NAB Perspectives: Telestream’s DeHart Sees Promise in HEVC, Cloud

Whether multiscreen, IPTV, cable, or broadcast, transcoding plays a critical role in the “need to see it now” nature of sports. Addressing the demand for efficient transcoding to deliver catch-up TV, Telestream added new capabilities for its Vantagevideo-transcoding and workflow-orchestration products, including a transcoder for IPTV and cable VOD workflows, new integrations for QC, high-speed delivery, and watermarking. Chief among Vantage’s new capabilities are support for HEVC — coming later this year — and deployment to the cloud.

“We see HEVC [having] two real promises,” says Barbara DeHart, VP of marketing at Telestream. “You need HEVC for 4K distribution — that is something that is going to be coming — but what HEVC also promises is the more efficient use of bits so you can create the same image quality at lower resolutions or, using the same bitrates, you can increase the video quality. For us, it’s always been about the trade-off between image quality and distribution efficiency, and I think HEVC holds a lot of promise in that area.”

With Vantage Cloud, users can run all the capabilities of Vantage —automated transcoding, media processing, analysis, packaging — on cloud-based infrastructure. Unifying with on-premise systems, Vantage Cloud allows users to quickly respond to new formats, regulatory requirements, and fluctuating workflow needs.

“The whole virtualization concept makes accessibility easier in many ways, and, oftentimes in the sports environment, you need rapid scalability to be able to deliver content very quickly,” says DeHart. “[For] situations where you have fluctuating needs and tight time demands, the cloud can offer some capabilities … we see that clearly as an area of interest.”

For the sports industry, Telestream continues to highlight Pipeline, a network-based video-capture and -playout device for moving HD and SD video and audio in and out of any file-based workflow. Currently in use by NASCAR and others, Pipeline provides synchronous high-resolution capture and playback for sports officiating.

Telestream also announced a major new enterprise-class video-transcoding product. Vantage Transcode IPTV VOD addresses the specific challenges of IPTV and cable transport-stream transcoding.

To quickly deliver high-quality video highlights in the correct format to distribution servers, Telestream pairs its Pipeline HD Dual network video-capture system with Vantage Transcode Pro workflow-automation software. As used by the University of Notre Dame and being demonstrated at NAB 2013, this solution allows editing to begin immediately during capture and automatically converts highlights packages into the formats needed for online distribution.