Telestream Vantage enabled improved file-based workflow for NBC Olympics during its coverage of the 2014 Sochi Winter Games

Nevada City, Calif., March 13, 2014 –Telestream®, the leading provider of digital media tools and workflow solutions, today announced that its products were used to provide filebased standards conversion, transcoding, and workflow orchestration to NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, during its production of the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. The announcement was made today by Darryl Jefferson, Vice President, Digital Workflow, NBC Olympics and Dan Castles, CEO, Telestream.

"We were excited to continue working with Telestream and used their next-generation Vantage® hardware and software toolset for advanced workflow orchestration," said Jefferson. “We used Vantage file-based standards conversion, transcoding, audio re-mapping and down-mixing, closed captioning extraction, and more. The GPU-accelerated Lightspeed Server ensured that processes kept up with the rigorous live environment, and the workflow profiles allowed us the flexibility to configure process intelligence with each step.”

"Vantage was designed to enable sophisticated content creation and distribution workflows, seamlessly connecting independent devices into a centralized, managed system," said Castles. "We're pleased that our technology allowed NBC to quickly scale their system to meet the demands of this major global event. We’re proud to have been associated with this effort."

Vantage was used by NBC to perform workflow orchestration between various third-party production and encoding systems, with a special focus on preparing content for non-traditional platforms such as cable video-on-demand, the Web and mobile devices. Vantage analyzed incoming source material from Sochi for parameters like frame rate and automatically directed content-processing workflows without requiring human intervention.

"Almost every file path for non-traditional TV was covered by Vantage in some way, either by workflow orchestration, just checking a file, or actual transcoding," said Jefferson.

Integration between Vantage and Cinnafilm® Tachyon enabled NBC to perform high-quality standards conversion from 50i to 60i in the compressed domain without decompressing the content back to baseband video, a significant time savings. The Tachyon product quickly delivered motion-compensated standards conversion, which Jefferson said was crucial for sports but hadn't been previously feasible in file-based conversion.

NBC also used two other Telestream products to help prepare its cable VOD content: CaptionMaker (which Telestream acquired with captioning firm CPC last year) and the recentlyreleased Vantage Transcode IPTV VOD product. CaptionMaker automated the retiming of captions from 50i to 60i, a process that typically would have required multiple disparate systems and human operation, while Vantage Transcode IPTV VOD created closed-captioned SD and HD CableLabs-compliant files for delivery to domestic cable distribution outlets.

"The big benefit of Vantage is its 'connective tissue',"said Jefferson. "Sometimes vendors have two products that might not be able to move content between each other, so we use Vantage to move from Point A to Point B."

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About NBC Olympics
A division of the NBC Sports Group, NBC Olympics is responsible for producing, programming and promoting NBCUniversal's Olympic coverage. It is renowned for its unsurpassed Olympic heritage, award-winning production, and ability to aggregate the largest audiences in U.S. television history. For more information on NBC Olympics’ coverage of the Sochi Olympics, please visit: http://nbcsportsgrouppressbox.com/

About Telestream
Telestream provides world-class live and on-demand digital video tools and workflow solutions that allow consumers and businesses to transform video on the desktop and across the enterprise. Many of the world’s most demanding media and entertainment companies as well as a growing number of users in a broad range of business environments, rely on Telestream products to streamline operations, reach broader audiences and generate more revenue from their media. Telestream products span the entire digital media lifecycle, including video capture and ingest; live and on-demand encoding and transcoding; captioning; playout, delivery, and live streaming; as well as automation and orchestration of the entire workflow. Telestream corporate headquarters are located in Nevada City, California. The company is privately held. For more information, visit www.telestream.net.

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