Nevada City, California, August 31, 2017 – Telestream, a leading provider of digital media tools and workflow solutions, has announced the successful installation of its Vantage® Media Processing Platform and Lightspeed Live Capture system within the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. Running on Telestream’s Lightspeed K80 GPU accelerated servers, Vantage provides transcoding facilities to the Commission’s Directorate General Communications (DG Com), which is tasked with supporting strategic internal and external communications infrastructure throughout the European Commission’s network of committee and meeting facilities.
The Vantage Lightspeed Live system went live at the European Commission in March this year. Throughout the project, Telestream has worked closely with local channel partner, Brussels-based VP Media Solutions. VP Media Solutions installed and commissioned the system, including design of custom workflows and integration with the DG Com MAM system.
DG Com provides audio visual content from all the European Commission activities - past and present dating back to 1948 - to broadcasters and other agencies. The organization operates two contribution satellite TV channels (EbS & EbS+) as well as a web portal where clean feed content is available free of charge and free of rights. The task of supplying content appropriate to the broadest range of media outlets is considerable: each piece of content is provided as hi-res, lo-res and audio-only files, together with thumbnail browsing images and 25 different language tracks.
Pre-recorded content is supplied as an MXF file from a GV Stratus server. Vantage, working closely with DG Com’s in-house media asset management (MAM) system, transcodes these into different file variants for the DG Com distribution system. The Vantage system replaces a Harmonic Carbon Coder transcode farm which came to the end of its support life and failed to meet DG Com’s evolving needs, especially in terms of speed and performance.
“DG Com researched various options and found that Vantage fitted as the best replacement,” commented Bart Snoeks, TV Solutions Architect at VP Media Solutions.
“A key motivation for DG Com installing Vantage lies in the platform’s ability to take live feeds from the Telestream Lightspeed Live Capture server and transcode them into high-quality files even as the event is still happening. This is especially beneficial when providing time-critical content to news broadcasters,” Snoeks continues. “With their previous transcode system, it could take two to three hours to produce the web versions of recordings from a meeting that lasted one hour, whereas with Lightspeed Live and Vantage DG Com can deliver that content to the European Commission’s website within a few minutes of meeting’s end.
“This kind of performance makes a real difference to the quality of service that the Commission can provide to broadcasters and news agencies, and to the citizens of the EU,” Bart Snoeks added.
Additionally, the Vantage system at EU DG Com is integrated with a Telestream Vidchecker QC system to validate the quality of content that is created. Another factor in DG Com’s selection of Vantage was its close integration with the Civolution Teletrax watermarking system, used by DG Com for statistical purposes to monitor content usage and demonstrate how widely its content is used by broadcasters and other agencies.
