AMSTERDAM — At the recent IBC2017, IBM and Telestream (www.telestream.net) introduced a solution for high-speed capture and production of live, broadcast-quality video from remote locations. Telestream Vantage powered by Aspera combines Aspera’s FASPStream high-speed streaming technology and Telestream Lightspeed Live Capture media processing platform to enable production teams to work on live video feeds from remote locations in near realtime.
Capturing and producing content for live events such as sports, news, training or education programs poses unique challenges, and timely, remote production has long been an unattainable goal. Today, media companies have to rely on costly satellite or fiber-based infrastructure, and incur additional costs by co-locating production teams and equipment at the event itself. Alternative IP-based solutions either offer streaming with low quality and high latency, or they are slow and cannot work with content that is still being created or captured, instead requiring completed files to be transferred over the network via hot folders. This can reduce quality and introduce unacceptable delays for time critical material.
Telestream Lightspeed Live Capture and Vantage Open Workflows powered by Aspera offers an innovative approach to delivering broadcast-quality video streams from the venue to the remote production facility live, enabling workflows believed impossible. Creative teams can now begin working on a live capture feed delivered from a remote location (across the country or around the world) while the event is taking place, without waiting for the entire file to be first written to disk and then transferred. Transcoding, packaging, editing and other downstream workflows can start immediately, significantly shortening the production cycle and increasing the value of the produced content. The end-point can have a range of hosting environments, including centralized on-premises, private or public cloud and the streams can be written to multiple locations concurrently to aid in redundancy and business continuity.
IBM Aspera’s FASPStream software line represents the first open video transport solution that is capable of high-quality, live streaming over commodity Internet WANs. Built from the ground up by Aspera, the software utilizes the FASP bulk data protocol to transport any live video source (local multicast, unicast UDP, TCP or growing file source) and provides timely arrival of live video and data independent of network round-trip delay and packet loss. Less than five seconds of start-up delay is required for 50Mbps video streams transported over 250 milliseconds round-trip latency and three percent packet loss, sufficient for 4K streaming between continents. The FASPStream technology is tightly integrated into Vantage using the available APIs to provide a seamless user experience.