To stream coverage of the FIS World Cup Ski Jumping competition in Norway, March 13-15, to more than 23,000 Web TV viewers, Vikersund-TV relied on Telestream’s new Windows-based Episode desktop encoder.
The event, which was televised to more than 100 million people worldwide, marked one of the first high-profile uses of the Windows-based Episode encoder, said Barb DeHart, Telestream VP of marketing.
According to Vikersund-TV Web-TV manager Jonas Christiansen, Episode not only delivered the fast encoding necessary for the event, but also offered the ability to tweak codec and container settings to produce the level of distribution quality needed.
During the World Cup Ski Jumping event, Vikersund-TV, a cooperative effort between Skiflying Vikersund and Volda University College in Volda on the northwest coast of Norway, produced about 60 stories using Telestream’s Episode encoder. The stories ranged in duration from 40 seconds to two minutes covering athletes, spectators and organization volunteers. Stories were published on Vikersund-TV’s own Web site, Vikersund.no, YouTube, several local media websites and as a podcast on iTunes.
Christiansen’s role was to ensure optimal workflow from material ingest, editing and graphics work to encoding and distribution. According to Christiansen, Episode reduced encoding times from 30 minutes per file to a couple of minutes. Episode was used on a Windows laptop to encode AVI media files to Web-friendly MOV in H.264 files. This enabled Vikersund-TV to push files directly to YouTube and iTunes with metadata from a single file.
Twelve students from Volda University College worked on the project as a part of their degree requirements.
