Telestream Vantage chosen for media processing at Adstream

Los-Angeles-based Adstream, the digital asset management and advertising delivery tech company, has adopted Telestream’s Vantage for automated video transcoding.

The company has opted for both cloud and on-premises deployments of the media processing platform to allow it to automatically transcode high-volumes of media and provide it with quality analytics.

To suit its needs, Adstream has transformed Vantage into a fully virtualised configuration that dovetails with its Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based infrastructure. 

Steven W. Brown, COO for Notransformeda, Adstream

“We chose to build on Vantage because it’s a proven, full-featured automation platform, and we trust Telestream to further expand its capabilities to address changing market needs,” commented Steven W. Brown, Adstream’s chief operating officer for North America.

Instead of engaging in the laborious, time-consuming process of contacting and managing siloed suppliers, such as production companies, post houses, and broadcast networks, Adstream gives users a single portal where they can quickly assess the status of their ad campaigns, make decisions and changes, manage media assets, and control costs at every stage of the process.

“By adopting this infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud model, which enables automatic dynamic scaling up or down, we now have greater operational flexibility to handle the peaks and lulls of our workload. We can instantly provision whatever level of compute power we need to satisfy customer demand, and cloud-based pay-as-you-go pricing enables us to better control costs,” said Brown.

As their labour-intensive closed captioning workflow becomes increasingly automated, Brown estimates that they’ve been able to reduce the hours they must devote to closed captioning services by 40%.

“This operational efficiency reduces overhead costs and helps increase profit margins while freeing up our core staff to manage other pressing tasks at our growing company,” Brown said. “We’re also able to invest more time and money in improving front-ends and feature sets that our customers want.”

The platform itself is very broad, interfacing with a wide range of cloud services, including AWS S3 storage, AWS RDS regional database service, and distribution portals for over 75,000 connected media networks worldwide. More importantly, Adstream ensures a high degree of security by maintaining control over the media assets that customers entrust to their platform.

“By building all of these Vantage-automated workflows into a single, unified AWS ecosystem, we’re able to deliver an on-demand service model that inherently controls costs,” Brown added. “And ultimately, we’re helping our customers manage their own operating costs, media assets, and global ad management and distribution objectives.”

While Adstream is now fully deployed in the cloud, the company still operates a backend infrastructure, including a large production services department that uses Avid editing and Adobe graphics systems. This facility also uses Telestream Switch Pro for quality control file inspection and correction, as well as Telestream CaptionMaker and MacCaption closed captioning software.

Adstream, headquartered in London, has a customer base of over 27,000 businesses and holds over two million media assets in its cloud storage environment.