NOS Bringing Vancouver Olympic Games to The Netherlands with StreamZ Encoders

Posted by Derrick on February 8, 2010 under Video Streaming and Compression | Be the First to Comment

Digital Rapids — the leading provider of tools and solutions for bringing television, film and web content to wider audiences — and Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS) announced that the Dutch public broadcaster has selected Digital Rapids’ StreamZ encoding systems to power live and on-demand Internet and mobile coverage of the 2010 Olympic Games for audiences in the Netherlands. The 2010 Olympic Games will be held February 12-28 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Part of Netherlands public broadcasting system Nederlandse Publieke Omroep (NPO), NOS is a market leader in the field of news and sports coverage on television, radio, the Internet and mobile devices. NOS will supplement their television coverage of the Vancouver Olympic Games with up to eight simultaneous live streams on the Web and extensive mobile content. The StreamZ systems will encode source video feeds into Web-friendly streams for viewing through an interactive experience powered by Microsoft(r) Silverlight(r) technology, and into multiple formats for mobile viewing. The encoded live streams will also be archived for viewers to watch on-demand.

“Our goal at NOS is to help strengthen the position of Dutch sports, by enabling the public to follow the many sports that play an important role in our society across all possible digital media platforms,” said Roeland Stekelenburg, Head of New Media at NOS. “During the 2008 Olympic Games, the ratio of streams viewed on our Website relative to the size of our country’s population was one of the highest in the world. Digital Rapids StreamZ encoders allow us to provide the quality and reliability we need for coverage of an event of this significance.”

“We’re thrilled that NOS has again chosen our award-winning encoding systems for their online Olympic Games coverage,” said Brick Eksten, President of Digital Rapids. “Audience expectations for the breadth, depth and quality of online sports coverage are higher than ever, and StreamZ encoding solutions are ideal for enabling superior Web-based experiences surpassing these expectations.”

StreamZ is the industry’s most versatile encoding solution, delivering multi-format video capture, encoding, transcoding and live streaming in a powerful turnkey configuration that integrates easily into any professional media environment. Combining the quality and performance advantages of hardware-based preprocessing with a format-flexible and feature-rich software application, StreamZ seamlessly supports live and on-demand multi-platform distribution opportunities with real-time, simultaneous encoding to multiple output formats.

Wowza Boosts Student Learning at Hundreds of Universities

Posted by Derrick on December 22, 2009 under Video Streaming and Compression | 2 Comments to Read

As digital video and audio grow into a preferred communications media on campuses across the world, Wowza Media Systems, the media server software company, announced that more than 500 universities and colleges on four continents are using Wowza Media Server technology to deliver live, on demand and interactive content to students and faculty on multiple players and devices, including Flash and iPhone.

The collegiate market is among the most aggressive adopters of streaming media technology solutions as the modern campus expands beyond the traditional four walls of classrooms, labs and lecture halls and the Internet is an increasingly inseparable component of learning curriculum. According to Reuters, the online education sector grew 13 percent last year and had been growing at about 20 percent in previous years.

“Universities are discovering that lecture capture is a competitive advantage and of great benefit to ‘millennial’ learners, who are accustomed to convenience and to on-demand access to myriad content sources,” said Alan Greenberg, Senior Analyst & Partner at Wainhouse Research in his recent report The Distance Education and e-Learning Landscape Volume 2: Videoconferencing, Streaming and Capture Systems for Learning . “The beauty of streaming and lecture capture today is that they are more affordable than ever before.”

In addition to powering streaming in hundreds of institutions of higher learning across the Americas, Europe and Asia, Wowza now holds 39 percent share of the collegiate market on the Australian continent. In one deployment, the University of New South Wales in Sydney found the Wowza servers to be much more cost effective and easier to maintain than its separate legacy QuickTime and Windows streaming servers, which the university is now planning to retire.

“With Wowza Media Server 2 we are able to consolidate our media resources onto a single platform, while also opening the door to new campus IPTV and iPhone streaming capabilities for our UNSWTV and lecture recording services,” said Patrick Stoddart, Manager of Web and Innovation at the University of New South Wales. “The multi-client reach and flexibility of the Wowza server has made it an essential technology component underpinning our online media strategy.”

Many other universities are leveraging the Wowza Media Server’s iPhone and IPTV streaming capabilities to expand enrollment and make courses and other content such as athletics widely available outside of a brick and mortar environment. The University of Sussex in Britain, a leading research university rated in the top five percent of all universities worldwide by the 2009 Times Higher Education University World Rankings, has deployed Wowza media servers to enhance learning options for its more than 10,000 students.

“Our first deployment of the Wowza streaming technology was instrumental in powering our Live TV Production course last year,” said Dr. Phil Watten, Media Technology Manager for the School of Informatics, University of Sussex. “That was an ideal proving ground for Wowza and we have since begun to roll it out across a number of other university courses to deliver televised lectures to Flash desktop players and soon to unify our iPhone delivery.”

“Wowza is focused on helping educators make learning more accessible and affordable by using online video content,” said Dave Stubenvoll, CEO and Co-Founder, Wowza Media Systems. “Performance and extensibility with solutions like Wowza are especially valuable in the collegiate setting where the appetite for streaming media across multiple player platforms continues to outpace the level of available IT personnel and technology resources.”

Wowza Media Server was named Best Server Hardware/Software in the Streaming Media Readers’ Choice Awards in 2008 and 2009, and received the 2009 Best Innovation award for Wowza Media Server 2 which extends this proven platform beyond Flash with multi-protocol streaming to the iPhone/iPod touch and other mobile devices, the Silverlight player, QuickTime, and IPTV set-top boxes.