Massive growth in Telestream Wirecast users over lockdown leads company to upgrade the technology

Telestream has announced the introduction of Wirecast 14, the latest version of its advanced live production and streaming platform, which will be available on the Telestream website soon.

The company also stated that it has seen an unprecedented rise in users over lockdown as companies have turned to its technology to enable them to connect through the cloud for streaming live productions and communications.

Wirecast empowers users to provide engaging, high quality interactions with others, even though they cannot meet in person.

Pre-pandemic Telestream had a global Wirecast base in excess of 50,000 users and the company reports that since the on-set of COVID-19 the Wirecast community has grown at an exponential rate.

Telestream believes that it is seeing a profound change in the way that organisations worldwide communicate internally and externally. This driver is impacting many different types of organisation; broadcast productions companies are harnessing Wirecast in their efforts to take workflows online, while increasing numbers of corporations, training companies and Houses of Worship are turning to Wirecast to strengthen their communication infrastructures.

While the boost in Wirecast users is good news for Telestream, the company’s CEO, Dan Castles, said there are important long term implications for organisations of all sizes and scales as we move forward in 2020 and beyond.

“I believe that two impacts will be felt long term,” stated Castles. “This pandemic has shown organisations they need to have disaster recovery and remote operations capabilities. Many have learned by now that they did not have this in place. So, I see a continued emphasis on getting these operations more secure in case this ever happens again.

“Also, worldwide, massive numbers of staff are learning how to work from home. In the future there will be a balance and more people are open to including remote work in the mix. Based on Telestream’s experience, we believe remote working will be a more common practice; this will be one of the lasting impacts of COVID-19,” Castles observed.
He went on: “In general, I think the digital media community will be stronger than ever. The need for the visual content and live content has not gone away: we just need to acquire new skillsets when working remotely. Nothing from COVID-19 has changed the underpinnings of our industry and frankly, I think it has managed to remind everyone how important this industry is, especially during a crisis like this,” concluded Castles.
Wirecast 14 has been updated with new options for more accurate Chroma keying including spill suppression, edge colouring, and clipping ranges. Plus, a Luma Key (useful if you have a logo with a white or black background you wish to remove), and Colour key (useful for images and logos) that have non-black and non-white backgrounds).

New options have also been added for sizing and scaling sources, making it easier to precisely size videos and images on the canvas. Also, incoming sources are now scaled automatically, and will maintain their size based on user settings. And the status bar is moved to the bottom of the screen, giving more space to show System CPU and App CPU, as well as other streaming stats.