Yangaroo, a Canadian digital media delivery service provider for the music, advertising and awards industries, has chosen Telestream solutions to improve and speed up its media processing, QC and captioning workflows.
Yangaroo provides its customers with technology solutions that enable high-quality audio and video content to be managed and distributed quickly and securely. The company’s patented cloud-based platform, Digital Media Distribution System (DMDS), automates dozens of manual steps in a streamlined workflow, eliminating errors and increasing efficiencies. Content, such as music, music videos and advertising, can be quickly distributed to television, radio, media, retailers, awards shows and other authorised recipients safely. Additionally, the platform manages a number of workflows – such as execution of traffic instructions, award show submissions, and approvals of on-air content.
“The latest features in Lightspeed Live Capture are targeted at organisations wishing to convert large tape libraries into file-based assets,” said Paul Turner, VP product management at Telestream. “To do this cost effectively, it’s imperative to automate as much of the process as possible, including capture, analysis and QC, and conversion.”
The video content that Yangaroo processes covers an enormously wide gamut. From short form ads to long form programmes and high-quality broadcast-ready HD content to low-budget music video productions that are not always technically suitable for broadcast – all this content needs to be managed quickly and efficiently, with minimum operator interaction.
To continue to support its rapid business growth, Yangaroo chose several Telestream products to support its methodology.
At the point of ingest, Yangaroo uses Telestream’s Vidchecker QC software to inspect video files and determine if they are technically suitable for broadcast. The API in Vidchecker allows Yangaroo to easily customise the QC reports to suit their needs, and to extract the error data from the reports so that it can be used in the next stages of their workflows. They also use Vidchecker to check that TV spots meet broadcast technical standards before they are delivered.
The workflow management and transcoding in the Vantage Media Processing Platform is the workhorse system that enables Yangaroo to deliver so many varied formats and versions in an automated process. The Vantage workflow orchestration is also integrated with Yangaroo’s Teletrax and Nielsen systems to add appropriate watermarking, as well as with Aspera to aid in accelerated network delivery of files.
Telestream CaptionMaker is used to add legally required closed captions.
“In the highly competitive market for digital delivery services, any provider needs to offer some unique values that set them apart from the competition,” said Richard Klosa, Yangaroo CTO. “With an ever-growing number of destinations, formats and variations in metadata, the state-of-the-art workflow automation we have put in place makes our service easier to use and more adaptable to rapidly changing delivery requirements.”
Although the Yangaroo system is predominantly cloud-based, the media processing is hosted on physical servers at a data centre in Toronto. Yangaroo has recently added Telestream Lightspeed K80 servers. Klosa said that using Lightspeed servers gives them an average performance gain of 50% to 100% compared to the previous servers they used.
