioning, and audio processing for OTT platforms, FAST channels, and global content distributors. Designed for elastic scalability, EDC enables high-throughput media processing without infrastructure management overhead.

Vantage Cloud allows existing Vantage customers to extend trusted workflows into cloud environments, enabling burst capacity, geographic flexibility, and hybrid deployment models without re-architecting established pipelines.

UP brings ingest, orchestration, review, and live monitoring into a single operational environment and is built for distributed and hybrid production models, UP gives teams real-time control and visibility across cloud-based workflows.

At launch, UP includes:

• UP.Capture – Elastic live and file-based ingest in the cloud for multi-source, fast-turnaround production.
• UP.Review – Proxyless playback and annotation with growing file support to accelerate editorial decision-making.
• UP.Workflow – Low-code automation for ingest, QC, AI tasks, captioning, and delivery.
• UP.Lens – Cloud-native multiviewer monitoring and intelligent alerts for SRT and other live contribution feeds.
• UP.Ingest – Professional camera card and file-based ingest for sports, news, and mobile production.

UP supports deployment as managed SaaS, within customer-controlled cloud environments, or connected to on-prem infrastructure, allowing organizations to modernize without abandoning existing systems.

“For nearly three decades, Telestream has helped the industry navigate major technology shifts,” said Benjamin Desbois, chief growth and strategy officer at Telestream. “With UP and our expanded Cloud Services portfolio, we’re giving customers the freedom to modernize on their terms, connecting Global Ingest, automation, and monitoring into a unified operational layer that’s ready for wherever their workflows need to run next.”

To learn more about Telestream Cloud Services and the new UP offering, visit: https://www.telestream.com/up/.

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Media workflow technology provider Telestream, has announced major new AI-powered features in its product portfolio, with practical AI enhancements across its Vantage, Vantage Cloud, EDC, Stanza, and Qualify product lines.

Building on the foundation introduced with Vantage AI in 2025, Telestream said it is is advancing its production-ready AI workflows, accelerating localization, strengthening quality control, and introducing new AI-assisted workflow design capabilities that connect and unify enterprise operations across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.

“Last year we introduced Vantage AI as a new foundation for intelligent media workflows,” said Rich Andes, vice president of product management at Telestream. “Today, we’re expanding that foundation with deeper integration across cloud and hybrid deployments, enhanced QC automation, and scalable localization workflows. This is practical AI in action: embedded, explainable, and designed for real-world production environments.”

The latest enhancements reflect a shift from introducing AI features to operationalizing AI across the enterprise, driving measurable workflow impact across ingest, processing, compliance, and delivery.

Telestream reported that its latest AI advancements deliver meaningful operational progress across five core areas:

• AI Caption: Expanded Localization at Scale. AI-powered captioning and translation now support up to 128 languages across Vantage and Stanza workflows, enabling automated speech-to-text, caption generation, and multilingual subtitle delivery in a unified processing chain. These enhancements significantly reduce turnaround time for FAST channels, OTT distribution, and global sports syndication.
• AI Qualify: AI-Assisted QC Embedded in Production Pipelines. Enhancements to Qualify integrate AI-powered lip-sync validation, subtitle alignment checks, and spoken-language verification directly into automated QC workflows. By flagging only exception-based issues for operator review, teams reduce manual inspection time while improving delivery confidence and platform compliance.
• AI Speech: Real-Time Speech Intelligence for Growing Files. Speech-to-text and metadata extraction capabilities now support growing file workflows, enabling real-time tagging and searchable metadata during ingest and processing. This allows news, sports, and live production teams to accelerate time-to-edit and improve content discoverability without waiting for file completion.
• AI Vision: Visual Intelligence Reduces Manual Lifting. AI Vision introduces frame-level visual intelligence across Telestream workflows, automatically transforming video into actionable metadata that extends beyond traditional file properties. Using advanced computer vision, AI Vision identifies objects, logos, lower thirds, safe-area violations, and objectionable content, while generating scene-level descriptions in real time. These capabilities enable describing the scene within a video feed as metadata, logo detection and removal across large content libraries, and ad-break identification and replacement for VOD repurposing. AI Vision reduces manual review time, strengthens compliance workflows, and expands automation for live and file-based production environments.
• AI Media Analyzer: Content-Aware Analysis. AI Media Analyzer advances content inspection from basic technical validation to contextual understanding of what is actually inside a media file. Rather than simply verifying resolution, frame rate, or codec, Media Analyzer detects the nature of the content, segments media into meaningful sections, and generates metadata that reflects scene changes, content types, graphic overlays, and potential compliance risks. This content-aware analysis enables faster review cycles and more accurate downstream workflow triggering. It provides significant operator time savings across ingest, processing, and delivery environments, transforming media assessment into an automated, production-ready capability. This feature is available in Telestream's EDC platform and will be coming soon to Vantage AI.

These enhancements ensure AI capabilities are integrated components that create a trusted production infrastructure.

“AI delivers value when it’s operationalized at scale,” Andes added. “Our customers don’t need more labels or transcripts; they need intelligent automation that reduces turnaround time, improves accuracy, meets compliance, and scales with their infrastructure and workflows. That’s what this next phase of Practical AI delivers.”

As with previous releases, Telestream’s AI capabilities remain secure by design. Customers retain full control of their content, whether deployed on-premises, in private environments, or via managed cloud services. No customer media is used to train shared models, ensuring compliance, auditability, and cost predictability.

In addition to AI workflow enhancements, Telestream also reported that it continues to invest in next-generation format readiness and compliance standards, including support for emerging codecs and audio standards and exploration of C2PA metadata workflows to address growing content authenticity requirements.

To learn more about Telestream’s production-ready AI, visit https://www.telestream.com/vantage-ai/.

NEVADA CITY, Calif., and CENTENNIAL, Colo.—Telestream DIVA content management platform is now certified for use with the Quantum ActiveScale object storage platform and will be jointly demonstrated in the Quantum booth at the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22, in Las Vegas.

The certification, which includes use Quantum ActiveScale integrated Cold Storage tier, enables media organizations to combine DIVA’s proven, policy-driven archive workflows with an on-premises object storage platform. Quantum ActiveScale is designed to deliver extreme durability, lower power and cooling costs and streamlined management to support long-term preservation at petabyte scale.

The certification also expands the relationship between the companies, building on existing certification of Quantum StorNext and interoperability with Telestream solutions, such as Vantage.

Media companies are now generating and retaining more content than ever, creating pressure to archive everything safely, affordably and sustainably. As the value of this content grows and libraries expand across sports, broadcast, production and streaming operations, organizations rely on DIVA’s lifecycle and policy management to keep archives structured, searchable and ready for reuse.

But protecting and retaining vast collections for decades also requires storage that is power-efficient, cost-effective, and secure at petabyte scale. With cloud costs rising and long-term content value increasing, organizations are seeking modern, on-premises S3 object storage with predictable economics and sustainable preservation.

The combined Telestream-Quantum solution provides a modern foundation for sports organizations, broadcasters, production companies, post facilities and enterprises managing long-term video libraries. With DIVA now certified across all ActiveScale tiers, users can build archives that:

• Scale from terabytes to multiple petabytes and beyond.
• Maintain consistent DIVA workflows across on-premises and cloud-based S3 tiers.
• Use a unified API-driven archive strategy to simplify ingest, retention, and retrieval.
• Preserve aging or at-risk library assets in a cost-efficient form factor.
• Avoid unpredictable cloud egress fees while retaining cloud-like flexibility.

Telestream has certified all active versions of DIVA with ActiveScale and ActiveScale Cold Storage using Quantum’s S3 API. The certification covers archiving, retrieval, metadata management and policy-driven lifecycle operations across local and hybrid archive environments. Both companies have validated interoperability and offer coordinated support for customers deploying the integrated solution.

Live demonstrations will be conducted at NAB booth N1726.

More information is available on the Telestream and Quantum websites.

LONDON—As Europe’s largest media company, Sky Group delivers premium content at a scale few media companies can match. Operating across multiple markets has meant managing a patchwork of siloed systems, inconsistent tooling, different operational practices and varied compliance requirements, preventing us from fully leveraging economies of scale.

Our challenge required not only a technically innovative approach to future-proof Sky’s content supply chain, but also a long-term strategic solution that would unify operations across the Group.

In short, we needed a radical shift onto a single platform.

One Group, One Platform
To address this, we built Media­Mesh, a unified cloud platform that centralizes QC, enrichment, conversion, and distribution at scale. The MediaMesh architecture—an API-driven, modular framework—brings together a curated ecosystem of in-house built microservices and products from leading industry partners, each selected for their ability to solve specific pain points.

For this project, we partnered with several companies, including SDVI, whose Rally platform provided the base layer that integrates with new and legacy tooling to retrieve metadata and media from dispersed systems and storage, in order to orchestrate content through the group’s platform.

Telestream’s Qualify serves as the automated quality control (QC) function at ingest, validating assets against Sky’s technical standards before proceeding further. Through close collaboration with operations, years of QC data were audited to optimize a system that flags issues early and reduces false positives compared to legacy tools, significantly minimizing manual review effort and downstream issues.

AWS ran AI to identify on-screen subtitles and spoken language to automatically identify localization requirements to fast-track downstream dubbing and subtitling efforts. This language detection has also allowed Sky Italia viewers to filter content by precise audio language, unlocking new levels of discoverability and personalization.

Codemill’s Accurate.Video platform not only plays back content, but provides a collection of audio controls, the ability to enable/disable subs and dubs for review and can present different time-based markers along a timeline (e.g., segmentation points, QC errors, sections needing localization).

We also deployed TMT Insights’ Polaris, which provides operations with a single platform identity, abstracting them from the multiple backend services, to streamline their operational practices. The Polaris UI provides visibility into metadata, end-to-end monitoring, workflow anomalies, prioritizes task management for steps requiring human intervention, communication threading and launching specialized functions such as editing tasks, various exports and ad hoc workflows. These functions help operations meet critical SLAs with confidence, reduce touchpoints, and speed up time to air.

Whether it’s ingesting content from over 300 content partners, enriching it with metadata and access services, or distributing it to platforms like Sky Glass and NOW, MediaMesh ensures every step is automated, observable, and streamlined. And the elastic scalability allocates sufficient system resources to meet the changing business demands.

To deliver a platform as ambitious as MediaMesh, we had to rethink not just our technology stack, but our internal capabilities. This meant evolving from a traditional broadcast engineering mindset to a software-first organization. TV engineers retrained as software engineers, embracing cloud-native development and modern DevOps practices. This transformation has not only accelerated delivery but fostered a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

Business Benefits
By centralizing workflows, we can develop and deploy features once, rather than duplicating effort across multiple systems, delivering consistent benefits across the entire group. This streamlines internal investment and speeds up our time-to-market when delivering new features. Today, MediaMesh processes more than 2.7 million assets annually, equating to more than 10 million minutes of content, and manages around $2 billion worth of media across our ecosystem.

As we continue to evolve MediaMesh, we’re exploring new ways to enrich content, streamline compliance, and personalize viewer experiences across markets. The platform’s modular design ensures we can adapt quickly, whether it’s integrating new services, responding to regulatory changes or supporting future product launches. MediaMesh has laid the foundation for a more agile, scalable and collaborative future at Sky, and we’re excited to build on this momentum to shape next-generation content processing.

More information is available at www.telestream.net.

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has introduced ARGUS Version 2.3, which introduces Live Look, a feature that lets operators inspect live and on-demand streams visually and audibly right from the ARGUS monitoring environment.

Designed for rapid validation of service health and quality, Live Look enables real-time video playback and audio confirmation from the ARGUS consolidated dashboard, allowing operators to see and hear exactly what viewers experience and resolve any issues without switching between tools or interfaces, the company said.

ARGUS, Telestream iQ’s centralized video-monitoring solution for video-distribution networks, provides users with a comprehensive end-to-end view of media health diagnostics through high-level dashboards and deep-dive analytics. With ARGUS Live Look, media operations teams can quickly isolate issues, reduce time to recovery, and improve confidence across the entire delivery workflow, it said.

“ARGUS centralizes correlated channel observability across the entire delivery chain and at scale,” Ken Haren, director of product management at Telestream, said. “ARGUS helps operations teams focus on what matters by surfacing precise, timely and actionable insights. With the launch of ARGUS v2.3 and the new Live Look capability, teams can now view any monitored stream in real-time directly in the ARGUS dashboard, enhancing diagnostic confidence and speeding up escalation decisions."

Live Look addresses the need for visual confirmation at scale, which is especially valuable for organizations managing hundreds of linear or over-the-top channels across distributed operations. From verifying audio presence to confirming editorial intent when silence or anomalies are detected, Live Look provides immediate insight without leaving the ARGUS environment. This, combined with Telestream’s monitoring-by-exception approach, allows operators to focus on addressing true deviations rather than watching every feed.

ARGUS v2.3 also offers updates that streamline management, improve security and optimize monitoring performance, including enhanced single sign-on (SSO)-enabled user management, automated lineup import/export and improved audio packet identifier (PID) monitoring. Telestream ARGUS v2.3 with Live Look is available immediately.

More information is available on the company’s website.

NEVADA City, Calif.—At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest architecture that seamlessly unifies live capture, camera card ingest, and file-based workflows.

Built on the Vantage platform, the new workflow capabilities are designed for ultimate flexibility, scalability, and efficiency, supporting on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments, the company said. Central to the strategy is Telestream’s practical use of AI; rather than generating unstructured “metadata dumps,” Telestream Global Ingest produces structured, system-aware, and standards-compliant metadata at the point of capture. This enables instant interoperability with a wide range of platforms, such as Avid, Iconik, and Mimir, accelerating editorial, archive discovery and distribution while eliminating workflow bottlenecks, according to the company.

“With Global Ingest, we’re transforming a fragmented technical hurdle into a unified entry point for high-speed production and operational efficiency,” said Charlie Dunn, EVP of Product Management at Telestream. “By standardizing ingest on the Vantage platform, we eliminate the need for proprietary vendors and rigid integrations, enabling customers to move content from any source into any editorial or MAM system with speed and precision. We are making ingest a strategic advantage rather than a workflow gap.”

A Unified, Intelligent Ingest Platform
Telestream’s scalable ingest capabilities empower technical teams with precision, flexibility, and speed, no matter the format, source, or operational environment (on-prem, hybrid, or cloud). It supports a wide range of media operations, from high-performance, real-time ingest for live sports and news, to scalable file-based ingest for post-production and media supply chains.

Highlights include:

• Vantage Live Capture – A high-performance ingest engine with unmatched input/output flexibility. Supporting ST 2110, SDI, SRT, NDI, MPEG-TS, and RTMP, it enables centralized ingest from IP, SDI, and even tape-based sources. With support for up to 16 channels in a single RU and deep codec support, Live Capture seamlessly integrates into editorial and MAM systems such as Avid and Adobe.
  
• Live Schedule PRO 2.0 – A high-availability, enterprise-ready scheduling platform with clustered deployment, automation, and failover capabilities. Designed for continuous operation, it’s ideal for live newsrooms, sports broadcasters, and 24/7 ingest environments.
  
• Camera Card Ingest – Telestream’s camera card ingest solution delivers a streamlined user experience with enhanced metadata extraction, multi-destination workflows, and tight Vantage integration. It accelerates turnaround times for editors and supports modern content production at scale.
  
• Review: Proxyless Player for Distributed Teams – A professional-grade playback experience for live and captured media, with real-time 10-bit native playback, scopes, and audio monitoring. Review will support remote editorial collaboration without the need for proxy generation.

Telestream will showcase Global Ingest powered by Vantage at IBC2025, Stand 7.B21.

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream today unveiled Vantage AI, a platform-wide evolution of artificial intelligence capabilities that enable smarter, faster and more adaptive media workflows from ingest to delivery, and will show it at IBC2025, set for Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center.

Building on Vantage’s ability to automate complex operations, the AI expansion broadens the scope of what can be automated.

“Many AI tools overwhelm teams with raw transcripts and labels that require manual interpretation before they’re useful,” Charlie Dunn, executive vice president of products at Telestream, said.

“Vantage AI takes a fundamentally different approach,” he said. “We deliver context-aware metadata that’s embedded into workflows and ready to trigger real actions, whether automating subtitles, accelerating search or enabling smarter decisions. It is practical AI that enables our customers to improve their operations and businesses.”

Telestream’s unified approach to AI empowers customers to streamline operations, enrich metadata and enhance QC, while maintaining full control over content, infrastructure and cost predictability. Highlights include:

• AI-Caption, which generates accurate, multilingual subtitles from audio with options for human-refined or fully automated delivery, preserving timing, readability and cultural nuance.
• AI-Speech, which creates rich, searchable metadata through transcription, content summarization and sensitive language detection. This accelerates content discovery across news, sports and post workflows.
• AI-Qualify, which detects lip sync issues, subtitle overlap and spoken language mismatches—problems often missed by rule-based QC systems. Automating these checkpoints with AI eliminates manual checks and improves accuracy across formats and platforms.
• AI-Vision, which detects logos, scene changes and ad break opportunities to automate segmentation and streamline content repackaging. This also helps ensure compliance by identifying visual elements that may require masking or replacement.
• AI-Workflow, which uses natural language prompts to create media processing workflows, accelerating production cycles while reducing errors. The intelligent automation makes media operations more streamlined and dynamic.

Vantage AI also enriches content in Telestream DIVA, automatically generating captions, transcripts, summaries and visual metadata that accelerates archive discovery and automation without the need for third-party tools or siloed processing.

“Security is paramount for our customers. Vantage AI operates securely on-prem or in controlled environments, keeping media assets within the customer’s domain. No customer content is used for training the model,” Dunn said. “This ensures compliance, auditability, and cost control, especially important for broadcasters and live event producers operating at scale.”

Vantage AI is available for deployment today across a range of media workflows, including live production, 24/7 broadcast operations, content repackaging, and other high-volume environments.

See Telestream at IBC2025 Stand 7.B21.

More information is available on the company’s website.

We all agree that content isn’t valuable unless it’s accessible and that access today (and for the foreseeable future) depends almost entirely on metadata. And while AI tools have made headlines for sensational visual generation, the real opportunity lies in applying AI at the point of ingest, where metadata can be structured, system-ready, and immediately usable across production, editorial and asset management systems.

For organizations managing mixed environments that include OGs like Avid to newcomers like iconik and Mimir, the challenge is consistent: how to generate actionable metadata once, and make it usable everywhere.

The answer requires more than transcription. It requires engineering metadata pipelines that are system-aware, and automation-ready.

The Metadata Challenge at Ingest
Ingest workflows today must accommodate a wide range of formats and signal types, from SDI and SRT to ST 2110 and file-based delivery. These inputs often arrive without standardized metadata, or worse, with metadata that is incompatible with the production environment it’s entering.

When your production, editorial or asset management system can’t interpret this metadata, assets become invisible. They might be present on shared storage or in a database, but they are effectively inaccessible to your colleagues who rely on search, tags, and categorization to do their work.

This isn’t just a usability issue; It is a systemic bottleneck—one that leads to duplicating efforts, unnecessary storage bloat, and unused assets. The manual update of metadata can be a drag on the creative process, and the big downside, loss of monetization opportunities around unused assets.

The Real World is a Mix of Logos
Consider a media operation where the editorial team builds long-form stories in Avid Media Composer, the digital publishing team uses iconik for clipping and social content, and leadership is planning a move to a cloud-native MAM like Mimir. Without metadata interoperability, these systems operate as isolated silos.

Engineers in this environment face several challenges:

• How do you normalize metadata formats across systems with different schemas?
• How do you automate tagging without exposing sensitive data to external AI services?

How do you build a metadata layer that can persist across platform migrations?

Solving these problems starts at ingest. When metadata is created during ingest using a controlled, customizable AI engine, it becomes possible to prepopulate editorial and asset management systems with structured, validated, and consistent metadata.

Privacy Please
Security and privacy is paramount for every professional media company. They want on-premise, media-specific AI engines that can generate multiple types of text-based metadata such as:

• Transcripts for full-text indexing and search
• Sub-clip summaries for segment-level context
• File-level summaries for cataloging and archive tagging
• Sentiment tags for editorial filtering

Keyword Extraction for Named Entities and Events
Because the AI runs entirely within the local infrastructure, there is no need for cloud access, no exposure of sensitive content, and no unpredictable usage-based costs. The output can be formatted to match the ingest requirements of your system without risk of your data being scanned or used to train public data sets.

The result is an ingest workflow that not only delivers transcoded media, but a complete metadata envelope with zero risk that is ready for immediate use across platforms.

Building a System-Aware Metadata Pipeline
The critical engineering task is not just metadata creation. It’s metadata alignment. AI-generated metadata must be:

• Standards-compliant to ensure compatibility across ingest and editorial systems
• Contextually aware so that summaries and tags reflect the intended use of the asset
• Mapped to system-specific schemas, including AAF for Avid or JSON/XML for cloud-based asset managers
• Linked via persistent identifiers to ensure traceability across edits and platform migrations

When this is done correctly, it unlocks a number of efficiencies. Editorial teams can search by phrase or keyword without transcribing manually. Digital teams can find content aligned to tone, event, or subject matter. Engineers can integrate new platforms without retrofitting metadata after migration.

Most importantly, content becomes discoverable and usable immediately upon ingest rather than sitting dormant on storage until it’s manually processed (or not).

Engineering for Discoverability
From an engineering standpoint, this is about shifting metadata from a post-processing task to an ingest-native function. When AI is embedded directly into the ingest workflow, metadata generation becomes deterministic, repeatable, and secure. The pipeline delivers not just media assets, but indexed, searchable, and categorized content across the production stack.

This is not just a smart automation play. It is a foundational shift in how media workflows are engineered for speed, scale, and cross-platform utility. In a landscape where discoverability drives reuse, speed to air, and monetization, metadata is no longer optional infrastructure. It is core to system design.

NEVADA City, Calif.—Telestream announced new product enhancements to its Vantage server platform as well as upgraded test and measurement tools for content creation and delivery at the 2025 NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 6-9.

Enhancements to Vantage include upgraded compliance, quality control, MAM, and archive workflows; next-generation ingest, media processing, and playout servers, and advanced AI and cloud-native developments, bringing speed, intelligence, and flexibility to the media operation, the company said.

"As new business opportunities emerge, and economic pressures intensify, customers are increasingly driven to expand their content operations, adopt new standards and formats like IP and UHD, and find efficiencies in the cloud. While these transitions move them forward, they do so with new challenges in terms of complexity, cost management, and operational scalability," says Benjamin Desbois, Chief Growth and Strategy Officer, Telestream. "Vantage empowers customers to strategically navigate these challenges with a flexible platform that optimizes both infrastructure and workflows—on-premise, hybrid, and in the cloud—to achieve maximum performance, scalability, cost-efficiency, and monetization."

Vantage simplifies complex media workflows for broadcast, post, sports, and corporate, through smart automation and seamless integrations.m the company said. New high-impact workflow updates include:

• Streamlined QC Workflows On-premise, Hybrid, & Cloud: Qualify Action QC supports on-premise, hybrid and cloud deployments. It seamlessly integrates the capabilities of both Aurora and Vidchecker to enable the full range of quality, compliance and integrity capabilities as a single Vantage action.
• Intelligent Automation for Captions/Subtitles, Metadata, and Content Summaries: New AI capabilities automate high-quality speech-to-text for rapid, professional quality captioning and subtitle workflows. Vantage also automates time-based metadata and summary extracts which add significant value to any content search and retrieve.
• Tighter integration between Vantage and DIVA: New integration between DIVA and Vantage streamlines archive and discovery processes. Create and act on DIVA archive objects through Vantage workflows. Additional features will support content scalability and media orchestration excellence.
• Leverage Cost-Efficient, Modern MAMs: Seamless integration between Vantage and powerful next-generation cloud-centric MAM solutions like iconik enables customers to bring the latest MAM functionality to their content repository, enhancing accessibility, collaboration, and monetization.

Technology advancements and additions for ingest, media processing and playout include:

• Advanced GRID processing: Split complex transcodes across Vantage nodes, enabling outputs to be processed up to 1/n the time. Faster task completion reduces time-to-delivery while simultaneously boosting operational capacity.
• Next-generation Lightspeed Live Servers for Capture: The new Lightspeed Live Servers for Capture double the recording capacity of previous models within the same 1RU configuration. New support for UHD formats and higher frame rates that were previously not possible. Local RAID storage is now expandable up to 30TB—a significant upgrade from the prior 7TB limit. Configuration options include SDI (3G/12G) and ST2110 (10/25G SR/LR). Comes standard with 2x800GB NVMe SSDs in RAID1 for OS.
• Higher performance Vantage Lightspeed Servers: The latest Vantage Lightspeed Servers deliver up to a 30% performance boost in media processing over the previous generation. Standard features include dual 800GB NVMe SSDs in RAID1 for the OS and dual 1.92TB SSDs for media storage—in a compact 1RU form factor.
• NEW! Lightspeed Live Servers for Play: (Coming June 2025) Purpose-built for live production, these new servers support SDI (3G/12G) and ST2110 (10/25G, SR/LR), offering configurations of up to 8 channels in HD and 4 channels in UHD in a 1RU form factor. Feature highlights include playout of any format back to back, AMP protocol support for std control, customizable APIs for advanced integration and a 15TB-30TB SSD storage range.

Test & Measurement
Enhancements to Telestream’s PRISM waveform monitors, SPG9000 sync pulse and test signal generators, and ARGUS centralized video monitoring systems—which already support SMPTE 2110 and UHD—will help creators transition to mainstream HDR production and allow service providers to expand their reach, the company said.

“The new PRISM, SPG9000, and ARGUS capabilities we are introducing at NAB Show 2025 are the direct result of close customer partnerships and the need for practical solutions to today’s challenges delivering high quality media,” said Matthew Driscoll, VP Product Management, Telestream. “As our customers move new technologies into mainstream deployments, we are adapting the tools they require to be successful.”

PRISM, Software-Defined Waveform Monitors include configurable and remotely accessible software that performs within any content creation chain in both SDI and IP installations. Key enhancements to the PRISM platform include:

• Complete support for ST 2110-22 using JPEG XS compression: With up to 4 simultaneous ST 2110-22 streams, the JPEG XS compression allows an approximate bit rate reduction of 10X, significantly reducing the cost of network infrastructure by eliminating the need for manual configurations and simplifying workflows. PRISM now supports a test-signal out in the same format to provide valuable comparisons to a known good signal.
• User Configurable 3D LUT: Integrated 3D LUT allows camera operators to shade HDR cameras by monitoring down-mapped SDR signals and compare HDR/SDR signals side-by-side, eliminating the need for conversion boxes offers a more cost-effective approach, streamlined workflow, and increased reliability in live productions.
• Enhanced HDR production tools: Enhanced Telestream CIE chart includes the ability to narrow the range of the Luma to focus on specific regions of interest. In addition to the false color mode for showing BT.709 and P3, regions are now ‘banded’ to indicate how far out of the gamut they are to help colorists more easily map into these color spaces for increased flexibility.

Telestream has now added more resiliency configurations and troubleshooting tools to its SPG9000, Software-Defined Sync Pulse and Test Signal Generator. The SPG9000 is an all-in-one synch reference and signal source for ST 2110 installations that require a PTP source and in hybrid environments where Analog reference is derived from PTP. Highlights for the latest release of the SPG9000 include:

• PTP Capture: For debugging difficult PTP configuration issues, now capture network traffic (both Rx and Tx) on the media interfaces to download and open in Wireshark on your PC. This dramatically reduces the time it takes to capture the network traffic on another device, filter out the PTP messages, and then open in Wireshark.
• Secondary Reference: Add a precision secondary reference clock (e.g., Rubidium) to guard against loss of Satellite for PTP grandmaster applications and provide an additional failover option for added flexibility.

ARGUS, a centralized video monitoring solution for video distribution networks, now includes enhanced tools that allow operations teams to identify faults faster. Integrating probe data from entry to exit, ARGUS converts mounds of data into valuable and actionable information. Key enhancements to ARGUS are:

• Expedited troubleshooting with new Monitoring Groups: Instantly identify the location of faults using Monitoring Groups to accelerate troubleshooting by quickly diagnosing and suggesting solutions.
• Live video, audio, and caption monitoring for faulty signals: Jump directly from an alarm or customer complaint to viewing content from the monitoring point of interest. Instead of looking at hundreds of live pictures on a video wall, point directly to the problem by focusing attention on the few critical signals experiencing issues.

Telestream will be in Booth W1501 in the West Hall of the LVCC.

NEVADA City, Calif.—Telestream has appointed Benjamin Desbois as its new Chief Growth and Strategy Officer. The announcement marks Desbois’s return to the company and “marks a pivotal moment for Telestream's innovation roadmap,” the company said, adding that “Benjamin’s return signals a strengthened focus on customer transformation with Telestream’s next-generation offerings.”

"I am incredibly enthusiastic about the future of this iconic company and the opportunity to lead such an exceptional team," stated Benjamin. "Telestream is known for delivering leading media solutions and an outstanding customer experience that consistently sets the industry standard. I am both humbled and invigorated by the chance to collaborate with some of the most talented individuals in M&E, turning out solutions that propel customer success and spur innovation."

Desbois comes to Telestream after serving as chief operating officer for Backlight, a provider of media production and analysis software. Before leaving Telstream as its Chief Revenue Officer in 2023, Debois had also held leadership roles at Avid Technology, and Dalet, where he built a reputation for visionary leadership, deep media workflow expertise, and relentless focus on aligning strategy with customer success. His ability to bridge technology and business needs has consistently driven growth and industry advancements.

“Benjamin is highly regarded within the M&E industry, bringing a deep understanding of our products and channels, along with the expertise needed to develop strategic product plans that capitalize on our extensive domain knowledge," said founding CEO, Dan Castles. "In an industry where relationships are crucial, Benjamin’s credibility and extensive network will play a pivotal role in advancing Telestream’s mission to provide modern solutions tailored to industry needs.”

Desbois’ addition marks a continued retooling of Telestream’s leadership team after founder Dan Castles returned as its CEO in 2024.

Dan Castles has once again returned as CEO of Telestream and is getting the band back together to help the company address current industry challenges.

Castles was the founding CEO of Telestream in 1998 and led it for over 22 years until retiring in April of 2023.

Returning members of Telestream’s senior leadership team include, Mark Wronski (product) and Charlie Dunn (product); Anna Greco (customer experience); and Jennifer Fehrmann (finance). Other members of the senior management team remain in place, said the company.

“The return of these previous leaders reflects the respect we have for our customers and a return to basics, as we navigate the many challenges and dynamics our markets present to us on a daily basis,” said Castles.

“These trusted individuals have substantial industry experience, and I’m thrilled they have rejoined the company to help lead it forward.”

This article originally appeared on TV Tech sister website TVBEurope.

NEVADA CITY, Calif. and CHESTERTON, Ind.—Telestream has signed a distribution agreement with Starin, a value-add distributor of broadcast and pro AV products, to distribute Telestream’s complete line of media processing, production and distribution solutions for cloud, hybrid and on-premises operations through its nationwide network of system integrators and value-added resellers.

“Telestream’s acclaimed media transcoding solutions are at the heart of a broad range of workflows for the world’s leading media and entertainment companies,” Starin Executive Director of Business Management—Broadcast Rich D’Angelo said. “We are focused on enabling our channel partners to capitalize on the ongoing convergence of broadcast and AV, and Telestream is a key addition to our portfolio, making it possible for corporations, ad agencies, healthcare providers and educational and government facilities to deliver high-quality video content to any audience regardless of how it is created, distributed, or viewed."

“Starin is perfectly positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for broadcast applications within AV installations,” Greg Doggett, SVP, global channels, Telestream, said. “They offer a unique combination of AV & broadcast expertise, software distribution capabilities, and solution selling, which will allow Telestream to reach new partners and grow our market opportunity.”

The Telestream solutions being offered by Starin include:

• Media Processing and Workflow Automation: Solving the media industry’s most challenging video workflows with Vantage and Lightspeed Live Capture.
• Video Quality Monitoring & Analytics: Automated and real-time monitoring of video distribution networks from content origination to subscribers for any type of video delivery service.
• Scalable, Powerful Cloud Solutions: Cloud-native video processing and media processing tools built on the same powerful technology as Telestream’s Vantage platform.
• Production and Streaming: Professional live streaming software for anyone, anywhere.
• Content Management: Enabling organizations to efficiently locate, access and manage all media assets across multiple locations through a single pane of glass with Diva.

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has unveiled the VLS-300 Vantage Lightspeed server, which it says boosts Vantage workflows “with unparalleled speed and efficiency in high-volume transcoding and media processing.”

As the first model of the next-gen Lightspeed servers, the VLS-300 delivers a 30% performance boost over its predecessor, thanks to its dual GPU configuration and state-of-the-art hardware components, according to Telestream.

"The new VLS-300 model is the next evolution of Telestream innovation in hardware that is purpose-built for the demands of high volume transcoding and media processing”, says Rich Andes, VP of Product Marketing for Vantage. “Built on years of expertise in designing high-grade servers to empower the Vantage platform, the 300 provides users unparalleled performance for critical operations that need the fastest end-to-end processing possible."

The VLS-300 sports two NVIDIA A4000 GPUs at its core as well as robust cooling systems, dual power supplies, and all solid-state storage. It features NVMe 800GB OS drives and dual 1.92TB media storage RAID drive bays as well as versatile Ethernet options, including 2-Port 1G/10G RJ45, and is ready for additional 25G and 100G network configurations.

Telestream will demo the VLS-300 at Stand 7.B11 at the RAI Amsterdam during the 2024 IBC Show, Sept. 13-17. For more information, visit https://show.ibc.org/

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream will showcase a range of AI-powered solutions engineered to transform how media professionals ingest, enhance, and deliver content during the upcoming IBC 2024 in Amsterdam (September 13-16, 2024). These media processing tools are designed to optimize every step of the media production lifecycle, with a focus on speed, quality, and efficiency.

In announcing its product line-up for IBC, Telestream noted that as media proliferates across a growing number of platforms the media and entertainment industry faces unprecedented broadcast and video production challenges that have pushed traditional media processing to its limits. 

Addressing these challenges requires solutions capable of handling this new landscape of media ingest and delivery, Telestream said. That includes managing diverse formats, ensuring compatibility across numerous platforms, and meeting varying standards for quality and accessibility, all while streamlining the process to accommodate the accelerated production and distribution timelines demanded by today’s content-hungry audiences, Telestream said. 

“While the promise of AI and Machine Learning are riding high on a wave of hype, we at Telestream see these innovations as powerful enablers for solving real-world problems that our customers face,” said Simon Clarke, CTO at Telestream. “We are delivering innovative solutions that provide real value as the industry evolves. By tackling the industry’s critical bottlenecks head-on, we are empowering our customers to achieve more with fewer resources and solve challenges that have long impeded progress.”

In direct response to these industry-wide content delivery bottlenecks, Telestream is excited to announce a suite of innovative AI-powered media processing tools, marking a significant advancement in the production and distribution of media content. Highlights include: 

• Automated Workflow Creation: Telestream's Vantage Workflow Designer automates the configuration of media processing workflows by leveraging AI. This drastically reduces manual interventions, streamlines operations, and minimizes errors, significantly speeding up the production cycle.
• Intelligent Quality Control: Telestream Qualify automates the process of ensuring consistent content quality across large volumes of media. This automation supports the delivery of high-quality content at the speed demanded by multiple platforms, eliminating the scalability challenges of manual quality control.
• Efficient Captioning: Media companies face pressure to meet accessibility standards and audience demand for accurate, multilingual captions. Stanza’s new AI-powered speech-to-text captioning capabilities offer instant caption file generation with built-in support for translations, comprehensive formatting, and flexible layout controls, available as a cloud service or locally on a captioner’s machine.

Telestream also stressed that its solutions offer seamless integration, user-friendly adoption and that AI should enhance workflows, not complicate them. It has designed its solutions for easy integration within existing workflows, reducing concerns about the complexity of new technologies and enabling media entities to innovate confidently while maintaining control over their content.

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has appointed Colleen Smith senior vice president of product and partner marketing.

With more than 25 years of software sales and marketing experience, Smith has spent the past six years leading Avid Technology’s marketing organization where she developed a strong foundation in the media industry and identified growth opportunities, the company said. 

In her new position, Smith will report to Telestream CEO Rhonda Bassett-Spiers. Smith will oversee the company’s go-to-market strategy and execution, driving revenue growth and enhancing the market presence of Telestream's products and services, the company said.

As a member of the Telestream executive team, Smith will also spearhead partner marketing efforts, supporting the needs of the company’s global resellers and cloud delivery partners. She will work to ensure Telestream’s partnerships align with market demands and customer expectations, it said.

"Colleen’s extensive go-to-market experience and deep understanding of the media industry brings incredible value to our organization," said Bassett-Spiers. "Her ability to drive strategic marketing initiatives and foster strong partnerships will be crucial as we continue to expand our market presence, bring more partners into our ecosystem and deliver innovative solutions to our customers."

Prior to Avid, Smith served as vice president and general manager at Progress Software, where she was responsible for building the SaaS/cloud business strategy and leading the product and partner marketing teams. Earlier in her career, she was vice president/industry analyst at AMR Research and spent years leading sales, marketing and R&D teams at Geac/D&B software.

"I am thrilled to join Telestream and work with the talented team to drive growth across our cloud, hybrid and on-prem solutions," said Smith. 

More information is available on the company’s website.

Of all the new technologies offered to film and TV production in the last decade or two, HDR probably received the warmest immediate reception. While single-camera production has been an early adopter, the demands of producing legacy formats side by side—and in real time—has made HDR slower to grow into multicamera work.

Kevin Salvidge, Sales Engineering and Technical Marketing Manager at Leader/Phabrix referred to a recent EBU session on the subject, noting the complexities involved. “They are concerned that this is appearing too complicated, and that’s preventing HDR [from] becoming mainstream—the knowledge and the power is in the hands of a few people,” he said. “If you’ve got one of those people on your production, bingo, the world’s your oyster. If not, how do you do this?”

The answer, Salvidge goes on, will involve both new equipment and new techniques, but decisions made now are likely to be foundational. “We are currently defining the workflows for the next twenty years,” he said. “The workflows that now seem to be universally adopted are a single master production. The vision mixer is cutting UHD, wide color gamut HDR, so any sources that are not 4K, wide color gamut, high dynamic range are upconverted. That’s close to the workflow the BBC used for the coronation.”

Little Room for Error
As a supplier of test-and-measurement equipment, Phabrix might not ordinarily expect to be involved in that sort of signal processing. Salvidge describes a process of convergence: “The HDR supervisor is the only person who sees HDR Images, and is having to compare both of them. The camera will also output HDR and this is normally where a conversion product sits. And if you’ve got a production, let’s say the FIFA world cup final, with 42 cameras, that’s a lot of kit, a lot of potential to go wrong.”

With Leader and Phabrix now under the same umbrella, some efficiencies have been realized, Salvidge adds. “What we’ve done with the Leader product is the ability for a LUT to be loaded into the waveform monitor, so now you remove that conversion product,” Salvidge says. “You switch on the LUT and you can see the picture, waveform, vectorscope, and the CIE color chart, and the beauty of that is the same LUT is being applied on the output of the truck as well.”

That kind of technical consolidation helps everyone, though Salvidge tells us that the concerns of vision engineering for HDR has also provoked some changes in tools, too.

“The Leader and Phabrix products, in the old days, used to display one analysis tool, or a quad split with four of them,” Salvidge says. “If you’re doing HDR, you need the picture, the waveform, the vector, the CIE chart, and you may be monitoring other parameters as well. You need to have more than four tools.

“So now you’ve got this customizable layout, on both products, which allows you to save it for a particular operation you’re doing,” he added. “We have a lot of freelance people who walk around with their setup on a flash key.”

There will, however, always be considerations which are creative, and harder to characterize on a test-and-measurement display, as Salvidge points out. “They’ve changed the way they shoot. Originally they’d focus on, say, a skier. You have very skilled camera operators, three or 4 km away. They’ll pick up a stick man doing almost 100 kph and they’d have a fairly wide shot. The guys who did the HDR testing said 90% of the screen was white, but you now see them frame the shot so you get the forest in the side… it changed the way they thought about the production, how they framed the shot.”

‘We’re the Plumbers’
With HDR likely to coexist with conventional pictures for the foreseeable future, trucks will be producing two separate outputs—but production has long demanded different outputs for different distributors.

Ralph Bachofen, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Triveni says his company deals less with the picture content and more with the way it’s moved around.

“I’ll differentiate between quality of service and quality of experience,” Bachofen begins. “We’re focussing on the transport layer. We do monitor the experience, we look at black frames, but… we’re focussing on the signaling aspects of it. We’re the plumbers.”

Distribution to vastly different platforms can make things even more complicated, as Bachofen explains. “A lot of people do a number of streams or production environments for different formats. You have very country-specific encoding requirements. How do I hand off these requirements to my main broadcast? How do I hand it off to my channel partners? You see a lot of encoding going on, a lot of activity in this field.”

The move toward IP, Bachofen reflects, makes for a lot of rationalization, with entirely new features as well as new maintenance demands.

“Can you make a box that does all of it?” Bachofen muses. “The answer’s yes—our StreamScopes handle multiple simultaneous stream inputs. You don’t want a box per stream, you want a single box that does multiple ingest.

“We have a large engineering staff who work on these requirements, and it’s not just video,” he adds. “There’s the vast requirement you get for security patches on the OS. The minute you put a device on an intranet, their IT departments require you to have the latest and greatest security patches.”

That unity of purpose can stretch the definition of test and measurement to provide an overview of an entire operation, a market need Triveni addressed at the 2024 NAB Show with the launch of Station Manager.

“Say, at 3 a.m., you want to do some datacasting… you add this in the Station Manager and you want to push this down to individual devices,” Bachofen said. “We look at whether this is a valid configuration. We help the engineering staff in each station to ensure they have valid configurations of the whole broadcast chain.”

Customer Feedback
Interra Systems is another QA provider that focuses on monitoring the entire production chain as well. The range of issues that can arise are more numerous than ever, particularly when it comes to HDR.

“Working with UHD, HDR files involves managing multiple aspects, including resolution, wide color gamut, high dynamic range, and frame rates,” the company wrote in a recent blog. “Each of these factors can contribute to different quality issues. Potential problems could manifest as blurriness, digital ghosting, color banding, and tone mapping. These issues may arise from mishandling wide color gamut, HDR metadata, or improper frame rate adjustments. It is crucial to adopt tools to address these conditions and ensure a smooth transition between HD and UHD content.

Many media workflows involve up-converting 1080p HD content to 4K UHD and processing both standard dynamic range (SDR) and HDR outputs. However, mix-and-match scenarios introduce their own set of problems,” the company said. “Upscaling the resolution can introduce artifacts like blurriness, digital ghosting, etc. Likewise, frame rate up-conversion can lead to temporal artifacts for e.g., motion jerks. Upscaling the dynamic range and color can lead to color banding.

Most of these new features are already part of Interra’s BATON file QC solution, according to Interra.

“First and foremost, we have ensured that we have complete format support right from capture to delivery. This includes capture and distribution formats like TIFF, SonyRaw, DPX, ProRES, AVC, HEVC etc. On the QC side, we have already added support for Color Banding, Digital Ghosting, Aliasing, Motion Jerk, measurement of Light Levels for HDR and more. Feedback from the customers is key here.”

The technology for supplying that chain with HDR material, meanwhile, requires technology which is still growing in maturity. Charlie Dunn, senior vice president and general manager of Test & Measurement at Telestream, describes some new solutions to the vision engineering challenges of HDR.

As Dunn puts it, “a vectorscope in HDR space isn’t that useful. What’s more useful is a CIE chart [color space], but that’s a 1930s thing, and it’s not that great for determining if you're out of bounds. We’ve made a number of innovations—we’ve pitched a couple of papers at SMPTE, and we’re working on that toolset.”

Bringing the long-established competence of experienced people into such a new discipline requires some lateral thinking Dunn adds.

“People are so used to looking at a waveform and vectorscope to shade the camera. So, we’ve given them additional tools—one of them is a false color map. You can look at the greens on the pitch, the white lines, the reds of a jersey, so you can make sure they’re in bounds. If they’re not, they turn to a cyan or some unnatural color, so the operator can check the colors are right.”

The complexities of HDR have sometimes led to a degree of engineering conservatism, often with the result that color is limited to a range that’s actually somewhat less than could ideally be achieved.

“People are really interested in whether the CIE chart is going outside the P3 color space,” Dunn muses. “But that’s based on displays of 10 years ago. I have a feeling that’ll go by the wayside. I don’t see a lot of people doing that—I think it’s a problem they currently have and is not something they’ll constrain themselves to going forward.”

With that in mind, Dunn says, Telestream has sought advice from people who do this on a daily basis.

“Someone like Sky has some tremendous engineers, and we’ve worked really closely with them on adjusting our tools,” Dunn said. “They have a really long roadmap for us of things they’d like to see. They're looking at it from the point of view of how can I make things easy for the operator. That’s how false color came about, that’s how the luma-qualified CIE charts came about. I’d say on a scale of 1-10, we’re probably at a three. There’s a lot of ground for us to cover.”

The transition that’s in progress, Dunn says, is not quite like those which have come before.

“A lot of people are doing things in different ways. In the transition to UHD, nobody really had to do anything differently. Going to HDR, especially for people using test and measurement gear, I think over the next five years the best methodologies will find their way to the top. How people build their facilities, what they make remote, what they decide to put in the cloud, on the basis of having experience. We worry about the screen area which is ten inches across—we worry about how much information we can display in a small space!”

“But it’s good for us,” Dunn concludes. “It means they need more test equipment!”

Missed any of our product coverage during your busy week? The TV Tech weekly product and services news wrap-up provides links to all of our coverage from May 13 to May 17, with the most recent news listed first, day by day from Friday back to Monday. 

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IAB Tech Labs, Google Partner on New First Party Data Solution

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Dish TV and Hughes Debut New Bundled Services

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Netflix Ad Tier Hits 40M Monthly Active Users

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ESPN, Fox, WBD Unveil Name for New Sports Streaming Service

More than three months after announcing plans to launch a major new sports streaming service, ESPN, Fox Corp. and Warner Bros. Discovery, have finally given the service a name: “Venu Sports”.

Telestream Taps Power of AI to Manage, Define Media Workflows

TV Tech recently sat down with Telestream CEO Rhonda Bassett-Spiers and CTO Simon Clark to discuss how the M&E industry is adapting the cloud, IP and AI to enhance and simplify media workflows.

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Comcast Plans Peacock, Netflix, Apple TV+ Streaming Bundle

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OpenVault Harnesses Generative AI to Improve Broadband Networks

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Chyron Releases Enhancements For LIVE Cloud Production Platform

https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/chyron-releases-enhancements-for-live-cloud-production-platform

Chyron has released a series of updates for its LIVE cloud-native production platform.

PBS Stations to Gain Access to Nielsen Local Dashboards

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TV Tech recently sat down with Telestream CEO Rhonda Bassett-Spiers and CTO Simon Clark to discuss how the M&E industry is adapting the cloud, IP and AI to enhance and simplify media workflows. Here is an edited transcript:

TV Tech: Simon, you've been with Telestream for about 16 years now. How do you think the media and entertainment tech industry has changed over that time and how has Telestream evolved with it?
Simon Clarke: I came to Telestream as part of acquisition number two. I founded Vara Software and we brought along to Telestream two products, one was called "Wirecast" and the other was "ScreenFlow." 

So I've been very involved in the streaming side of the business. And when I started with Wirecast, we originally streamed out three different formats: Real Networks, Windows Media Smooth Streaming and the third one was RTSP. A big part of Wirecast’s value was our ability to stream multiple formats. Things ended up consolidating later with Adobe's RTMP and those three formats sort of became footnotes.

And so the industry consolidated around H.264 and RTMP and then you have HLS, released in 2009. So we’ve got this huge ecosystem of different codecs and format containers simplified down. While I think that’s been an improvement for us, the complexity has exploded.  

And for our customers, the complexity has come around the movement from on prem to hybrid cloud as well as the transition to 2110. And now we're going through yet another evolution: AI and machine learning; I think it's very early days right now for long-form generative content, but it's coming. I think we're all going to remember the first generative AI movie we watch at the theater—I think that milestone is coming. 

TVT: Tell us about some of the new products you launched at NAB and how the company has evolved under new leadership.
SC: We have a new user interface design system that is going to initially roll out with three new products we talked about at NAB. We're also launching a product called "Live Play 2.0," which is a playback service solution. This is going to roll out to all of our products at Telestream on a new unified look and feel. 

Rhonda Bassett-Spiers: Telestream is 26 years old, and over that period of time, we've acquired 13 companies but we’ve never really been able to, quote, tell the story about how those pieces fit together to create a bigger “whole.” We made these acquisitions, but never really integrated them, nor have we gone to market to tell the story of how it all fits together. 

We've done that now. And so at NAB we announced our new framework of “ingest, enhance and deliver.” It really talks through the content supply chain, like how we move, how we ingest content, how we enhance it, and then how we deliver and distribute. 

But one of the things that we've done as part of this rationalization… we looked across our product line and realized they all look and feel a little bit different. Many of them were designed by engineers for engineers, which is great if you have someone that's been in their role for 10-15 years, but as newer people come onboard and as we even want to go to new markets… if we want to go more mid-market our products need to be easier to use. 

So we created a UI UX function and as we build out new products, the UI is all going to look very similar. We're also building in AI, both as co-pilot, but also as ways to enhance our workflows so that we can allow customers to be more productive; so things that used to take days or weeks to do can take minutes.

SC: At NAB we showed our workflow designer that's running initially in the cloud. And then there is a tool called GLIM, which allows you to open broadcast media directly in your browser and have that streamed back to you and can be viewed on a lower end computer and you don't have to download the whole file. It’s a really great tool for QC and other monitor features. 

And then Live Capture, a FAST channel application where I can spin up live channels very quickly and record them to cloud storage. You can view them with GLIM as they're being created, and then push them through the workflow. We will be rolling these out towards the end of the year. 

TVT: Tell us a bit more about how you’re using AI in Vantage.
SC: A typical workflow for Vantage today is as follows: it receives a file, then it does a bunch of stuff, but I think the trick here is that “bunch of stuff” can be difficult to decipher for people that didn't build the workflow for somebody who is new to the industry. And so we use machine learning to take the whole of an existing workflow and then automatically build and generate a description of what that workflow does. So without me having to go in and sort of peer into each individual place and go, “what does this part do?” “What is this doing,” the AI is able to build a really very simplistic description actually telling me what this workflow is going to do. 

This helps our customers understand what they have in their catalog of workflows and lets them search on them through natural language. It’s using generative AI to help our operators understand and categorize their existing workflows and maintain those going forward. 

TVT: What’s been the customer response?|
RBS: We've been doing business reviews with customers, especially the larger enterprise-level customers, ABC, NBC, etc., they have hundreds of workflows, right? Their problem is in finding a workflow that does what they need it to do. And so invariably, they'll have several hundreds or thousands of these workflows and they don't necessarily have an up-to-date description of each one. 

So this is one application as a result of feedback from customers who want  to know what a workflow does, so that they don't have to go and recreate it. Having a definition that is standard across all the workflows makes it a lot easier to keep up to date and makes it a lot easier to find what you're looking for. 

TVT: So this feature consolidates and eliminates workflows based on redundancy and things like that?
SC: It has that capability because it can understand the intent of what the customer is doing. Now, we have to be slightly careful of deleting people's workflows but I think you could see a feature though, that says, “Oh, these workflows look very similar to each other, would you like to consolidate or remove them?” We would never remove them without a user performing that action, but absolutely, that's where we're going.

TVT: Tell us about some of the other features.
SC: We’ve put a virtual assistant into all of our applications. Now obviously, you’re seeing more of them these days, but our trick here is it knows about Vantage… it's a “broadcast engineer” baked in.

I can have a conversation with the virtual assistant about the features of our products and also industry stuff in general. It has a knowledge base that expands across all of our products and where we have a knowledge base, we're filling that with data from our industry experts. 

We want to provide something that can really help both experienced broadcast engineers and people new to the industry be successful, because as you know, there is a tremendous amount of complexity associated with our business and we feel like we can add huge value through an AI assistant that has domain-specific knowledge. 

We also have a fantastic new user interface for Vantage workflow designer. We're super excited about being able to generate a workflow through natural language. We've had feedback that as workflows get more complicated, we can really save operators huge amounts of time… they can use this to get started really quickly to modify existing workflows. This is going to give people their time back and it's going to take workflows that, in the past, needed specialist knowledge to build and you're gonna be able to build them with natural language super, super fast. 

RBS: One of the things we've heard from our customers is that there is a small subset of people who can really create the more complex workflows and we've had customers ask us for training and things like that. So this will provide the virtual assistant—as well as this natural language—the ability to build the workflow or leverage natural language to build the workflow, enabling customers to be more productive. It'll lower the bar in terms of the training and expertise required to be able to do this. 

TVT: Rhonda, let’s talk about your first year leading Telestream. What are your impressions about the industry 12 months in?
RBS: It's been a really fascinating year. Clearly this industry is different than any I've worked in previously. My background is financial services supply chain, perishable food supply chain, but it's always been software, right? I've also been in industries where technology adoption has been more accelerated. So for example, in financial services, cloud, AI, machine learning, SaaS, all of those things happened 10 years ago. 

And what's interesting about this industry is you would think that media and entertainment is bleeding edge. But if you pull back the curtain, it's actually still evolving—it's been a little slower to adopt the newer technologies like cloud and AI.

Our customers’ business models are evolving and I think as a company Telestream has been the “on prem” leader for 25 years and we're going to continue to lead and innovate and lead on prem. But we want to lead in the cloud as well. 

But we didn't necessarily have all the experience in terms of running a software company at scale and then continuing to innovate. Much of our innovation had been at the request of customers or through an acquisition. And so we needed to build out a strong product organization so we brought in Mike Gilson as the chief product officer. Mike does not come from the industry but he's very quickly come up to speed and  pulled together our products, and figured out a framework in terms of how we can position our products and all the acquisitions we've made into a story that we can tell customers in the market that shows how all the pieces fit together to create a better whole. 

And we also needed a little more sophisticated financial function so we brought in a CFO that had been a CFO at a prior company and had also had 15 years of public accounting experience. And that helps us because as a company, we didn't have things like product p&l (profit & loss), we didn't have some of the rigor that we need in order to run and operate our business. 

We also needed to get some experience with the cloud. We needed some experience with AI and machine learning. We needed experience on UI UX, disciplines we didn't have. Most of our engineering is still intact, but we've had to make adjustments because we need to focus on two to three areas in order to grow the top line of the company and we want to invest and put a lot of wind behind those arrows, as opposed to just trying to manage a portfolio of 50 products and incrementally enhancing them over time. 

We're taking a really pragmatic view. For example, our copilot applications are changing the way people program, but they're not replacing people, they're helping people be more productive. AI is going to dominate it but we're demonstrating things that we think have real value to people immediately versus just saying AI for the sake of saying “AI.”

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has announced that it is working with NVIDIA to provide fully cloud-native professional video monitoring services to media enterprises and professionals.

As part of the collaboration, Telestream’s INSPECT application is now integrated into NVIDIA Holoscan for Media for a versatile, cloud-native, SMPTE ST 2110-supported video monitoring solution. 

In announcing the integration, the companies noted that ensuring the highest quality and compliance of live content currently poses significant challenges for broadcasters because the volume of content, complexity of real-time issue detection, and scalability demands of cloud-based and IP workflows often outpace traditional monitoring solutions.

In addition, the complexity of real-time issue detection in live broadcasts — ranging from audiovisual quality to compliance with broadcast standards — requires sophisticated monitoring tools that can accurately identify and flag issues as they arise, without introducing delays into the live production workflow, the companies explained. 

These issues are compounded by the industry's shift towards cloud-based and IP (Internet Protocol) workflows, which, while offering scalability and flexibility advantages, also introduce new challenges in terms of ensuring seamless integration and maintaining consistent quality across distributed production environments.

To address these challenges, Telestream reported that it is integrating NVIDIA Holoscan for Media with its INSPECT monitoring platform. Harnessing NVIDIA's advanced GPU acceleration and AI technologies simplifies and accelerates the process of identifying and resolving quality issues in real time. By leveraging the power of Holoscan for Media, Telestream offers broadcasters an innovative solution to ensure their content consistently meets the highest standards of quality and compliance, transforming the landscape of live media monitoring with enhanced efficiency and accuracy, the companies said. 

Telestream noted that they key benefits to its customers include: 

• GPU Acceleration: Employs NVIDIA GPUs for faster, real-time processing of high-resolution streams, essential for live production.
• AI and Machine Learning: Utilizes AI to automatically identify anomalies and compliance issues, significantly improving efficiency and accuracy.
• Cloud-Native Architecture and IP Workflow Integration: Facilitates INSPECT’s integration into contemporary broadcast infrastructures, offering scalability and supporting standards like ST 2110 for smooth IP workflow transition.

"Telestream has a vision of helping drive a revolution in the media industry to dramatically increase the efficiency of processing high-quality content as the expectations of viewers for more, and better, experiences rise,” stated Charlie Dunn, senior vice president and GM, Test & Measurement, Telestream. “The ability to provide optimized media processes without compromising quality or ease of use has been the hallmark of Telestream’s test and measurement solutions, so we are thrilled to include INSPECT as an integrated solution for ST 2110 on NVIDIA Holoscan for Media.”

“Precise and proven technology is needed for robust monitoring of video content and standards requirements,” added Bob Pette, vice president, Enterprise Platforms, NVIDIA. “Telestream’s integration of its INSPECT application with NVIDIA Holoscan for Media is poised to empower media enterprises to deliver enhanced video content monitoring and output for broadcasters worldwide.”

NVIDIA Holoscan for Media transforms application development for live media by providing an IP-based, cloud-native architecture unconstrained by dedicated hardware, environments, or locations. It integrates open-source and ubiquitous technologies, enabling developers to simplify the development process, streamline delivery to customers, and integrate emerging technologies like generative Al into their solutions, all while optimizing their R&D spend.

Telestream’s INSPECT IP-based video monitoring and ST 2110 solution is designed to provide extensive production oversight, such as audio levels, picture display, and ancillary data monitoring, as well as automated detection of PTP-related issues. Its monitoring-by-exception approach provides for an efficient troubleshooting process, eliminating the need for constant network supervision. INSPECT also offers remote access monitoring and control from anywhere.

“As media production increasingly migrates to the cloud for operational benefits, our collaborations with technology leaders like NVIDIA offer a powerful avenue for cloud and AI enterprises to swiftly provide cutting-edge tools to customers," Dunn added. 

The solution will be on display at the 2024 NAB Show. For more information about Telestream products and services at the NAB Show visit: www.telestream.net/nab.

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—At NAB Show 2024 in West Hall (#W1501), Telestream will introduce a host of new AI-powered suite of media processing tools engineered to optimize how media professionals ingest, enhance, and deliver content.

“GLIM as a Service,” a new cloud-based solution is designed to allow media companies involved in remote production to access high-resolution, mezzanine content via instant playback of content in any format through a web browser, streamlining remote content access and eliminating the need for extensive downloads or specialized playback hardware, according to the company.

Also at their booth is a new cloud-based “Live Capture as a Service” offering designed to simplify the live capture of content from any location in real-time, allowing production teams to bypass the traditional hurdles of remote setup and maintenance. 

"The growing need for live content underscores the urgency for faster, more flexible production processes. Live Capture as a Service transforms live content capture by providing cloud-based, instant access, freeing media companies from the limitations of physical infrastructure,” said Telestream Chief Product Officer Mike Gilson. “This breakthrough not only streamlines production but also opens up opportunities for media companies to capture and monetize more content, meeting audience demand for high-quality, timely media experiences more efficiently."

Designed to target the streamlining and further efficiency of AI-media tools,  Telestream will also showcase a suite of AI-powered media processing tools with the following features: 

• Automated Workflow Creation: By leveraging artificial intelligence, Telestream's Vantage Workflow Designer automates the configuration of media processing workflows. This drastically reduces manual interventions, streamlines operations, and minimizes errors, significantly speeding up the production cycle.
• Intelligent Quality Control (QC): Telestream's AI-driven QC tools automate the process of ensuring consistent content quality across large volumes of media. This automation supports the delivery of high-quality content at the speed demanded by multiple platforms, eliminating the scalability challenges of manual QC.
• Efficient Captioning and Subtitling: The integration of AI also extends to captioning and subtitling processes, making them faster and more efficient. This not only enhances content accessibility and global reach but also ensures that content can be quickly turned around to meet the immediate needs of a diverse and widespread audience. Simplified Adoption and Integration: Understanding the industry's hesitation towards complex technology adoption, Telestream has focused on making its advanced AI solutions accessible and easy to integrate. This approach lowers the barrier to adopting these technologies, enabling media entities to adapt and innovate quickly.

Qualify QC
Telestream will also  unveil updates to Qualify QC, including:

• IMF Compliance: Enhanced with Netflix Photon support, ensuring Interoperable Master Format (IMF) packages meet critical industry standards.
• Harding FPA Test: Incorporates detection capabilities for potentially epileptic content, prioritizing viewer safety.
• DolbyE Presence and Dolby Vision Validation: Verifies the inclusion of DolbyE audio and the accuracy of Dolby Vision metadata, guaranteeing top-notch audiovisual experiences.
• Rude Word Detection: A new tool to screen and flag unsuitable language, ensuring content suitability for all audiences.

Telestream will introduce its Inspect Monitoring Platform, a comprehensive monitoring solution crafted for ST 2110, SRT, and NDI protocols. The platform offers a comprehensive solution for continuous media stream integrity monitoring, in-depth issue analysis, and strategic optimization of broadcasting and streaming operations, according to the company. This integrated approach enables production companies to detect, diagnose, and optimize high-quality content delivery across all platforms and protocols.

Targeting cloud-based hybrid workflows, Telestream will also roll out its DIVA 9 content management solution which facilitates the smart transition of media assets between on-premises and cloud environments, leveraging intelligent media storage policies, advanced Elasticsearch search functions, and comprehensive integrations with MAM, automation, and other cloud systems, the company said. 

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream today launched DIVA 9, the latest update to its middleware system for media management, access, and archiving. 

Targeting the complexities of long-term video asset storage, DIVA 9 introduces critical enhancements to bolster the accessibility, reliability, and efficiency of digital video archives, the company said, adding that the new version simplifies archiving with smart media storage policies, advanced Elasticsearch search functions, and comprehensive cloud integration, ensuring secure, scalable, and adaptable solutions. 

DIVA 9 includes a new Proxy player integrated with Telestream Vantage, simplifying clip identification, segment marking, and partial restore processes, offering unprecedented ease in handling video data, the company said. Telestream also said DIVA 9 is easier to deploy in cloud environments with  support for Postgres open source database, and compatibility with major cloud storage options, catering to both hybrid and native cloud setups.

“One of the qualities that makes DIVA 9 such a powerful solution is its widespread support for diverse production ecosystems, including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments,” said Tom Pflaum, Vice President of Product Management at Telestream. “DIVA’s versatility makes it highly adaptable to various storage technologies, such as LTO, disks, and private cloud servers. It also effortlessly integrates with MAM, PAM, and automation systems to further enhance and enrich media supply chain workflows. It’s truly a comprehensive and flexible solution for content management.”

DIVA 9 features nearly 100 updates from its predecessor, focusing on improving system reliability, user experience, and operational efficiency, according to the company. Updates encompass bug and security fixes, performance enhancements, and usability improvements and the solution's intelligent media storage lifecycle policies aid in reducing costs while optimizing asset storage, Telestream said.

DIVA 9's Elasticsearch-driven search capabilities offer a unified view across multiple storage systems, ensuring efficient resource utilization. Its redundancy, distributed deployment options, and disaster recovery features enhance reliability for media production teams, the company said.

DIVA 9 centralizes content management, transcoding, and archiving, eliminating workflow silos, facilitating a more agile media supply chain, the company said. Integration with Telestream solutions like Vantage, Qualify QC, and GLIM Clipping & Inspections automates quality control, accelerates media processing, and enables efficient proxy-less playback.

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has unveiled a virtual assistant in the latest release of Wirecast (version 16.0), its software-based live video streaming and production solution. 

Leveraging generative AI, the virtual assistant delivers real-time feature walkthroughs, technical advice and tailored troubleshooting in multiple languages, providing quick answers so creators can continue their work uninterrupted, the company said.

“We’re really excited about the new AI element of Wirecast and the rapid responses it offers users. Questions take seconds to answer, and we believe that Wirecast customers will enjoy the personalized approach of the new virtual assistant service,” said Telestream CTO Simon Clarke. 

“This is just the beginning for Telestream. We see countless opportunities for AI and machine learning across our entire portfolio. This is where the industry is headed, and we are thrilled to make this technology available to our customers.”

The latest release offers other new features, including custom Look-Up Tables (LUTs), video filters, shot editing, locking layers and Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) source and output features, the company said.

A variety of pricing plans are available, including a monthly Wirecast Studio subscription for $35; an annual subscription for $299; a monthly Wirecast Pro subscription for $46 and an annual subscription for $399.

More information is available on the Wirecast and Telestream websites. 

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has announced the appointment of Alex Keighley as chief revenue officer. Reporting to Telestream CEO, Rhonda Bassett-Spiers, Keighley will lead Telestream’s global sales teams and play a pivotal role as the organization looks to expand its operations.  

For the past 30 years, Keighley has held senior positions with media owners and news organizations such as AP, News International, and Reuters, as well as playing a significant role in the growth of well-known technology brands, including Avid, Bitcentral, and Grass Valley. He brings a proven track record of steering successful regional and global sales teams through periods of growth and building strategic relationships with clients and partners. 

Since joining Telestream in December 2020, Keighley has led the Telestream U.S. sales team, working with customers across the whole spectrum of networks, studios, live and post-production companies, station groups, and streamers. 

“The global media landscape is constantly evolving, and Telestream stands side-by-side with our customers to turn increasingly complex challenges into opportunities together,” explained Rhonda Bassett-Spiers, CEO Telestream. “We are working hard to be the partner for change, and no one is better placed than Alex Keighley to spearhead our global sales efforts. Alex brings a special combination of  broadcast and media technology experience that enables him to map our innovation and solutions to customers’ needs today and the future, putting them at the center of everything we do.”

“I’m excited to be leading Telestream’s global sales efforts at such a crucial moment in our expansion and growth,” Keighley added. “Telestream has a deep track record of delivering the results our global customers and partners want, with the value they expect and the pace they need to succeed. Powered by best-in-class technology and deep industry knowledge, I look forward to guiding our diverse sales teams as we continue to deliver solutions that help shape and unlock the future of media workflows from content creation and production to distribution and monetization.”

Based in California, US, Keighley replaces Benjamin Desbois, who has left the company to take up a senior position within the broadcast industry.

Over the years, the cost of good television equipment has bucked the general inflationary trend. For example, you can buy a camera and lens today that is far better than a camera and lens from 20 years ago, and today’s gear will cost just 50% or less of what the camera would have cost you in 2003.

When using that camera back in the day, you probably wanted to view its output on a waveform monitor to get the exposure right. Today’s camera is likely to have a waveform display capability built in that can be called up anytime to check the exposure. So today’s production equipment not only often costs less than ever, it does more than ever.

Of course, video networks are far more complex today, and this complexity means that test and measurement/quality control equipment today has to do much more at the network level than was needed for the simpler networks two decades ago. Much of today’s network-level test gear is evolving with new measurement and analysis techniques, as the video streaming environment gets more complicated and demanding over time.

“As delivery systems have become more complex, the demand for versatile and advanced digital monitoring and analysis solutions has increased,” said Anupama Anantharaman, vice president for product management at Interra Systems. “As a result, single-purpose monitoring gear has taken a backseat to more adaptable multifunctional tools. These tools leverage the power of new content creation and delivery standards—and computer networks—to provide comprehensive monitoring capabilities that cover various aspects of stream analysis and signal evaluation.”

The Impact of ST 2110
Signals that conform to the SMPTE ST 2110 standard have multiple components (video, audio and ancillary data) each transmitted as separate streams. An IP-based stream monitor can analyze, evaluate and route these streams and extract the metadata based on the user’s workflow, providing full flexibility.

“Software-based tools used on an IP network can efficiently extract and analyze this metadata, allowing broadcasters to monitor and verify critical information such as format, timing and identification,” Anantharaman said. “In the context of video, waveform monitors can sometimes fail to detect problems due to human error. However, by using IP-based probes, operators can automate the process of stream verification for today’s vast amount of content.”

Human error notwithstanding, standalone testing and QC devices still have value in many operations and workflows.

“Although the underlying infrastructure of how media is transported has changed, the overall tasks that need to be accomplished by operators and engineers are still fundamentally the same,” said Don Kianian, solutions marketing manager for Telestream. “The workload has increased and the need to manage these workflows efficiently is paramount. 

“Traditional, familiar waveform monitoring tools are still extremely useful to monitor and measure video and audio signals,” he added. “They may also be complemented by other software tools (such as quality control solutions) that can automatically QC content and alert users to media that does not meet spec.”

Telestream serves both OTT and broadcasters, and Kianian said the company is seeing a shift in how the two are evolving.

“We’re certainly seeing OTA adopting more and more OTT technologies and solutions [e.g., cloud workflows, remote collaboration, AI/ML] as part of a broadcaster/content provider’s overall strategy to reach broader audiences and go toe-to-toe with the increasing number of content providers in the market,” he said. “I expect this tug-of-war to continue well into this year and beyond.”

Upgrade to ATSC 3.0
Traditional broadcasters are in the early phases of a soft transition to the ATSC 3.0 standard, which is much more IP-friendly than the outgoing ATSC 1.0. What does this mean with respect to test and measurement equipment, and what lies ahead?

“As the transition to ATSC 3.0 heats up in the United States, we are seeing increased interest in test and measurement equipment,” said Ralph Bachofen, vice president of sales and marketing at Triveni Digital. “The transition to ATSC 3.0 is an opportunity for broadcasters to upgrade their T&M suite.

“With the latest T&M equipment, broadcasters can ensure outstanding-quality NextGen TV services, better understand the new standard, and simultaneously deliver ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 transmissions during the simulcast phase.”

Bachofen explained that single-purpose test gear is still in use, but it has an easily understood limiting factor.

“Single-purpose gear is still in use, especially in the RF realm,” he said. “The trend is to adopt multipurpose systems for service quality assurance and enterprise-wide monitoring. Single-purpose gear is much more expensive than having a solution from one vendor that can monitor multiple demarcation points at the same time.”

The sheer volume of production today means that more test, measurement and quality control gear than ever is needed. And yes, that means devices such as waveform monitors.

“The demands of operational television businesses are largely unchanged in that content has to meet in-house delivery standards as well as regulatory requirements,” said Prinyar Boon, product manager at Phabrix. “This remains the case regardless of how it’s been carried: file, streamed, broadcast, compressed, uncompressed, SDI, IP, MT2TS and so on.”

New Signal Types
Although production facilities need to measure and confirm the quality of signals, the relatively recent (and ongoing) industry transition from SDI to ST 2110 means new test gear is needed for the new signal types, according to Boon.

“To complicate the picture, many of these facilities will use both SDI- and IP-based systems,” Boon said. “We’ve been deeply involved for many years with the development of workflows for live HDR production, and measurement tools for ST 2110 systems using precision time protocol (PTP), while also retaining traditional SDI-based toolsets. 

“So yes, we’d agree very much that the era of standalone gear is over, and without doubt the long-term trend is to have operational and production tools evolve into on-prem and off-prem cloud-based systems.”

In the days when broadcast OTA was the only game in town, broadcasters could rely on knowing that the signal was properly received on a monitor TV in the studio. If the picture/sound were good on that TV, then all viewers were receiving a quality signal.

In the OTT world, it is much more difficult for a program provider to check what the user experience is—especially when dozens of network operators (Comcast, Verizon, Cox, etc.) actually take the signal from the program provider and deliver it to the customer. Ensuring a quality experience in this environment is complicated… but not impossible.

“Because of the user-centric technology in modern video streaming, measuring the quality of the video transmission sent out doesn’t necessarily offer insight into the quality of the video received by the customer,” said Mathieu Planche, CEO of Witbe. “Furthermore, true video service performance is now defined by many more elements than just the image quality alone. User-centric video services need to be tested with user-centric monitoring technology.”

Location, Location, Location
In other words, sensors from the test system must be placed as close to the user as possible to make sure the network delivers the expected quality to the customer.

“Checking that a FAST channel is available on Comcast NOW TV cannot be verified through simple packet loss,” Planche said. “It involves complex interactions between backend systems, cloud-to-cloud integration, device operating systems, content providers, ad providers and various DRM stacks. OTT providers need user-centric monitoring technology to understand the true quality delivered to their end-users.”

This is where artificial intelligence (AI) could play an important role in monitoring networks and responding to failures faster than a human can react. In the meantime, change and growth is constant in the program delivery process.

“As the weight shifts further to online content and live streaming, having a solid grip on the entire chain becomes more important,” said Rajesh Patel, vice president for sales & solutions EMEA at Mediaproxy. “With an ever-increasing scale of sources, using software-based tools and APIs to optimize monitoring workflows will help reduce overall cost and enhance quality-of-service. 

“Teaming up with partners with solutions that straddle multiple disciplines is something to look at as old equipment becomes obsolete,” he continued. “This also includes shifting the thinking towards what the cloud can offer to handle specific pressure points.”

Patel sees that there is still a need for hardware-specific test equipment, even as change is coming.

“Despite the ever-growing availability of software-based tools, traditional hardware-based monitoring equipment is certainly still relevant in today’s monitoring chain,” he said. “This is especially still true for ST 2022-2 as well as for the emerging SDI replacement, ST 2110.” 

It’s not the end-all, be-all answer for every production-based scenario. But according to some, it’s getting there.

Its capabilities to connect, streamline, produce and deliver have brought cloud-based production into the mainstream, with more cloud-based components being designed for the production ecosystem and more broadcasters using public cloud providers for high-value events and channels. 

The reasons are plentiful, with two key issues taking the lead: the ability to save on infrastructure costs and the desire to accelerate change in an ecosystem that seems ready-made for innovation.

“Cloud technology enables broadcasters to spin up multiple environments/systems, tinker with new production workflows and then have a template for reuse or tear it all down—wash, rinse, repeat as needed,” said Dave Norman, principal sales engineer for Enterprise Products for Telestream. “Leveraging [the] cloud drives this pace of innovation by orders of magnitude.”

Accelerated Workflows
When comparing cloud-based workflows with on-prem environments, the velocity at which teams can experiment increases massively, Norman said, and the cost of innovating a new workflow with a “never done before” approach is minimal. Cloud production is rapidly becoming the great enabler of “doing more,” he said.

Cloud production should be seen as a step change in the speed of production, “whether that is across different shooting locations or just the speed of getting content edited, reviewed and to the consumer very quickly on social media platforms,” said Paul Scurrell, senior vice president of product for Atomos. “Productions just become more ‘real-time.’”

Another reason that cloud-based productions have taken off? Cost. From the start, a product cost is minimized because the focus of a production is on infrastructure that is managed and supported by a third party. As a result, broadcasters and content creators are able to spend fewer resources on infrastructure and can instead focus on production technologies at the event itself. 

Cloud-based production is also being touted for its flexibility. After all, the ability to scale up and down and switch services on and off is easy to do when all the components are virtualized in the cloud, Scurrell said. “You basically use them—and pay for them—when you need them.”

The limit on a business’s production capacity is typically determined by the resources or equipment available. However, the use of cloud-based technology seeks to eliminate this restriction and allows resources to expand as demand for capacity increases, according to Harry Sampson, product manager of Cloud Production Solutions for Ross. 

“By facilitating businesses to scale up or down based directly on their production requirements helps enable greater utilization while also reducing large upfront costs associated with building additional production facilities,” he said.

Trickle Down
The efficiencies don’t stop there since cloud-based production also trickles down to staff and equipment efficiencies too. 

“Engineers, production staff and editors can support and work on a cloud-based production from anywhere, therefore expanding the scope of a production and access to talent, Telestream’s Norman said. “Cloud-based production also allows a previously unseen level of flexibility—as needs increase and decrease throughout the lifespan of a production, additional resources can easily be allocated or scaled-down without the historic hindrance of capital expenditure, coordination and facility management.”

This is indicative of where the industry is headed. 

“Deploying and managing a traditional on-premise production facility requires dedicated resources such as an IT department, commissioning and support teams as well as physical equipment rooms with air conditioning,” Sampson said. “By leveraging cloud-compute, businesses can benefit from increased efficiency by simplifying operations, automating tasks and minimizing manual intervention.” 

When deploying in a cloud environment, significant time and cost savings can be made, with no need for shipping, installation or cabling, he added. “As a result, turning on and off a production environment can now realistically be a quick and simple task.”

“Remote production and the ability to create content from anywhere is now a permanent fixture,” he added. “Cloud-based technology allows businesses to deploy live production resources globally across multiple regions at the click of button and give operators immediate access from anywhere with an internet connection.” 

The tools that facilitate those features are also maturing in capability. 

Technology such as the Ross Production Cloud is designed to enable gains in efficiency, flexibility and scalability, which should result in improved costs while also simultaneously ensuring that customers have access to familiar user interfaces. 

There are also technologies that can now quickly and cost-efficiently increase record channel capacity with cloud-deployed software. Telestream’s Lightspeed Live Capture software, for example, can run unshackled from physical hardware, meaning a user can increase their record footprint by sending contribution IP streams to a public cloud provider for recording sources that were previously not being recorded due to a lack of physical space at a venue.  “As soon as the event is complete, you can simply sunset the cloud environment,” Norman said. 

For some time, content creators have successfully turned to the cloud to send files of significant size during a production. Media Shuttle from Signiant, for example, allows a producer to leverage cloud storage and other cloud services in this way.

Adapting a New Mindset
As with any industry wide change, challenges remain—including concerns over security, availability, speed and access. It’s also important to note that cloud-based production requires a different skill set than those held by typical engineering teams who otherwise support on-premise technology. 

“Production teams need to also adapt their mindset to embrace cloud-based productions,” Norman said. “There is some lack of tangibility, for instance, that exists in a fully cloud-based production that does not exist on-premise.  Moreover, object storage is not file- or block-level storage, and there are some rough edges surrounding immediate access to objects that live in object storage.” 

Other concerns remain too. “When working on A+ grade productions with HDR/SDR heterogenous color profiles, as an example, cloud production becomes challenging today, and on-prem gear/tools play a critical role,” he said. 

Other roadblocks include concerns over network latency, bandwidth, interoperability, audio hiccups and transparent pricing. “It is important to acknowledge that production in the cloud may not be the ideal solution for all applications, and traditional hardware will undoubtedly continue to play a key role — let’s face it, some things have to stay on the ground,” said Ross’ Sampson. Yet despite these challenges, there are meaningful gains to be realized by leveraging cloud technology in live video production. 

“Historically, cloud technology has always evolved at pace and I see our industry moving in the same direction; many of the current hurdles won’t be around for long,” he said.

What continues to draw interest, despite lingering challenges, is the flexibility and low cost of entry, said John Wastcoat, senior vice president of Strategic Alliances and Marketing for Zixi. “Broadcasters are starting to adopt these models because it allows them the flexibility to produce more content and events, something that would not fit legacy production budgets.

“With the changes in viewing habits and the proliferation of IP networks, cloud-based production models are certain to take over traditional production models,” he added. 

Even the significant investment in legacy equipment won’t necessarily keep broadcasters from considering some type of cloud-based model. Enabling hybrid on-prem and cloud-based production environments is a key milestone to full cloud migration, according to Telestream’s Norman.

“If a broadcaster or content creator needs to run any type of production and they already possess premise-based equipment—as well as the staff that knows how to operate and support it — there is no need to swap this model for a cloud one instantly,” he said. Cloud-based production enables additional options for doing more than they can currently offer on-prem.” 

What else is ahead for cloud-based production? In the next year or two the industry can expect to see cloud production use cases trend upwards, with broadcasters continuing to experiment with more events/channels and the leveraging of public cloud providers. Some high-value productions will continue to leverage on-prem technologies while more cloud-based components will appear in the production ecosystem — and perhaps become the standard approach.

While the industry is not quite ready today for full-time production in the cloud, the future looks to be bright.  

GATINEAU, Quebec & NORTHWOOD, Ohio—Adaptiv Networks has announced a strategic wholesale partnership with Telesystem. As part of the partnership, Telesystem will incorporate Adaptiv’s powerful and economical SD-WAN, VPN, and SASE technologies into its product portfolio.

“Adaptiv’s SD-WAN and SASE solutions will enable us to meet the advanced networking requirements of our customer base in an innovative and affordable way,” said Bruce Wirt, chief revenue officer at Telesystem. “Importantly, Adaptiv’s enterprise-grade solutions are agile and reliable, providing seamless failover, high quality of service, and end-to-end network visibility and control. We believe that I.T. is about trust, and going to market with Adaptiv greatly increases our ability to build trust with our customer base.”

Telesystem is a leading provider of networking, communication, managed security, and cybersecurity solutions to SME and mid-market businesses in the United States. 

Adaptiv Networks provides simple, secure, and reliable cloud-managed network connectivity solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. These include SD-WAN, hybrid workforce connectivity, and VPN replacement. Adaptiv’s SASE (secure access service edge) managed security solutions provide real-time, cloud-based threat protection. 

“Telesystem’s core go-to-market strategy is to develop technology solutions for SME organizations that value a trusted layer of expertise and a managed experience that allows them to focus on their own business rather than vendor management. Telesystem’s portfolio of managed solutions is a perfect fit for Adaptiv Networks,” said Bernard Breton, CEO of Adaptiv Networks. “Together we are transforming the SD-WAN market landscape to provide innovative and cost-efficient service offerings for Telesystem customers.”

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has announced that it will now offer its industry-leading Lightspeed Live Capture multichannel video capture and processing solution as software-only. The software-only version, which will bring professional-grade live capture capabilities and formats to more workflows, both broadcast and non-broadcast, will be on display at the 2023 NAB show on booth W1501.  

“Telestream customers can now deploy a complete software-only Lightspeed Live Capture solution anywhere they want; whether that’s on Telestream Lightspeed Live Capture servers, their own servers or in a virtualized environment in the cloud,” said Telestream senior director of product management Owen Walker. “It’s the same software in a flexible form with a lower cost of entry.”

This software version of Lightspeed Live Capture supports IP formats including transport streams, SRT, NDI, and RTMP.  Additionally, due to its deep integration with Telestream Vantage workflow automation, it provides unparalleled depth in capture and media processing, the company reported. 

Telestream also announced an update to the Live Schedule browser-based application for scheduling Live Capture event recordings. The app enables events to be added to the schedule manually or through a robust API, and it has been updated with enhanced router control features. Lightspeed Live Capture can also capture media right into GLIM, which enables users to easily capture and quickly make available content for secondary uses and additional monetization. GLIM is the Telestream software for remote viewing and sub-clipping over standard internet connections.                                    

Telestream will demonstrate Lightspeed Live Capture at NAB, booth W1501, where visitors will see the company’s solutions for content creation and production and for distribution and monetization. The software-only version of Lightspeed Live Capture is planned for worldwide availability in Spring 2023.

For more information about Telestream’s NAB 2023 showcase please visit:  www.telestream.net/company/events/nab/NAB-2023.htm. 

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream will unveil Telestream Content Manager, a management system that leverages both on-prem and cloud storage, and PRISM MPP, a multi-format rasterizer purpose-built for post-production, at the 2023 NAB Show, April 15-19, in Las Vegas.

The company also will introduce a software-only version of its Lightspeed Live Capture solution and showcase Qualify, a cloud-native QC service as well as demonstrate its iQ architecture for cloud-native video quality monitoring, it said.

“Digital transformation is driving exciting innovation across media and entertainment workflows, and we want to ensure our customers can take full advantage,” said Jon Wilson, president and COO of Telestream. "We’re focusing the vast capabilities of our company on delivering software-centric and cloud-native solutions to give content owners, broadcasters and video service providers the flexibility and tools they need to automate, optimize and scale their operations.”

The Telestream Content Manager offers a single point of access to content across an organization’s entire storage ecosystem, including the cloud and on-prem, and is built on DIVA Core technology. It is integrated with Telestream’s workflow orchestration tools and all major MAM, PAM and automation systems, the company said.

With an intuitive web-based user interface to search, preview and repurpose content, the new offering includes an auto-discovery feature that enables indexing of files directly from cloud storage without incurring egress charges, it said. 

Telestream Content Manager, which has a summer release target, enables supply chain workflows that incorporate content movement, lifecycle management and media processing, it said.

The Telestream PRISM family now includes three new models to address the needs of post-production workflows focused on high-end video formats like SDI- and IP-based 12-bit RGB for 4K/UHD applications. The solutions offer measurement tools for colorists with HDR requirements, a complete set of QC tools for objective evaluation of video and audio content and a remotely accessible user interface, Telestream said.

Supporting local, remote and post-production applications up to 8K, the MPP models enable color grading, surround sound audio production up to 7.1.4, SDI monitoring and IP analysis. The company expects to release the tools in the summer.

Telestream’s new software-only version of Lightspeed Live Capture can be run from a Telestream server, the user’s own server or in the cloud. It is due out in the spring.

See Telestream at 2023 NAB Show booth W1501.

More information is available on the company’s website.

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has announced a new CEO with Rhonda Bassett-Spiers assuming the post immediately. She succeeds Dan Castles who will retire from the CEO role and remain with the company through April 2023 to aid in the transition of Ms. Bassett-Spiers into her new role. 

Telestream also announced that president and chief operating officer Jon Wilson will remain in his current role, continuing to lead the company’s operations.

Castles, the company’s founding CEO, returned to the CEO position in January 2020 from the Board of Directors to lead the Company’s recent phase of accelerated growth. During his most recent tenure as CEO, Telestream has completed five acquisitions to expand its leadership across the media supply chain, the company said. 

“Under Dan’s leadership and strategic foresight, he has grown Telestream to an industry-leading provider of automation tools and applications across the media supply chain,” said Eli Weiss, managing partner of Genstar Capital which owns Telestream. “I want to thank Dan for his leadership since returning into the role of CEO in January 2020 to guide Telestream through its most recent phase of accelerated growth while positioning the company for continued success moving forward.”

Prior to Telestream, Rhonda Bassett-Spiers’ 30+ year career of leadership across the technology industry included her most recent role as president and CEO of iTradeNetwork, a leading global supplier of end-to-end supply chain management and intelligence solutions for the perishable food industry. Under her leadership, iTradeNetwork developed a suite of industry-first solutions that enabled customers to build resiliency and quickly adapt to the ever-changing conditions of the food supply chain.

“Rhonda has an excellent track record of leadership across the technology industry and pioneering innovation and driving growth,” said Castles. “Our leadership styles are complementary and our priorities of delivering superior customer and employee experiences are consistent, which is why she is the right person to lead Telestream as the next CEO,” 

Rhonda Bassett-Spiers added that “I joined Telestream because of its culture, its track record of growth and profitability, and its leadership position in the video industry. I look forward to partnering with Jon and the great leadership team as the company begins a new chapter of providing world class solutions across the digital media supply chain.”

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has announced that Anne-Louise Buick has been named senior vice president of marketing.

Buick joins the 25-year-old company following a decade of acquisition, transformation, and significant growth that has significantly expanded Telestream’s operations as a leader in workflow automation, media processing, video quality monitoring, and test and synchronization solutions for the production and distribution of video. 

Most recently Buick led worldwide field, channel, and demand marketing at Avid as vice president of global revenue marketing. Her 20-year career in media and entertainment technology marketing has also included leadership positions in the TV and Media Division at Ericsson, IP video technology manufacturer Exterity and organizations focused on pay TV and digital archive monetization. She previously served on the board of IABM and is currently on the advisory board of the Marketing Leaders Circle, and Rise – a group focused on equality and diversity in the broadcast industry, and she has been an active mentor in the Rise mentoring program since its inception. Buick is based in Scotland.

“Anne-Louise will be an incredible partner in driving a high-performing marketing function to support Telestream’s next phase of growth,” explained Telestream president and COO Jon Wilson said. “Her global expertise and past successes will be invaluable as we help our customers evolve to meet new opportunities and take our innovations into new markets.”

“Telestream has built an incredible reputation by partnering with its customers to move the industry forward,” Buick said. “They’ve managed to remain humble, and maintain a positive, inclusive culture even as they transformed into the powerhouse they are today. I look forward to helping Telestream realize the investment in that transformation.”

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has announced the latest release of its Lightspeed Live Capture multi-channel on-premise ingest solution.

Lightspeed v3.5 makes it possible for broadcasters to connect the software over IP networks locally or remotely using SMPTE 2110 with NMOS, NDI sources SRT sources. The new capability augments existing Transport Stream and RTMP IP format support, the company said.

“As global demand for VOD and live streaming continues to grow, it’s critical that the workflows to create it are also able to take advantage of the flexibility and simplicity of IP networks,” said Telestream senior director of product management Scott Matics. “With this connectivity, broadcast engineers and operations staff can capture and route high-resolution IP streams around to multiple systems, onsite or remote, incredibly efficiently. Add to that the unprecedented integration with our Vantage Media Processing Platform plus an expanded Avid workflow, and you can see how significant this leap forward is for network capture.”

The new connectivity methods provide reliable, low latency, frame accurate connections over common IP network implementations while preserving source synchronization. NMOS support for SMPTE ST 2110 adds a control plane that makes the infrastructure simpler to operate. The implementation comes with full support for the ISO4 and ISO5 specifications. Using the ISO4 specifications within NMOS, Lightspeed Live Capture can query for information about other devices, it said.  

The software also registers its capabilities and discovers other devices where live capture workflows might originate. ISO5 is used by Lightspeed Live Capture to perform the setup and removal of media flows between itself and the sending device. Telestream has also enhanced segmented recording capabilities with the addition of several new methods, such as time, timecode and duration-based segmenting. Integration and support for Avid workflows have also been expanded with new metadata options in the Capture action.  

Lightspeed Live Capture v3.5 will be available worldwide later this month.

More information is available on the company’s website.

In a recent TV Tech Talk, moderator Wes Simpson discussed the latest challenges, opportunities and trends in the growing field of remote production, also known as “REMI.” The following is an edited transcript of his discussion with Deon LeCointe with Sony, Steven Bilow with Telestream and Dan Maloney with Matrox Video.

Wes Simpson: Remote production got a big boost from the pandemic, but what factors are driving broadcasters to continue growing their remote production capabilities going forward from today? 

Deon LaCointe: There's two things, first it's the technology and the fact that it's possible now. IP technology for video has been around for a long time but I think a lot of people think about streaming applications, transport streams, and so on, but recently with the advent of technologies like 2022-6, 2110, people now feel way more comfortable building broadcast infrastructures that allow that connectivity to drive their actual environments. 

And then there's the cost aspect. They now have the ability to do things like resource sharing or remote production (REMI), where you can deploy a minimized amount of equipment and personnel on site to capture your content. You have the ability to share resources from production to production. 

And I think, hopefully, this starts to diminish more and more over time. But I think the pandemic was a big driving factor. It's the elephant in the room—I think there's still the continued drive for protective measures by keeping a large number of people away from each other and just minimize the amount of people that are in a control room. So I said two, but really it was three.

Steven Bilow: Deon said something really important when he mentioned having fewer staff on site, and being able to do more remotely with the newer technologies because when I think of it from a business perspective, everybody is always buying new equipment because there's new technology. 

But what you really want to do is be able to make the most efficient use of that capital investment as you can, and one of the reasons I think remote production is going to continue is because people now can, not only when they make a capital investment; they're able to do it maybe in a little bit larger scale than they could before because you're now able to use the equipment you buy, the software you buy, the trucks and you build across a larger number of potential events. 

In the old days if you wanted to do some sports production or you wanted to do a live event, you needed to bring your truck in and you needed to set it up and everything. We still have to do that for live events, but you have so many fewer people on-site that you can now take the capital you invest, say, in building a truck or building internal infrastructure, and you're able to deploy that in a way where you can actually, let's say, do multiple shows in a week that you could never do or even potentially do multiple shows in a day.

Dan Maloney: The only thing I would add is that the pandemic specifically forced content creators, producers to to get creative and do whatever they could with spit and bubblegum to try to keep the show going and keep the events rolling. And they developed a lot of good content, despite the fact they had limited technology. 

So that really opened their eyes for what was possible, and once they got the taste for what was possible, now that the restrictions are removed or slightly removed, they can go ahead and really start experimenting with less fear than they might have in the past because they were able to do it in We've seen a number of sporting and news events are being done remotely, so it's growing and the world is your oyster. But if you're doing it just for the sake of doing it, you should probably rethink what your outcomes are.

WS: Are there any applications where remote production is not a good idea? 

DL: My response to this or similar questions is: Don't do remote production just for the sake of doing remote production. Everybody runs their business differently; everybody knows when they have a primetime show, and they don't want to put it at risk. If you're going to deploy a traditional production truck, I think there's a certain financial threshold. 

We've seen the Olympics was done in remote production. We've seen a number of sporting and news events are being done remotely, so it's growing and the world is your oyster. But if you're doing it just for the sake of doing it, you should probably rethink what your outcomes are. What efficiencies are you achieving? What benefits and objectives are you achieving? Because it's still not an easy thing to do and a lot of thought still has to go into it. 

DM:  I just want to add that although the technology might be there, if your creative staff—the directors and some of the staff running the equipment aren't—and they're much more comfortable being in a live environment and getting content produced that way—then maybe you don't force it down their throat. So there really is a people aspect to it as well.

SB: There are some tasks that might still best be done on-site, or at least I haven't seen people trying to do them too much remotely, for example, camera shading. If you’ve got a truck with 16 cameras on it, you've got to shade them and I think there's still a place for camera operators to be sitting in that truck. And even if it's just one guy shading cameras, there are certain tasks that are still best done on site.

WS: What about the things that we all do when we're doing live events or even doing pre-recorded events in terms of monitoring and maintaining and watching the video to make sure that things are happening the way that we expect them to go? What are some of the techniques for monitoring these feeds remotely and entering and exiting cloud environments and things like that?

SB: As far as monitoring goes, let's say for example, you have camera operators on-site, but other people are doing editing and building packages all remotely and you have this choice of who's using what equipment, what people you want, maybe have a broader selection of who you want to use on your team who’s producing the predictive killer shots and you want to fly them around.  You really have the choice now of having your absolute best creative people, anywhere you want in the world. I'm not downplaying the creative aspects of this because there are people who do things that I admire that I could never do. 

But I think if you look at the creative side of things, there are more choices in terms of the creative people that you bring into a production than you do having the technical people who have to debug a problem, for example. 

So I think, in the broad sense, being able to monitor a lot of distributed systems remotely—whether it be 2110 or 2022-6—you have things spread out remotely and you need to be able to monitor them from a central location for example. And the reason I think that is, is because you can have your best people creatively anywhere you want in the world, but you don't have that big of a choice of the best technical people in the world. So what you want to do is maybe centralize them and have them centrally monitor a distributed system. 

DL: If I can add to that, coming at it from a little bit of a different angle, the goal of building out these remote production environments or production-at-a-distance environment is that to try to emulate an in-facility production as closely as possible. So, you want to emulate those workflows. You don't want to put the broadcast engineers or your production staff in a position where they can tell the difference, and now they have to operate differently. 

WS: What about latency issues?

DL: We kind of dealt with this a few years ago, when REMI was really coming to maturity, and we came up with a term called "operational latency." If you're a technical director, you're sitting in front of the switcher. You're bringing in a whole bunch of remote feeds... How long does it take between when I switch from source A to source B before I see the changeover in my multiviewer? 

And I think there's two ways of looking at it: One is, where is your equipment deployed? If in a traditional REMI—and I use the word "traditional" loosely—you have your cameras deployed to the field, the signals are all coming back from multiple sites, so there are potentially different network latencies that are coming in. 

If your switcher and your processing hardware are back at headquarters, as the signals land in the switcher, when you switch your signals, you shouldn't see any latency because the latency has already been taken up from the network side, from traversing the distance. If your panel is located at headquarters, but your switcher, your processing, is located at the remote site, that's where you could see a difference switching from source A to source B. 

Now the key to remember is, as long as it's going into the switcher in time, then you're good because all of the signals are fine; they’re timed and they're good to go. And then there are technologies within 2110 where they put in the RTP timestamp in the stream. There are systems out there that can make those frame accurate so you can line things up. So you should be good on having your signals coming in and being lined up correctly within the switcher. 

DM: I'll give you one of the examples where we as equipment vendors should try our best to minimize latencies for  things like talkback, when, for example, if a production director is remote or, excuse me, in studio or back at headquarters, and he's talking to his camera operators, you don't want him to be 15 seconds behind. 

But when you're looking at a one-second latency or so or less, then that's usually quite manageable. If they have to do small adjustments, you know, frame-accurate cuts for example, everything is in sync coming in, doesn't matter if things are all delayed by the same amount, no big deal. But the interpersonal discussion—if you’re using Zoom or Skype or some other type of, not even a professional means of talkback back to the camera operators—that's very low latency, so trying to bring those things back in as low latency as possible is an important task we strive to achieve.

WS: Among the trends—going full-time remote or a hybrid model or back to all in-person, what do we see going forward? 

SB: I don’t think we’re ever going to go back to all in-person.

DL: Interestingly enough, I'm seeing a mixed bag. I'm actually seeing a lot of broadcasters going back to all in-person and I think that kind of follows what you're seeing going on in corporate America, where we're being told "it's time to come back to work." 

So, it's not that the amount of remote productions have gone down, but definitely you can walk into a lot of broadcast facilities, like here in New York, you go to our control room and there's a full complement of personnel in there. I don't have percentages, but I can still see that there's some that are moving in that way. And there are others who are still like, "No, we're still working out of our living rooms, and we have the technology to do it.” I think it's going both ways right now. 

DM: There are people going back and there are other media production companies that are going to be perfectly happy to remain remote. And they build a business on that versus some of the more traditional operators who are like, "well, we know how to do things the old way and we're comfortable doing that." So it's here to stay in various capacities at various organizations. 

WS: I think you've got a good point there. So one of the things about a lot of these remote and hybrid workflows is that they really rely on high-speed high-availability data links, so I don't see that trend going away. 

DL: I think broadcasters were all hoping for a significant drop in the costs of fiber connectivity, with telcos between different facilities. If you're coming from a sports venue, or doing election coverage or something like that, and if you look at it in a smaller timeframe, like a two-to-five year timeframe, you might argue that the cost hasn't come down at all—in fact, you might argue it went up. But if you look at it in a broader timeframe, 10 years or more, the cost of the links have actually come down so I give the telco some credit there. But the broadcasters are still going to have the rest of your links for your big primetime events—you're going to have dual, you're gonna go terrestrial and satellite. 

But I also think a lot of interesting things are happening in the way of 5G. All the stadiums in the NFL are talking about 5G connectivity, but then you have to figure out, well, you're not going to use the 5G connectivity that's being used by the fans, right? So you’ve got to figure out, are you deploying 5G for the production environment? The technologies are coming along, but it always just comes down to cost and implementation. 

You can access the full hour-long webcast here. 

WASHINGTON—If you work for a broadcaster, you know that distribution over IP is supplanting SDI as the best practice, both for in-studio and remote activities. IP is simply the “better mousetrap,” with more flexibility than SDI, at costs that are no greater and often less.

One of the interesting benefits of working in an IP production environment is that it is better understood by corporate IT departments than the traditional way of working in an SDI “island” that is strictly the concern of the television engineering staff. At a time when skilled broadcast engineers are retiring in great numbers, the transition to IP production infrastructures could not have come at a better time.

“Live production over IP is a definite reality now,” said Ulrich Voigt, vice president for product management at Vizrt. “It has reached a level most of us did not expect.”

Changing Quickly
Liam Hayter, senior solutions architect for NewTek thinks he knows why the change happened so quickly.

“[It’s] the acceptance of lightweight, high-efficiency, and crucially low-latency software-based compression as an acceptable tool for broadcast,” he said. “Early in the IP transition, there was much chasing of uncompressed zero-latency IP delivery, but this becomes heavy and unwieldy—particularly when globally everyone, in every scenario, needed to work remotely.”

As quickly as the IP production steamroller was upon us, that doesn’t mean it was easy or without growing pains.

“There were several hurdles that needed to be overcome to make this a reality and they have been conquered for the most part,” said Steven Bilow, senior product marketing manager at Telestream. “For example, the nondeterminism of IP switching versus SDI used to be a big roadblock. But now, with technologies like ST 2110 and, especially for widely distributed sites, ST 2022-6, as well as ever-increasing format efficiency with technologies like JPEG-XS, these latencies have largely been overcome.”

The inherent flexibility of IP has users and manufacturers thinking of ways to structure systems to capture and distribute signals in novel ways. Producers and content creators are pushing the technology into situations where SDI dares not go.

“We believe completely in the cloud and IP’s ability to transform live production in a way that dramatically expands who and how video is produced and delivered,” said Paul Shen, CEO of TVU Networks. “It’s what drives us to keep creating—empowering content creators is at the core of everything we do.”

One of TVU’s users is the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (CONIFA), a soccer organization based in Latin America. In June, CONIFA produced and broadcast the Copa América, a professional soccer tournament from the remote Chilean city of Linares, with practically no equipment, minimal personnel and on a shoestring budget.

“With the TVU ecosystem, four or five people in different countries participating in production and transmission, a few pieces of basic equipment, and a couple of smartphones, we were able to stream live to the whole world from one small city in southern Chile,” said Diego Bartolotta, president of CONIFA Americas. “Before the Copa América, I was a bit incredulous that we could achieve a quality broadcast of a professional football game with only interconnected phones. But [this broadcast] totally changed my perspective.”

No Immediate Replacement
Although IP is now widely accepted for broadcast infrastructure, existing SDI cabling does not necessarily need to be replaced immediately. There are a few ways to keep both the IP and SDI gods happy.

“With SDI/IP gateways, there is no immediate need to make SDI equipment obsolete,” said Chris Scheck, marketing content manager for Lawo. Hardly anyone is seriously considering this option, because their CFO wouldn’t like the idea, and because [in some situations] there is still no equivalent IP solution.”

“The idea was always to phase out SDI naturally by no longer purchasing non-IP gear, but even that remains tricky as some tools are still firmly rooted in the SDI domain,” Scheck said. “What will happen, however is that SDI routers will disappear over time, because IP natives like Lawo’s .edge can replace them at a lower cost, while also offering almost unlimited scalability of the number of SDI inputs and outputs.”

At least one vendor sees a healthy SDI universe in the foreseeable future.

“As a big part of our business and an OEM supplier to major broadcast equipment manufacturers, we can confidently say that SDI is quite healthy,” said Francesco Scartozzi, vice president of sales and business development for Matrox Video Broadcast and Media Group. “That’s not to say that the IP is not being adopted, but SDI is still quite prevalent. At the lower end of the broadcast pyramid, SDI is very well suited, whether it’s for 3G SDI and 12G SDI for those moving toward 4K. As a supplier to those vendors, we can see these customers are refreshing all the SDI equipment with newer SDI equipment that now needs to handle not only HD-SDI but also the ability to go 4K.”

Monitor and Measurement
Of course, high-quality broadcasts are not possible without tools to monitor and measure the quality of the signals. As the use of IP production has mushroomed in the past few years, manufacturers of test and measurement gear have been racing to make monitoring and measurement practical, and for it to make sense in a live production environment.

“Point-to-point SDI connections used to be far easier to troubleshoot than IP connections. In some ways they still are,” Bilow said. “But the sophistication of tools, such as Telestream’s Inspect 2110 and PRISM, to allow proactive monitoring and problem identification in large-scale media networks has come so far in the past five years that it’s now possible to identify and diagnose even complex problems in a reasonable amount of time.”

Bridging current SDI systems to the IP world can be done with gear from a variety of vendors. One of the first to come up with a solution was NewTek, which developed its Network Device Interface (NDI) line of interfaces and processors.

“Five years ago, ‘IP’ in broadcast mainly referred to the SMPTE ST 2110 family of standards, which is designed to be used on-prem with mainly physical equipment,” Voight said. “If we look at IP production happening today, we see a clear mix of ST 2110 on-prem and NDI hybrid as on-prem and cloud. 

“We see NDI being used today at almost every large media entity, at least as ‘commodity’ IP production technology and ST 2110 for the high-end infrastructure,” he added. “The pandemic has been a catalyst to adopt NDI as one viable IP technology, as it was the only one supporting cloud, remote and work-from-home scenarios.”

New Options
The people producing content focus on getting good images and sound, and combining them in interesting and entertaining ways. However, even they are discovering that IP gives them options that were never before available—or were hopelessly expensive or complex.

For example, it’s easy to have bidirectional signals in an IP environment. And since IP is literally available everywhere, it is not a huge technical consideration to get a feed from India, Korea, Egypt or Peru. What was once complicated and expensive in a satellite uplink world is far easier and much cheaper with IP.

The Covid pandemic pushed broadcasters to embrace IP production systems and techniques faster than they would have otherwise, but the reality is that the advantages of IP are obvious for at least larger productions. Depending on what you’re doing, it can definitely make sense for smaller productions as well.

One final thought: SpaceX now has a constellation of thousands of satellites that can deliver modestly high-speed IP circuit anywhere in the world, and the company is adding satellites at the rate of 50-100 per month. With the ultimate goal of having tens of thousands of satellites and the capability to deliver upload/download speeds of more than 100 Mbps, this literally means that high-quality video can originate from anywhere in the world. At a moment’s notice.

Think of what clever content creators and video producers can do with that capability. 

The August 2022 TV Tech Talk on remote production is now available on demand. 

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—LucidLink, AJA Video Systems and Telestream have announced that they are working together to provide users with a faster way to access, organize and view data in one easy workflow. 

As a result of the collaboration, the LucidLink Filespaces SaaS-based solution now provides rapid access to data through AJA Diskover Media Edition in conjunction with Telestream GLIM and the Vantage platform. LucidLink serves as a central hub uniting what are typically two disparate systems creating seamless workflows for media professionals.

“We are excited to be showing this powerful solution for media professionals at IBC 2022,” said Rupert Watson, LucidLink’s Director of Alliances and Channels, EMEA. “Pulling together the innovative technologies from AJA, Telestream, and LucidLink into one workflow brings new capabilities for creative teams to work in tandem on the same project, giving them the power to truly collaborate and create in real-time, no matter where they are based.”

The solution provides users with one workflow from three powerful solutions, the companies said. 

LucidLink’s centralized data repository provides immediate data access combined with AJA Diskover Media Edition, which helps catalog and find the right file while customers use Telestream GLIM to review the data and Vantage for transcoding. 

The combination offers great speed; LucidLink allows remote workers all over the globe to share and access data with speeds that are normally only reserved for high-speed on-prem storage.

AJA Diskover Media Edition on top of LucidLink allows organizations to very rapidly index extremely large file systems stored via LucidLink and gives users visibility to the data no matter where they are located, but without the security risks associated with full, potentially destructive access to the data.

“The media and entertainment industry is bottlenecked with unwieldy data management across production and post, while remote workflows present additional challenges for managing file locations and metadata on the cloud,” explained Nick Rashby, president, AJA Video Systems.

“AJA Diskover Media Edition removes the hurdles associated with data management, helping industry professionals work more efficiently and make more informed data decisions," he continued. "Our partnership with LucidLink further simplifies navigating cloud storage, enabling remote teams to collaborate via a streamlined workflow akin to using on-premises storage, and even move immediately from viewing of media and metadata to further production of assets with tools like Telestream’s Vantage package.”

LucidLink Filespaces provides an infinitely scalable, centralized repository of data, in the cloud, that can be immediately accessed from anywhere for teams, the companies said. 

LucidLink works on any major operating system. The client can install on any server, laptop, or workstation and mount as a local volume. As a mount point on a server, LucidLink provides a standard directory structure and instant access to data for all these various services that have never been able to integrate seamlessly. LucidLink enables AJA’s Diskover and Telestreams GLIM and Vantage servers, which are located in different parts of the world, to easily access data and work in concert with each other.

Telestream GLIM helps creative professionals quickly preview high-quality media files with color accuracy via any web browser – without generating a proxy file. With direct access to and the ability to launch the player in AJA Diskover Media Edition, professionals can now easily view and validate files located on-premises or in cloud storage as indexed by Diskover Media Edition as associated metadata. All files are shown with SCTE-35 markers, waveform view, and audio metering to ensure compliance standards on-the-fly, for any user, in any location.

Access to Telestream’s powerful Vantage platform via AJA Diskover Media Edition v2.0 gives remote workers access to centralized tools for generating proxy files or transcoding media assets for delivery. Users can now select files and send them to an on-premises or cloud-based Telestream Vantage system to create proxies or transcode the assets, regardless of user, file, or Vantage system location. Coupled with AJA Diskover Media Edition’s global index, the plug-in accelerates workflows by eliminating roundtripping between applications and streamlining files.

LucidLink will be at IBC2022 (Hall 7, Booth B06). 

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has released Lightspeed Live C2+, the latest member of the Lightspeed Live server family.

Lightspeed Live C2+ is built for operators and engineers who must stream live events or capture feeds for post-production. With four high-performance SDI ports to maximize the flexibility of ingest, Lightspeed Live C2+delivers enterprise-class live streaming and capture for media and entertainment companies, corporations, government agencies and educational facilities, the company said.

The new server, with four 3G HD-SDI inputs, is HD and UHD-capable and costs 30% less per channel than configurations of previous generations, Telestream said.

“We continue to make advancements in the Lightspeed Live server family to support the enhancements being made to the Capture and Stream software,” says Scott Matics, the company’s senior director of product management. “As remote productions become more sophisticated, state-of-the-art live capture and streaming hardware servers ensure performance and reliability for the most demanding productions.”

Lightspeed Live Capture, an ingest application for the Lightspeed Live server offering high-resolution and proxy file support, includes RS422 VTR control for automated tape ingest. The application can operate as a standalone capture device, a multiple server capture farm or be integrated directly into a Vantage domain of any size, the company said.

To expand a system and increase channel count, users can simply add more Lightspeed Live Capture servers, add their services through a common database and control them via common user interfaces, it said.

Lightspeed Live Stream, is an application delivering enterprise-class live streaming that can ingest multiple baseband SDI or IP video sources (MPTS, SPTS, RTMP), encode multiple variants or ABR packages and deploy multiple sources to multiple destinations or host the origin, it said.

The application will detect SCTE 35/104 and place an IDR (Instantaneous Decoder Refresh) frame at the boundary so that downstream equipment or server-side content replacement and ad insertion can take place seamlessly and cleanly without requiring re-encoding of the existing stream to improve quality and efficiency, it said. 

Lightspeed Live C2+ server is available now.

More information is available on the company’s website. 

See Telestream at IBC 2022, September 9-12 in Amsterdam, in Stand 6.C16.

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—Some of us can remember when audio was regarded merely “as the poor step-child of video.” There was but a single channel to look after, and it passed muster if it met the aural equivalent of “it looks good leaving here” and the transmitter operator didn’t complain about carrier over-deviation. 

But that was then, and this is now. Television audio in the 21st century is anything but a simple “step-child” that doesn’t need to be watched that closely. 

Multiple Formats
Start with the increasing plethora of formats, according to Mike Waidson, application engineer at Telestream.

“Gone are the simple days of analog audio—we must now deal with digital PCM with one-to-many channels,” Waidson said. “These audio channels are distributed in multiple ways. Sometimes the audio is embedded in SDI. But it is now also carried as an audio stream in IP. To further complicate matters, the carriage in multiple file formats, whether uncompressed or compressed, is a common occurrence.” 

Berny Carpenter, audio product manager at TSL, agrees. “With the evolution of audio delivery formats, we have seen audio channel counts gradually increasing, particularly for marquee content, such as high-profile sports events,” he said. “What was stereo became 5.1, and now we’re seeing the next generation of audio delivery formats for broadcast which cater to immersive and personalized audio, including Dolby Atmos and Fraunhofer’s MPEG-H. 

“The signal formats used in productions have gradually changed too,” he added. “Within the last two decades, SDI has gone from 1.5G (HD-SDI) to 3G, and now 12G is becoming more and more common.”

Like so many media tech solutions these days, “one size does not fit all” anymore, according to Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe, Nugen Audio product specialist.“People are consuming content in such a wide variety of environments, on such a wide variety of equipment, so in my opinion our biggest challenge is making sure the audio always translates. You want the dialog to be intelligible regardless of whether someone is watching on their laptop on a train using inexpensive earbuds, or watching in a home cinema with a finely tuned 7.1.4 setup.” 

Meeting the Challenges
A common denominator in designing today’s professional audio monitoring gear for television is flexibility—the ability to expand or otherwise change monitoring capabilities as operations grow and requirements are added. Capability for updating existing capabilities or for unlocking initially unneeded features is also a big plus.

“Being able to future-proof an investment is obviously appealing for broadcasters, enabling them to reduce CAPEX and add capabilities to a product only if it is required at a later date,” said TSL’s Carpenter. “TSL’s audio monitors include connectivity options and software features as upgradeable items. The PAM-IP supports upgrades for both ST 2110 and Dante IP connectivity, whilst our SAM-Q range offers optional MADI connectivity and loudness functionality. All of these can be purchased with the unit, or retrospectively applied.”

Larry Schindel, senior product manager of TV Solutions at the Telos Alliance, is also an advocate of upgrading via software changes.  

“Unless a monitoring unit is a basic stereo, analog, ‘speaker in a box’ type of unit, the modern monitoring devices are digital, sometimes even being a ‘PC in a box,’” Schindel said. “The nature of these digital devices today is that they are meant to be updated as new features are developed. All Telos Alliance units are designed to be updated as new software-based features are added and become available.”

Nugen’s Vinehill-Cliffe observed that product “agility” is not the only benefit derived with software-driven monitoring.

“The ability to work faster than real-time with software tools, Nugen’s VisLM or LM-Correct, for example, is also a major advantage,” Vinehall-Cliffe said.

“As it stands, our full Loudness Toolkit bundle already supports 7.1.2 audio, and this is also true of Halo Vision. Anyone who owns VisLM, LM-Correct or ISL v2.0 and above can already upgrade to v2.9 for free. Many of our updates are free, and even when issuing a paid update we offer discounted upgrade paths for existing owners.”

In addition to monitor future-proofing, Wohler CEO Makarand Karanjkar described another “plus” that can come with software architecture: increased functionality within a single “box,” something that’s especially welcome in crowded racks found in smaller control rooms and production vehicles.

 “The rapid evolution of signal types, whether Dante, Ravenna, ST2110, ST2022-7 or Dolby ATMOS, coupled with various mezzanine compression formats like JPEG2K for backhauls, or HEVC for distribution, is driving the need for multifunctional hardware, with software that can upgraded to meet evolving needs,” he said. 

And the Beat Goes On…
As ATSC 3.0 broadcasting continues to roll out, it brings with it additional requirements, even one for which a standard has yet to be developed. “We anticipate the need to support multiple audio codecs for ASTC 3.0, and our iVAM series of products are well equipped to support emerging technologies like Dolby AC4 in the future,” said Wohler’s Karanjkar 

“With the additional height channels and personalization objects in next-generation audio formats there is more to measure than ever before.” said TSL’s Carpenter. “As an example of how TSL can help broadcasters with this requirement, the SAM-Q range allows for up to eight simultaneous programs [each up to 9.1.4] to have loudness measured, logged and a downmix can be monitored through the unit itself.” 

Telos Alliance’s Schindel notes that for broadcasters moving to ATSC 3.0, audio monitoring specifically for the advanced broadcast format may not be necessary.

“Most broadcasters who are launching ATSC 3.0 services today are doing a simple simulcast of what’s on their ATSC 1 service, so other than wanting a monitor which can decode Dolby AC-4… there isn’t much new that they need, yet,” he said. “Dialog Enhancement is an inherent part of Dolby AC-4, so really any AC-4 decoder should be capable of supporting this function, but looking forward, broadcasters will want monitors that support Dolby Atmos and personalized audio which ATSC 3.0 is capable of supporting.”

“The challenge for the broadcaster is to deal with another compressed audio format, AC-4,” said Telestream’s Waidson. “While this offers…the ability to carry multiple streams with more audio channels, it requires equipment to support these formats.”

Nugen’s Vinehill-Cliffe noted that some of this equipment has yet to be developed.

“It’s great that the ATSC 3.0 spec includes support for object-based audio,” he said. “But currently there is no standard for calculating or measuring the loudness of object-based audio, which poses a problem. Once a loudness standard has been developed… broadcasters will need monitoring tools which can support the new standard. This is something which we at Nugen are looking towards tackling.” 

Television audio monitoring has certainly come a long way from one simple VU meter. Perhaps it’s fitting to resurrect an old saying and add a corollary:

“There’s no rest for the weary—particularly if you’re an audio monitor designer.”

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—At IBC 2022, Telestream  will demonstrate its comprehensive portfolio of solutions that cover the range of media workflows from production to distribution. 

IBC 2022 will provide the first showcase of the company’s newly expanded cloud-native services offering due to the recent acquisition of Encoding.com, demonstrating how the cloud native automation and scale of Encoding.com, coupled with the broadcast media DNA of Telestream, “delivers an unparalleled set of capabilities for customers,” the company said.

“We’re looking forward to seeing our customers and partners again after such a long hiatus,” says Jon Wilson, Chief Operating Officer at Telestream. “We’ve grown significantly since our last gathering in 2019, recently having completed our 13th acquisition, Encoding.com. Now together as one platform, Telestream and Encoding.com deliver the most complete and comprehensive cloud media processing service in the market.”

Also new for IBC 2022:

• The latest enhancements in media processing and workflow automation feature new HDR capabilities in the Vantage Media Processing Platform, significant updates for Lightspeed Live Capture such as ST 2110 with NMOS, and a next generation captioning product, Stanza.
• A next generation, centralized video quality monitoring and analytics solution, Argus, that enables automated surveillance of each transition in the video delivery chain will be debuted for the first time.
• The latest version of the PRISM waveform monitor family features fast IP switching and enhanced post production format support, including DCI 4096x2160 4K sources and more.
• The latest versions of DIVA and Kumulate content management solutions will be on display with a new user interface for DIVA and support for the Archive eXchange format.
• The multiple award-winning, fully configured, live video streaming production system, Wirecast Gear 3, will be shown at IBC for the first time. Plus, the latest version of Wirecast live streaming and production software.
• Sherpa Stream, a secure and highly customizable live video streaming and content management platform, trusted by media and entertainment organizations, Fortune 500 enterprises, financial institutions, and more will also be shown.

"We've made tremendous progress in advancing our capabilities and solutions, especially with the acquisition of Encoding.com, and we look forward to demonstrating that at IBC this year," says Wilson. "These broader capabilities, combined with our market-leading cloud presence, position Telestream to address our customers’ most complex business challenges. We look forward to connecting in Amsterdam!"

For much more information on what’s new at IBC 2022 from Telestream, please see https://www.telestream.net/pdfs/events/WhatsNew-IBC2022.pdf

The IBC Show takes place at the RAI in Amsterdam, Sept. 9-13.

Telestream will be in Booth 7.C16.

In recent years, remote production has taken on added importance in how media enterprises plan and execute their live production strategies. 

Join TV Tech Talk Moderator Wes Simpson and Steven Bilow from Telestream, Dan Maloney from Matrox and Dan LaCointe from Sony as they discuss the opportunities and best practices that make a successful and cost-efficient remote production.

Click here to register for this free webcast.  

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream today announced Version 3.3 software for its PRISM family of hybrid IP/SDI waveform monitor with new video format support for post-production applications beyond broadcast television.

The latest release adds faster switching of IP inputs and Dolby ED2 metadata support to PRISM’s existing IP and SDI measurement tools, the company said.

Other new features include:

• AV Delay Measurement for SDI, ST2022-6 and ST2110-20/30/31 using the AV delay test signal from Telestream Sync Pulse Generator products.
• Safe Area display with AFD graticule, which allows users to ensure that text, graphics and important information like weather, headline and school closure crawls are visible on consumers’ displays irrespective of aspect ratio and production aperture size.
• Colorized RGB Parade Waveform / Stop display for ease of use and quick operation.
• Larger floating timecode display, which allows timecode to be visible no matter how the tiles are configured.

PRISM is designed for video engineering, operations, live acquisition, event production and post-production. It offers specialized tools to maximize its usability with today’s wide color gamut, high dynamic range and high-resolution formats, it said.

Fast IP input switching –around a half second, enables camera shading operators to make comparisons quickly regardless of whether they are working in IP, SDI or a hybrid situation. Version 3.3 now supports DCI 4K post production resolutions up to 4096x2160 and refresh rates from 23.98 to 60p for everything from cinematic to broadcast workflows. The latest version also offers Dolby ED2 metadata decoding which is used for Dolby Atmos and guard band measurement for comprehensive audio monitoring.

“As the dividing lines between Film and TV production blur, we are adding capability to the PRISM platform to extend the format capability in SDI and IP to meet these needs for a broad range of customers doing higher-end post work,” says Charlie Dunn, senior vice president of the company’s Video Test, Synchronization and Quality Assurance Business Unit. 

“Now that ST-2110 can be considered mainstream, we are adding the expected capability to measure AV-Delay, Dolby E/ED2 and enable a seamless switch so that the benefits of an IP infrastructure can be realized without any operational compromises.”

More information is available on the company’s website.

Broadcasters are looking for more effective ways to increase viewer choices through new services and expanding to new markets. In TV Tech's July TV Tech Talk, Moderator Wes Simpson will lead a discussion in how the M&E industry is optimizing its content management strategies.

Click here to register for this free webcast. 

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has acquired privately held cloud media processing firm Encoding.com, the company announced today. Financial details were not disclosed.

“Over Encoding.com’s 13-year history, the company has generated significant traction powering video supply chains for leading streaming platforms, content distributors and web-based VOD platforms,” said Telestream CEO Dan Castles. 

“Being cloud-native from inception, the technology fits perfectly within the strategic direction at Telestream to offer our customers the ultimate flexibility to meet their most demanding workflow needs across cloud, on-prem or hybrid environments," he continued. "This acquisition, together with Telestream’s 25 year heritage of continuous media workflow innovation, cements our leadership position across the entire VOD cloud media processing ecosystem.”

Encoding.com is a U.S.-based company with development resources around the world. Its team will be integrated into Telestream. Company founder and CEO Gregg Heil and president Jeff Malkin will assume senior leadership positions at Telestream working on the company’s cloud initiatives.

“Telestream has an excellent track record when it comes to strategic acquisitions that truly benefit their customers and unite teams in a singular mission to bring the best possible solutions to market,” said Heil. “The combined engineering organizations will enable the acceleration of new features and services to support continued migration to the cloud by businesses seeking the advantages of parallel processing, elasticity and scale afforded by cloud infrastructure.”

Encoding.com customers will continue to be supported and can expect access to a broader set of capabilities and options in the future. Telestream customers will benefit from Encoding.com’s enhanced VOD workflows, including ultra-fast processing with Ludicrous mode and industry leading content protection, as the engineering teams integrate the technology stacks, Telestream said.

More information is available on the Telestream website.

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has announced the latest version of its live video streaming and production hardware, Wirecast Gear 3 with support for up to 4K60 streaming workflows.

Designed for video streaming specialists requiring a turnkey solution to produce and stream live video content, Wirecast Gear 3 is well-suited for a number of industries and uses, including those in corporate and marketing environments, sports, news, education, training and houses of worship. 

“Wirecast Gear 3 is the most powerful 4K streaming device on the market in its price range and includes everything you need to broadcast professional HD or 4K content,” said Scott Murray, senior vice president of corporate marketing and production and streaming business at Telestream. “Our Gear 3 4K SDI configuration is the only fully-integrated 4K60 SDI streaming box on the market under $10,000.”

Supporting up to 1080p HD or 4K resolutions, Wirecast Gear comes pre-installed with Telestream’s Wirecast Pro software and includes NDI input/output, PTZ camera control, pro audio effects, ISO recording and Telestream Switch Player software for quality control and inspection, the company said.

“Video streaming specialists need the power and flexibility to perform several tasks simultaneously, from a single system, to keep viewers engaged in real-time,” said Murray. “Effortlessly delivering high production value video with great sounding audio and graphics is a key ingredient to success.”

Using customizable graphics, templates, stock video and audio media and moderated social media comment overlays, users can create uniquely branded shows quickly and stream to popular destinations, such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. The system comes ready to stream out of the box, ensuring that anyone can become a live-streaming professional.

Wirecast Gear 3 hardware was designed to handle the rigors of live streaming production and is available in four models that vary by max resolution and input configuration. They include Wirecast Gear 3 HD HDMI; Wirecast Gear 3 HD SDI; Wirecast Gear 3 4K HDMI; and Wirecast Gear 3 4K SDI.

Each model runs cooler, quieter and 66% more efficiently than the previous generation of Wirecast Gear hardware, the company said.

Key components include:

• AMD Ryzen 5 6-core/12 thread CPU
• NVIDIA Quadro GPU for acceleration and encoding
• 16GB of RAM
• 250GB NVMe M.2 system SSD system drive
• 1TB SATA3 SSD storage drive
• 2x Gigabit Ethernet RJ45
• NDI I/O
• 2-channel line In/Out, Mic In/Out audio
• 9 USB 3.1 connectors for additional audio/video source flexibility
• Microsoft Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC OS
• Compact, portable 2RU form factor

More information is available on the company’s website. 

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has announced the latest version of Inspect 2110, its IP video monitoring solution for SMPTE ST 2110 media networks.

Using a monitoring-by-exception approach to alert engineers proactively of quality issues, Inspect 2110 enables facilities to manage the reliability of the hybrid SDI-over-IP and ST 2110 networks across their facilities. The latest version offers a 180Gb/s bandwidth-capable solution and relies on an entirely new way to think about the Inspect 2110 probe, the company said.

Inspect 2110 is now configurable based on bandwidth monitoring needs and offers options that allow it to be tailored easily to specific applications in contribution monitoring, multiple-studio monitoring and live and production applications for monitoring multiple vehicles from a single location. New features include a high-performance platform, an audio and video remote viewer, automatic detection of frozen and black frames and compliance measurements for loudness (CALM).

“As live remote production becomes increasingly widespread and ST 2110 multiplies the number of essences we must monitor and diagnose, the Inspect 2110 probe enables a wide array of media essence characteristics to be automatically monitored, with no human intervention required until a problem has been identified,” said Agostino Canepa, Inspect 2110 product manager. “Automated, unmanned, 24/7 monitoring of any size ST 2110 / ST 2022-6 network is the best way to maximize the productivity of highly skilled engineering resources because it lets them focus on fixing problems instead of searching for them.”

Inspect 2110 enables user to click on the “View in PRISM” button to redirect an anomalous IP stream to a selected PRISM media analysis instrument. There, an engineer can see and analyze the problem in depth. This capability enables one-click access to fine-grained debugging of video, audio and ancillary streams and PTP timing, it said.

Rather than relying on humans to verify the correctness and integrity of a content stream with their eyes and do so with multiple products to monitor different parameters, Inspect 2110 automates the process and measures all necessary parameters by itself, the company said.

“Automated monitoring speeds up issue resolution while simultaneously freeing up highly skilled technical personnel to work on more critical tasks,” said Canepa. “You can’t do that with a multiviewer, and when combined with Teletream’s PRISM waveform monitors, you can’t do that with anything else.”

Inspect 2110 automatically confirms hundreds of stream parameters against their expected values and only alerts an operator when a notable event or error condition occurs. It then provides the data and tools needed to make quick work of troubleshooting the flagged error condition, it said.

Inspect 2110 will also monitor PTP behavior, such as verifying PTP timing signal accuracy, validate that proper video and audio signals are being carried in each stream, confirm that redundant streams are identical and in sync and identify any stream that is out of compliance with applicable standards, it said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

LAS VEGAS—The pandemic was a busy time for Telestream, company executives said during its press conference at the 2022 NAB Show. 

“Through COVID-19 we’ve done five acquisitions,” President and Chief Operating Officer John Wilson said. “We’ve expanded the product portfolio to across what we’ve really done well from a media workflow-automation perspective, and then test and measurement.”

First, Telestream merged with Tek Video. Then it acquired diva, Masstech, ContentAgent and Sherpa Digital Media.

The company announced a new multiyear, enterprise-wide agreement with Sinclair Broadcast Group that covers all existing products and services across the station group’s properties, together with unlimited usage of Telestream Cloud Services.

Sinclair Senior Director of Media Management Mike Palmer outlined some of the benefits his company has found in working with Telestream.

“During COVID-19, one of the large projects we had was centralizing our ingest and prep of syndicated content, commercials and promos for all of our 600-plus channels,” he said. “So that means that when a commercial comes in, it’s going to be centrally available to all the channels without need to duplicate.”

A piece of material could potentially be received by 60 sites, and people would then check the timing of that content, check the quality, and then a copy of the file was made and moved into play. 

The workload of processing each file is not evenly spread across a week, with the bulk of the files received on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Sinclair needed a way to dynamically scale.

“We wanted to centralize that process, which would mean a huge amount of cost savings to us,” Palmer said. “Our traffic teams were a little worried. They said: ‘OK, everybody is going to be ingesting this stuff in the cloud. How long is it going to take to move through? How long are we going to have to wait?’ So we actually measure our latency for a commercial coming in before we begin to process it. It’s less than 10 seconds during the entire week.”

Another major announcement from Telestream is its release of the latest version of Inspect 2110, the company’s award-winning internet-protocol video monitoring solution for ST 2110 media networks.

The upgrade ensures reliability within hybrid SDI-over-IP and ST 2110 deployments by using a “monitoring by exception” approach to proactively notify engineers of any quality issues within facilities and across networks.

©NAB

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream will showcase its newly announced V. 15 of Wirecast, the company’s live streaming and production software for Mac and Windows, at the NAB Show, April 23-27, in Las Vegas. 

Offering improved 4K support, Rendezvous conferencing enhancements, interactive web page overlays and social comment moderation and new subscription options, Wirecast 15 allows users of any skill level to create professional-looking content that engages and retains viewers, the company said. 

The latest version leverages a re-architected, high-efficiency software engine that makes it possible for users to create compelling productions while using up to 60% fewer computer resources, it said.

“Wirecast 15 represents a significant leap forward in ease of use, efficient use of computer resources, and further enhanced creative tools,” said Lynn Elliott, senior product manager for Wirecast. “With its refreshed UI and subscription options, the new version allows users of any experience level and budget to easily produce broadcast-quality programs that rival most professional television productions.”

Wirecast 15 supports capture of 4K camera sources, playback of 4K media files and 4K streaming output. The Rendezvous peer-to-peer conferencing system now supports live musical instruments as high-definition audio sources in the Wirecast stream through audio processing enhancements that preserve the tonality of the music, the company said.

Web page overlays are now fully interactive in a stream when performing tasks such as live demos or tutorials. Social media comments from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook can be integrated directly into the broadcast with precise control over what gets publicly displayed. Selected comments automatically populate an animated title template enabling users to have a continuously rotating collection of comments playing over the stream, it said.

Wirecast 15 also offers a new user interface (UI). It enables users to create sophisticated content with customizable graphics, templates and stock media. Upgraded audio tools include an enhanced display of audio meters across different views so users instantly see whether audio levels are too low or too high, it said.

Telestream is now offering low-cost subscription options for Wirecast Pro. Users can choose to enroll in monthly or annual subscriptions (starting at $35 per month) and get all of the features included in Wirecast Pro and free upgrades with Premium Access support, for the duration of their subscriptions, it said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

See Telestream in NAB Show booth C3007.

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream will showcase its comprehensive portfolio of solutions for media companies across the content creation, distribution and archiving lifecycle at the NAB Show, April 23-27, in Las Vegas.

“We’re looking forward to meeting our customers and partners face-to-face again at NAB 2022 this year,” said Scott Murray, senior vice president of marketing at Telestream. “With a focus on ensuring our customers thrive, we’re bringing more products and services to NAB this year than in any time in our history.”

For live and studio production, the company will highlight its latest software features for the PRISM waveform monitor. Telestream will feature its new Inspect 2110 probe, updates to its QC software for on-prem, virtual and cloud-native workflows and new 12G-SDI and SMPTE ST 2110 interfaces for Lightspeed Live Capture. The Inspect 2110+PRISM combination is an essential engineering monitor and troubleshooting solution for broadcast and production facilities, the company said.

For post-production professionals, Telestream will highlight the latest PRISM form factors, optimized for trucks and post, as well as feature new ContentAgent server capabilities, it said.

The Telestream Cloud suite of services for post, VOD and QC workflows, offering a pay-for-what’s-needed pricing model and nearly unlimited scaling will also be shown. The company will highlight its new Qualify cloud-native QC service, it said.

Telestream will feature its Vantage Media Processing platform, now available for on-prem, as a subscription, in a virtual environment or as a cloud service, to support transcoding and workflow automaton requirements.

It will demonstrate CardAgent as part of the Vantage workflow, as well as remote file viewing via GLIM with a new UI and a second-generation server. A new luminance scope for GLIM will also be previewed.

Stanza, a new browser-based caption and subtitle editing solution and Telestream Cloud to support automated captioning workflows will be shown. The latest versions of DIVA and Kumulate with a new disaster recovery and business continuity package will also be highlighted, Telestream said.

Telestream will showcase its significantly expanded monitoring capabilities for OTT headends where live content is acquired, transcoded and packaged as ABR and delivered to an origin server. 

The company also will feature iQ Solutions with Zixi and SRT transport monitoring for feeds to an OTT system. It will show expanded multi-DRM vendor integration with EZDRM, Irdeto, Synamedia and Verimatrix.

The iVMS-ASM management system also has been further expanded to provide high-level visibility to quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) metrics through correlation of all iQ probe data for complex video networks, it said.

See Telestream at NAB Show booth C3007.

More information is available on the company’s website.

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream has announced a new version of GLIM, the company’s remote media player that can play any media file from anywhere.

Built for broadcast engineering, operations and post-production personnel who need to QC files visually when they are remote from the media, GLIM plays master video files of any size and format directly to a browser on-the-fly without the need to generate a proxy, the company said.

Prior to GLIM, those needing to QC media remotely needed to download huge media files which could take hours just to view the file, the company said.

Although downloading a smaller proxy file might not take as long, there’s a risk media might not be in perfect frame sync with inspection tools, it said.

With the latest version of GLIM, a new UI places video front and center to the user experience while surrounding the content with audio VU meters and a new zoomable mini timeline with selectable overlays for GOP, SCTE 35 and 104 markers and Nielsen watermarking, it said.

The latest version of GLIM also introduces a technology preview of a new luma waveform display with more scope tools to follow in subsequent releases, it said.

“With its new UI, GLIM has never been easier to use. We’ve had a tremendous response from our many GLIM customers and are delighted to hear all the stories of hours saved in QC workflow,” said Nick Kayworth, senior product manager at Telestream. “This product has truly transformed QC workflows as our users continue to evolve and standardize their remote working environments.”

GLIM can run on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) server or a new turnkey GLIM hardware appliance. In the case of the former, it supports up to five simultaneous playback sessions. In the latter, up to 15 concurrent sessions are supported due to GPU acceleration, Telestream said.

It also can run five sessions in an AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment or up to 15 simultaneous sessions when using GPU-accelerated instances of AWS EC2, it said.

GLIM is built on the same framework underpinning the Vantage Media Processing platform, a true multi-format media player with support for a wide variety of format and containers, it said.

More information is available on the company’s website.