by James E. O'Neal~ April 25, 2006
TV TECHNOLOGY
At the company's Monday afternoon press conference, Telestream CEO Dan Castles reflected on the company's growth since its inception in 1998.
"It's been a great eight years," he said. "We've had very significant growth and we've brought on quite a few new people, allowing us to expand development."
Castles said that the company's FlipFactory product now supports 50 different formats and that Telestream has partnered with than 100 industry players.
"You will see FlipFactory in 27 booths here at the show," he said. "We also have new formats and models that go beyond FlipFactory."
Castles also spoke about Telestream's emerging role in the process of file-based content delivery to broadcasters.
"The delivery of content as files is a fact now," he said. "With this comes commercials, syndicated series and the like. TV stations have to be able to figure out what to do with it. The same goes for metadata -- how do you handle it?"
Castles said there was no standardization and that Telestream was working with users on this issue.
"About four years ago this really started and now it's hit full force," he said.
Castles mentioned growth in mobile video and other small screen applications and said that since encoding technologies are very much involved, Telestream is in a position to play a big part in this rollout of new video delivery methodologies.
David Heppe, Telestream president and CEO, announced the company's newest GraphicsFactory offering, which is a file-based graphics workflow automation application. The new release allows the use of templates for graphics production.
"The fact that it's template driven allows the use of lower cost data entry operators to adapt content for each piece of media required," Heppe said.
The new GrahicsFactory is available as a complete system or as an upgrade for present GraphicsFactory users.
Other new products being shown at NAB2006 by Telestream include FlipFactory Mobile and FactoryArray.
FlipFactory Mobile is designed to automate the encoding of media into mobile video and other small screen formats.
Flipping Formats
"The product allows users to 'flip' to a mobile format of their choice," Heppe said. "In addition to format support, some of our customers are delivering files to aggregators in different formats. FlipFactory Mobile allows aggregators to receive media in a number of different formats and consolidate it into the format of choice for delivery."
FactoryArray manages the distribution and continuity of jobs across a group of FlipFactory servers. It provides uninterrupted job processing, with load balancing, failover protection and database mirroring, creating a multiple server environment with no single point of failure.
Heppe said that all the products are being exhibited at the Telestream booth and that they would be shipping in June.
© 2006 NAB
