Belgacom delivers live session streaming to European Parliament with ViewCast Osprey systems

ViewCast Corporation has announced that Belgacom, a leading European telecommunications company, selected 33 of ViewCast's Osprey-560 capture cards to be used by the European Parliament for Internet streaming of parliamentary sessions and other meetings.
This installation, purchased from GO Telecom in the Netherlands and managed by Brussels-based systems integrator Belgacom, gives citizens of countries in the European Union high-quality, real-time access to parliamentary proceedings in 21 languages and up to three video streams.
"We selected Osprey cards for this installation because the capture cards are state-of-the-art, they produce exceptional video output, and they are extremely reliable," said John Vanhoucke, product manager for streaming at Belgacom. "We are fully confident in the reliability of the Osprey cards due to our past experience in various installations both internally at Belgacom and for our customers."
For the European Parliament, Belgacom is using ViewCast's Osprey cards to encode audio and video signals in both Windows Media and RealPlayer formats. Compared with other cards, their increased speed and throughput delivers professional-grade performance. The Osprey-560 offers a 64-bit PCI-X-compatible interface, closed caption extraction from analogue and SDI inputs, and enhanced audio/video synchronisation, as well as audio and video loop-back for monitoring.
All the streaming is hosted at the Belgacom Datacenter on a fully redundant and load-balanced streaming platform that can support formats including Real, Windows Media, QuickTime, MP3, and MPEG.
For the Real Media format, the Belgacom platform consists of four Real Helix servers receiving information from the Helix transmitter.
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