NAB 2010:Complete Coverage from B&C
Las Vegas -- Transcoding
supplier Telestream, whose FlipFactory product is used by a number of
major programmers to convert content between different formats, entered
the NAB Show riding strong sales and a slate of new products.
Telestream CEO Dan
Castles said that the Nevada City, Calif.-based company has enjoyed a
record first quarter of sales, including a March that was "off the
charts." Revenues for Telestream's enterprise products were up 25% for
the first quarter over the previous year.
Castles said that
the systemic changes in the broadcast business have been driving sales
for Telestream, which has enjoyed 12 consecutive years of double-digit
revenue growth.
"This tough economy
has brought customers to us," he said. "They have to automate, and they
have to pull costs out [of their operations] for survival."
Telestream is using
NAB to introduce three new products, the most significant being
Vantage, an enterprise-class workflow design and automation software
system that can manage video capture, transcoding, metadata processing,
analysis, graphics assembly and video file management. Along with
Vantage, Telestream launched the companion Vantage Transcode, an
enterprise-class server transcoder built on the FlipFactory transcode
engine and designed to provide broad file format support for broadcast,
cable, edit, web, mobile, VOD, and IPTV workflows.
Vantage is not
designed to be a "hot-switch" replacement for FlipFactory, said Castles,
though the company expects that some customers will immediately migrate
to it. Instead, it is designed to automate multiple functions and tie
together islands of transcoding and encoding products into a single
system.
"FlipFactory was a
transcoding solution that had some workflow in it, while Vantage is a
workflow solution that incorporates transcoding as part of that,"
explained Telestream VP of Marketing Barbara DeHart.
Vantage will
maintain existing integrations that FlipFactory has with third-party
products, and will be sold in modular format with pricing starting at
$5,500.
Telestream also
introduced Episode, a new video encoding platform which allows users to
pool resources to share encoding work across multiple computers in a
mixed environment of Macs and PCs. Episode ranges in price from $495 for
the desktop version to $3,995 for the server-based Episode X version.
Episode also has a feature which allows a programmer to automatically
publish content to YouTube.
The other big
product launch was a major update, version 4.0, to the company's
Wirecast live streaming software and a new Wirecast Pro product that is
designed for creating real-time or on-demand professional video
broadcasts for the Web. Wirecast Pro accepts more professional input
devices and formats, including HDV and MPEG-2 transport stream inputs,
and also has advanced chroma key features. It lists for $995.
All of the new
Telestream products will be available in the second quarter.
