Vigor, Telestream Partner On PTV File Delivery

Vigor Systems, a provider of TV content distribution and media solutions, and Telestream, a provider of video transcoding and workflow automation solutions, have partnered to deliver a technology solution that will enable the public television community to move file delivery and media processing to the cloud.

Ultimately, this will allow the public television system to migrate from satellite file delivery to a next-generation terrestrial broadband-based file delivery platform.

Vigor was selected by the public television system to design, implement and manage the infrastructure that enables the delivery of content to public television stations. This solution is based on Vigor’s PitchBlue technology, a cloud-based content distribution, management, monitoring, and storage solution already widely used at 1,700 stations.

Vigor says PitchBlue is the largest TV content distribution platform in the U.S., distributing billions of dollars’ worth of content via the cloud from partners such as CBS, NBC Universal, Warner Brothers, Sony, 20th Television Fox and PMI.

As part of the initial phase of this new system, Vigor has chosen Telestream as its transcoding partner to optimize delivery of media files in station workflows. The implementation of the Telestream Cloud Workflow solution, a media processing and workflow automation powered by Vantage media processing technology, “will allow stations to intelligently conform media in the cloud for station playout broadcast,” according to Vigor.

“When it came time to pick a partner for this project, Telestream was the first company that came to mind,” said Magnus Sorlander, CEO-founder of Vigor. “With their industry proven transcoding solution and the latest addition of Telestream Cloud to their portfolio, they were the perfect choice to work with to bring this first phase of progressive content distribution to the public television market.”

Telestream Cloud Workflow is a fully managed SaaS solution designed to perform automated content preparation such as standards conversion, time adjustments, and captioning in addition to high-quality transcoding. Workflow utilizes Vantage technology components to bring transcoding, metadata processing, analysis and quality control into a single, unified system with intelligent workflow automation. Through seamless API integration to the PitchBlue platform, Telestream will transcode predefined station media profiles upon ingest into the Vigor cloud library or upon download request from stations.

“We’re tremendously excited to have the combined power of Telestream Cloud and PitchBlue capabilities at the heart of this solution for public television stations,” said Scott Murray, VP of Product Management at Telestream. “We know that, in their mission to serve a broad and diverse audience, public TV stations are looking to provide the highest quality, richest media to their viewers, and they need to do so in the most cost-effective way possible. Vigor shares our conviction that the highest quality solutions can also be lean and flexible.”

The joint integration is currently being tested at pilot locations and will officially be rolled out to all public television stations by early fall 2018.