Nevada City, California, June 19, 2017 – Telestream, a leading provider of digital media tools and workflow solutions, has announced a major order for its Vantage® Media Processing Platform from New Zealand’s leading free to air broadcaster, Television New Zealand Limited (TVNZ). The order sees TVNZ installing multiple nodes of Vantage Transcode Pro Connect with the Advanced Avid option which enables delivery of files and metadata into Avid Interplay. Also, Vantage Array provides peer-to-peer system management with fail-over and CPU-aware load balancing.
Throughout the project, Telestream is working closely with regional channel partner, Auckland-based Amber Technology. The system will be installed and commissioned in June.
“Our partnership with Telestream sets us up to deliver content faster to our viewers. At TVNZ, we have a range of first generation transcoding equipment from various vendors that are all at the end of their supported life. We needed to seed a new transcoding environment that can grow throughout our operations,” explained Greg Montgomery, GM Technology at TVNZ. “Telestream’s Vantage offers us a cost-effective and elegant solution – one that offers the best architecture for future growth and supports our need to use 10-bit formats such as AVC-Intra.”
The first application of Vantage within TVNZ’s broadcast operations involves its news production workflows. “Speed is critical in our news operations environment – and that’s where our new technology will give us an edge,” said Greg Montgomery.
Vantage will be used to ingest content from various external sources including field generated content received as files from LiveU enabled cameras, Aspera delivered material from journalist’s phones and agency feeds from Reuters. AP agency feeds will be accommodated in a future integration. Vantage will be used to ingest and transcode this time-critical content and place it as quickly as possible within their Avid Interplay production system.
A key advantage for TVNZ is the integration between Telestream Vantage and Avid workflows. “The tight integration between Vantage and Avid is important to us,” explained Greg Montgomery. “It allows us to reduce complexity within our ingest process thereby increasing efficiency and saving time in the news production process.”
In addition, it was important to TVNZ that Vantage integrates well with their media asset management (MAM) system. TVNZ employs the VizOne MAM system and, again, Telestream has worked closely with Vizrt on API level integration of the systems.
“TVNZ needed a powerful, future-proof, enterprise-scale transcode solution and this is what Vantage offers,” comments Josh McMahon, Head of Sales, Asia Pacific at Telestream. “Whatever content needs to be ingested, converted or exported, we can say ‘Vantage Does That’. We look forward to working with Greg and his team as we progress together.”
