TELESTREAM AND OMNEON TEAM UP WITH BSKYB

THE AUTOMATION of streaming media production directly from the Omneon Networked Content Server, and their initial implementation by sports broadcasters, BSkyB, were announced by Telestream and Omneon Video Networks.
BSkyB is the first company to use the multi-format transcoding technology for England’s Premier League football clubs. The system was designed and implemented by UK systems integrators, Boxer Systems.
The joint technology seamlessly integrates Telestream’s FlipFactory Pro universal media format transcoder with the Omneon Networked Content Server. The combined technologies, utilising multi-format capability, enable automatic high-speed media transcoding into streaming formats from the Omneon server with direct-file transfer to a Digital Rights Management (DRM) server, destination web servers or web hosting partners.
This direct digital transfer simplifies re-purposing of on-air content for the web, and optimises picture quality by eliminating the need to go back to baseband video.
As the holders of the primary broadcasting rights for England’s Premier League football clubs, BSkyB are ideally positioned to expand their services by utilising this new technology. Football clubs operate popular web sites and are looking for an efficient way to provide their fans with access to the latest matches ‘on-demand’ as soon as possible. Broadband streaming technologies provide a convenient delivery channel; but that still leaves the challenge of capturing, cataloguing, encoding encrypting and delivering the content to the clubs’ hosting services.
BSkyB captures the live feeds from every Premier League match into an Omneon Networked Content Server at their headquarters in West London. Since up to eight matches can be played simultaneously, and up to 20 matches in one week, the server had to be capable of recording at least eight simultaneous live feeds, and storing in excess of 40 hours content. Feeds are recorded into the Networked Content Server as 25Mbps MPEG2 4:2:2 files, with up to eight channels of audio. The files can then be directly accessed by the Telestream application through a standard wndows file system interface on the Omneon server.
Telestream’s FlipFactory Pro application, hosted on two dual CPU Windows servers, automates the process of converting the broadcast quality video and audio into streaming formats. FlipFactory’s load balancing software automatically shares the processing across all available CPU resources. (CD)