ContentAgent Helps Spiegel TV Stay On Top Of 24-Hr Broadcasts

Spiegel TV, one of the leading television distributors in Germany, are continuously expanding their file conversion and delivery capabilities with ContentAgent, supplied by ROOT6 Technology.

Over the last 30 years, they've provided content to ARD, Arte, BBC, Discovery Channel, National Geographic and media companies around the world. Since 2009, they've also broadcast a 24/7 programme on Sky, and in 2011 they launched a second TV channel for cable TV providers in Germany and Switzerland. This expansion, coupled with the rising demand for HD and 4K, and the need to deal with an increasing number of codecs, meant that Spiegel TV needed to automate ingest, conversion and delivery.

Technical Manager Steffen Brautlecht explains: "ContentAgent's user-friendly GUI makes it easy to set up new workflows and integrate them into our existing ones. Because we're able to set up watch folders for certain processes, for some users triggering ingest is as easy as dragging and dropping files."

Spiegel TV have to deliver their programmes in 1080i50, and use ContentAgent's integration with Cinnafilm's Tachyon and Dark Energy plug-ins to carry out advanced processing and scaling operations: "Clips in 25p look awful in interlaced sequences, so we had to figure out a workflow to transcode progressive material into 50i. ContentAgent's integration with Tachyon and Dark Energy makes transcoding 50p into 50i easy, so now we produce all our GoPro and drone clips in 50p and transcode."

As well as allowing them to "convert almost any file into editable clips", using ContentAgent means that Spiegel TV can deploy their deliverables using templated workflows that transfer finished work to the client's servers and notify them that the job is complete, so Spiegel TV's customers are always up to date on the progress of their jobs.

Spiegel have recently invested in a second ContentAgent system to handle "thousands and thousands of cloud files" that they need to process for a large international production. To see more of their work, visit spiegel-tv.de.

For more info on ContentAgent or to arrange a demo please contact: [email protected] or visit www.root6technology.com.

(JP/MH)