Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009 - (Page 77)

case study Transcoding for Global Reach When Mark Portu, CEO and president of The FeedRoom, says, “Video is the most emotive of all of data types, and the one with the most power,” he knows what he’s talking about. With clients that include HP General , Motors, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Coldwell-Banker, as well as the U.S. State Department, The FeedRoom has developed and managed the growing web video initiatives for these leading brands and government agencies. The FeedRoom provides web video solutions that optimize communication strategies for global organizations and government agencies. The FeedRoom provides a platform for content owners to create, control, and distribute video. Its services range from video production and site integration to encoding, content management, streaming, and reporting. It also offers a feature set that includes RSS feeds, UGC tools, video blogging, podcasting, and search engine optimization. The FeedRoom’s task is a difficult one, and it’s made more difficult in a world with an ever-increasing volume of video content as well as an increasing number of video formats. By Dave Trescot, VP Rhozet, Harmonic Inc. The Challenge: Lots of Content, Many Formats The big challenges for companies such as The FeedRoom are to find a transcoding solution that keeps pace with the new formats and to meet the demands of the vast amount of video content being created. The fundamental task of transcoding between two video files appears to be simple. But the devil, as they say, is in the details. Digging deeper, one begins to understand that the myriad complexities of stream mixing, metadata, subtitling, audio channels, and more combine to create an extraordinarily complex problem. On top of the complexity of transcoding, there is also the issue of scalability, requiring a solution that can move from a single computer to running on hundreds of servers. This means that solutions need to be able to handle load balancing, failover protection, and job distribution. For The FeedRoom, these complex issues demanded a flexible, software-based video transcoding solution. The Solution: Automated Enterprise Encoding The FeedRoom decided that Harmonic’s Rhozet Carbon Coder—a universal transcoding application that facilitates the transfer of media from acquisition to editing, playout, archive, web, and mobile—fit the bill. Carbon Coder can run as a stand-alone application, but in this case, it’s being used in a multinode, fully automated rendering farm to deliver maximum performance. Rhozet Carbon Server is used at The FeedRoom to control a network of Carbon Coder transcoding nodes to automate and speed up the transcoding process to meet the demands of its growing business, which can exceed 15,000 transcodes in a given month. Since The FeedRoom’s customers are leading the way in showcasing the potential of this medium, The FeedRoom requires the latest encoding and transcoding technologies to meet this demand. The FeedRoom receives video content in an extremely wide range of formats. Tape and physical sources such as Beta, DVCAM, MiniDV, DVD, and DVCPro in both NTSC and PAL formats are generally captured using an NLE and exported as DV25 AVI files for consistency and archival purposes. Digital submissions come in virtually all types of file formats, typically submitted via FTP , media (data CD or DVD discs and external drives), or direct links. Carbon Server is able to process them all seamlessly. By watching several network locations, Carbon Server automatically detects any new files captured by an NLE, submitted via FTP or copied from any received media , and transcodes them into one standardized format that is then transmitted to The FeedRoom’s content management system (CMS). In addition to straightforward transcoding, Carbon Server automatically queries the details of the source format and performs any scaling (i.e., HD to SD or web) or frame rate conversion (NTSC to PAL or 24p) on-the-fly, drastically simplifying the required setup to handle the vast assortment of material The FeedRoom receives. The FeedRoom also uses a proprietary user-upload tool called RSU (real simple upload) that allows its clients to upload source content directly to Rhozet Carbon Server, which then transcodes the file and delivers it to the in-house CMS. Carbon Server makes this approach possible by regularly monitoring the upload location of RSU, which functions as the triggering mechanism for the entire workflow. In addition to transcoding the source, Carbon Server also applies watermarks to the source content if required, generates a thumbnail image for each video, and encodes up to 1 dozen different formats all programmatically depending on the source content. “Given the variety and volume of videos that we process, it is vital that we use a powerful and flexible encoding solution,” Portu says. “Our encoding needs have grown over 50% in the past year and Rhozet makes it possible to meet this demand.” This is a vendor-written case study. Contact us at erics@streaming media.com if your company has a case study you’d like to share. Comments? Email us at letters@streamingmedia.com, or check the masthead for other ways to contact us. WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM 77 http://WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009

Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009 Table of Contents User-Generated Politics Netflix Needs a Business Model Technology and Business Trends by the Numbers Improving Video Color Quality What Makes for Compelling Video? Game On: Bringing the NHL to IPTV Give! The New Era of Corporate Communications New Video Frontiers: Taking It Beyond the PC The HD Showdown: Codec Vendors Battle It Out for Supreme Quality The Ultimate Guide to Creating Online Video Content That Works, Part 2 Planning for Webcasting Success: Considerations for Deploying an Enterprise Video Communications Platform All Mobile Devices Are Not the Same Datmedia Datpresenter LSI Tarari Encoder Accelerator LCPX-6140 Gomez Active Streaming XF Transcoding for Global Reach Executive Visions 2009 The Revolution Is Being Televised

Streaming Media - December 2008/January 2009

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