The Middle East-based Tanweer Group has installed Digital Rapids StreamZ in its main studio in Dubai. Purchased through Digital Rapids distributor MediaCast Fz., the StreamZ 1500xs is providing encoding in multiple formats and content delivery to the company’s offices in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Digital Rapids’ StreamZ is being used to encode to Windows Media 9 files for screening, enabling Tanweer to send samples of its production work to broadcasters for selection. Additionally, the MPEG-2 format at 15Mbps is used for content delivery over its network to broadcasters, and 50Mbps MPEG-2 is utilised both to send material to Tanweer’s post production facilities for further work on the content and also for video archiving. Real Media encoding also captures video with timecode for translation and voiceover purposes.
Tanweer feels that a proper content delivery system requires video on different formats. Its previous encoding facility had been purely software-based, which had limited options when it came to providing multiple formats at the highest quality. It also liked StreamZ’s colour space conversion capabilities, allowing colour spaces to be changed before encoding to accommodate varying video signals. In future, Tanweer is also planning to provide services such as video on demand for its broadcast clients.
According to Bama Devan, senior director – business affairs at Tanweer, “Compared to the 2-channel audio output available on many encoders, the StreamZ server gives at least 4-channel audio output in realtime. This was one good reason for us to choose Digital Rapids. Apart from this, the Digital Rapids installation has easily enhanced the quality of our content delivery system without any compromise on data size! This enhancement in our projects has given us a definite competitive advantage in the market.”
Senthil Kumar, chief non-linear editor and digital content engineer at Tanweer, added: “Digital Rapids’ StreamZ server has become the core of our content delivery process and is definitely giving us excellent results for any heavy duty work that we undertake.”