Telestream has three new enterprise-class system management products: Vantage Enterprise Control, Vantage Master Control, and Vantage Team Management. It also released Vantage 3.0, which adds support for various new video and audio formats, wrappers and systems, and new video workflow design and automation features, writes David Fox.
“The new Vantage products expand our capabilities in video transcoding and workflow automation with the proven large-scale media production and system management expertise gained from our Agility group,” said Barbara DeHart, Telestream’s VP of marketing (pictured). “Vantage products now provide solutions from single-server transcoding to very large and highly-complex systems.”
The Vantage server-based software automates content ingest, transcoding, video file interoperability, video production workflows, and multi-channel distribution for content owners, creators, broadcast, cable and new media companies.
“At UNC Charlotte, we require files for broadcast automation, iTunes, YouTube, Flash, video-on-demand, and archive, along with metadata to support the ever-increasing requirements of media distribution,” said Craig Berlin, director of broadcast communications at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. “We chose Vantage because of the exceptional opportunities its innovative schematic workflow provides. Vantage has streamlined our transcode process; the Workflow Portal tool has made the entry of metadata easier and clearer for our operators; and the addition of the new job status tools in Team Management promise to solve many of the challenges of workflow design.”
Vantage Enterprise Control promises to maximize workflow capacity, resiliency (with no single point of failure), throughput and reliability. It offers automated response to fluctuations in processing or media loads, customizable task scheduling, and tools for analyzing workflow, system bottlenecks and throughput. It should also save money, power and cooling by improving hardware efficiency – through its ability to balance loads across all available servers.
Vantage Master Control adds full dashboard views and historical reporting to provide complete visibility of the workflow and underlying systems involved. This removes the complexity of managing large-scale systems with a single, unified view. It also integrates Telestream’s Agility 2G directly into Vantage, enabling its transcoding services to be embedded within Vantage workflows. This will give Agility 2G users access to the full power of Vantage, including dashboards, automated QC, input and output analysis, and automated decision making.
In addition, Vantage Team Management allows the creation of user accounts and custom web-based job status views for any Vantage installation. With multiple operators, administrators and departments performing transcoding and video workflow automation tasks, VTM provides the ability to manage user permissions and visibility, which allows for broader access and improved system protection across the enterprise.
“The new web-based dashboard features in Master Control will allow us to monitor our system from a central control GUI. The optimization features in Enterprise Control will allow us to more closely analyze and understand all of our workflows, while helping to minimize capital expense for processing power. Team Management will allow for well-defined responsibilities based on users; this functionality will be key for a project we are working on for a combined master control facility,” commented Duane Smith, director of technology at WJCT, Florida.
