After
a one-month trial period with a well-known, professional-grade
encoder, Chuck Hilliard, video analyst for Arlington
County, Va., knew he had to look elsewhere to find
the streaming solution that would allow him to take
the county's Info 31 television programming to the
Internet.
The
high-end demo system's CPU utilization kept peaking
at 100 percent while performing low-bandwidth broadcasts,
and it also lacked some of the most important features
Hilliard wanted in a new streaming system. He decided
to reevaluate his options.
"I
did some research and compared the stats, and I found
that ViewCast's streaming product does more for a
lot less," says Hilliard. "In fact, price
didn't come into the picture until we started looking
at ViewCast's Niagara. We had to ask ourselves, 'Why
are the other guys selling a single-encoder card on
the same Windows®-type platform for twice the
price?' With the Niagara, we're looking at half the
cost and getting more functionality."
Hilliard
contacted ViewCast on a Thursday, and the next Monday
morning, his custom ViewCast demo system had arrived
on his doorstep - along with a ViewCast technician.
Brian Reynolds, the ViewCast systems engineer who
installed Arlington County's demo unit, showed up
with the Niagara box, put it in the rack, and had
it up and streaming live to the Web in less than an
hour.
"Not
only did ViewCast send the product, they sent a tech
along with it," says Hilliard. "I think
that one, single incident is what really impressed
our executives. Every other company just sent us a
box and told us to figure it out on our own."
ViewCast's
Niagara family of systems is designed from the
ground up to offer reliable turnkey solutions that
allow users to implement premium, broadcast-quality
audio and video over the Internet with little need
for on-site configuration. Once Reynolds had physically
installed the system, it took fewer than 30 minutes
to configure the box and begin live streaming.
All
Arlington County staff had to do was rename the Webcast
link on the county Web site to point toward the Niagara
box.
It
didn't take long for Hilliard and others at Arlington
County to see that they had found their solution.
In addition to easy installation and configuration,
the Niagara offered better video quality at a lower
compression rate than did the county's previous system.
According to Hilliard, he and his colleagues ran both
machines side by side at the same compression rate,
and the video quality from the Niagara was twice as
good.
The
Niagara installation represents a technological leap
forward for county board members and their constituents.
Info 31 provides a critical link between the county
and its residents, featuring information about the
county's programs, people, services, and events. The
bimonthly board meeting, carried live, gavel-to-gavel,
is among the most-watched programs. The true test
of Arlington County's new system came just one day
after installation with the first live Webcast of
a county board meeting.
"We
have a lot of residents who can't make it to the board
meetings but are still interested in seeing what's
going on," explains Hilliard. "We got a
lot of feedback from the user community on the streaming
broadcast we did Tuesday night, and all the feedback
has been positive. Everybody loves it, even the people
who are on 28.8 modems."
The
morning following the first live Info 31 Webcast,
Arlington County made the decision to purchase its
new Niagara 4229ARW multi-channel streaming system.
Because each channel in the system can share IRQs
across multiple channels, users can implement one
box providing multiple video and audio sources for
streaming, a product feature that is unique in the
industry.
"One
of the channels in our Niagara will take a direct
DV camera input. When I shoot video that needs to
get to the Web immediately, I can either stream raw
footage straight to the Internet, or I can come back
and edit it, download it to my camera, and go back
and do a direct input. The ViewCast system just gives
me more options and more flexibility than I had with
many of the other products we evaluated."
An
integrated solution for real-time encoding of video
and audio content, ViewCast's rack-mount Niagara 4229ARW
is a powerful Intel® Pentium® IV 2-GHz system
with two channels of audio and video streaming, as
well as advanced video and audio capture card capabilities.
Niagara
Stream Control Exchange (SCX) control software
provides a unified interface that controls both encoder
channels either directly on the encoder or from a
remote computer connected to the Niagara via LAN or
WAN.
The
Niagara system's SimulStream capability enables
creation of up to four different streams from a single
video input, allowing Arlington County to set up two
large streams for high-bandwidth users and two small
streams for low-bandwidth users. The system also supports
RealNetworks Real Video and Windows Media streaming
formats.
The
Niagara has performed so well that Hilliard says the
county is already working on phase two: capturing
data and graphics in real-time and providing streaming
content on demand. Arlington County is also exploring
the possibility of providing streaming support for
surrounding counties. Says Hilliard: "We're already
looking at storage space for the next ViewCast box."
For
more information on Niagara Streaming Systems, click
here.
For
a Niagara system feature comparison chart, click here.
Utilizing
the Viewpoint VBX video distribution system, users can
direct networked video and audio sources to streaming
applications running on the Viewpoint Streaming Client
Station. These applications can be any video and/or
audio streaming or archive program such as:
As
a result of a continuing effort to optimize Osprey Video
devices on the latest operating systems, all Osprey Video
capture cards have been approved by the Microsoft Windows
Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL). This certification insures
that your Osprey Video card is compatible with Windows XP
and in applicable instances, optimized for that OS environment.