Telestream To Provide Sinclair With Multiple Products & Cloud Services

Telestream, a global provider of workflow automation, media processing, quality monitoring, and test and measurement solutions for the production and distribution of video, has a new multiyear enterprise-wide agreement with Sinclair Broadcast Group that covers all existing products and services across Sinclair properties together with unlimited usage of Telestream Cloud Services.

Sinclair is using the Telestream Vantage Media Processing Platform for both cloud and on-prem media transformation and orchestration workflows with DIVA and Kumulate content management products for archival and media sharing workflows.

Sinclair is centralizing the reception and processing of all commercials, syndicated programs, paid programs and promotions for all of its 600-plus channels. This allows the group to de-duplicate not only workflow and media, but also much of the equipment presently needed to process this content at more than 60 physical sites across the country. To accomplish this, Sinclair has chosen Vantage and Vantage Cloud Port, which will centrally receive and process content for their entire group within Sinclair’s public cloud environment.

Mike Kralec, Sinclair SVP-CTO, said: “We’re leveraging a cloud-native and dynamic services architecture to ingest, QA, prep, transcode and distribute content. Using Vantage in this way has allowed us to move away from station-based on-premise systems built to handle peak demand. Vantage not only allows us to scale dynamically, but it also allows us to consolidate and, in many cases, decommission on-prem hardware and services that were built using older monolithic architectures.

“Since January we’ve already processed more than 1 petabyte of content through Vantage consisting of hundreds of thousands of files. It represents a substantial savings in terms of both cost and time.”

Previously, when Sinclair stations would share news content with each other, they would undergo a laborious manual process of using FTP to transfer files between stations. A major workflow initiative has been to de-duplicate and centralize news content sharing between stations. Kumulate, Telestream’s content storage management solution, working with Sinclair’s newsroom computer system, creates media wires that resemble other news wire services they receive, such as AP, but that contain actual links to the associated media.

This internal wire service, and the behind-the-scenes automated media processing provided by Kumulate, has provided a simplified and intuitive way for thousands of Sinclair journalists to trade tightly linked scripts and video.

Kralec said: “We’ve been able to share hundreds of news stories a day within the group using Kumulate. When we use a shared story on air, it increases both the quality of our newscasts and our efficiency. Smaller stations consistently benefit from using content produced by larger stations with more production resources. This results in savings that stations can re-invest in deeper reporting of local stories.”