Omneon is launching ProCast on the market following its acquisition of Castify Networks late last year. ProCast is a high performance file transport engine employing what the company claims is unique acceleration technology which allows for high-speed file transfers over a wide area network, writes Adrian Pennington.
With ProCast, users can move large media files over great distances “as fast and simply as if it were a local transfer.” The core technology behind this system was obtained by Omneon in the acquisition of Castify in December 2007. File transfer speeds achieved with ProCast are orders of magnitude greater than FTP transfers and are not affected by distance. For example, a one hour DV25 file sent from Los Angeles to New York on a 450Mbps connection would take 30 hours via FTP, but takes only three minutes with ProCast. The same file sent from Beijing to New York would take 69 hours via FTP, but still takes just three minutes with ProCast.
ProCast is fully integrated with all Omneon server and storage products (MediaGrid, Spectrum, and MediaDeck). It allows for point-to-point and point-to-multipoint transfers of content between systems. Typical media applications for ProCast include transport of contributions from regional offices of large broadcasters, transfers between affiliates, transfers from post productions houses to clients and broadcasters, etc.
