Vikersund-TV Selects Telestream Episode For FIS World Cup Ski Jumping Web-TV

Telestream has announced that the company's new Windows-based Episode desktop media encoder was deployed by Vikersund-TV to provide web TV encoding for the FIS World Cup Ski Jumping competition which was held between March 13-15 at the Vikersund Ski Jump Centre in Norway.
The event attracted 30,000 spectators, over 23,000 web-TV viewers and over one hundred million TV viewers.
Jonas Christiansen, Web-TV Manager at Vikersund-TV, said: "Episode saved our project. Encoding speeds and quality were far superior to what we experienced with other encoders. The ability to tweak the codec and container settings in Episode took our project to a new level in terms of distribution quality."
During the World Cup Ski Jumping event, Vikersund-TV produced approximately 60 stories using Telestream's Episode encoder. The stories ranged in duration from 40 seconds to 2 minutes covering athletes, spectators and organisation volunteers. Stories were published on Vikersund-TV's own website, Vikersund.no, YouTube, several local media websites and as a podcast on iTunes.
Barbara DeHart, VP of Marketing at Telestream, said: "Vikersund-TV's need for high-quality output and encoding speed in a Windows environment is the perfect fit for our Episode desktop encoding solution. The high marks it scored at the prestigious FIS World Cup competition made Episode a winner for Vikersund-TV."
Christiansen's role was to ensure optimal workflow - from material ingest, editing and graphics work to encoding and distribution. He chose Telestream's Episode encoder because he was unhappy with the quality and encoding times of other encoders. According to Christiansen, Episode reduced encoding times from 30 min per file to just a couple of minutes. Episode was used on a Windows laptop to encode AVI media files to web-friendly MOV in H.264 files. This enabled Vikersund-TV to push files directly to YouTube and iTunes with metadata - all from a single file.
Christiansen added: "Episode performed very well. The fact that we could tweak the settings the way we wanted helped us distribute the same video file on the web, YouTube and iTunes, which saved us time and effort."
Episode software provides a fast, flexible, future-proof solution for virtually any video and audio compression need.
In December, Telestream announced cross-platform support for both Mac and Windows users plus the addition of watch folders which allow users to drop finished projects into folders for automatic encoding. Version 5.1.2, which is being released today, includes additional enhancements and bug fixes.
Vikersund-TV is a co-operation between Skiflying Vikersund and Volda University College. Twelve students from Volda University College work on the Vikersund-TV project as a part of their degree.
(KMcA/BMcC)