|
September 2008 Digital Rapids Transcode Manager and StreamZ Power MICAH Digital Media Workflow at NBC Universal
www.nbcuni.com
"Working closely with Digital Rapids, we’ve built a unique, high-quality and scalable ingest, encoding and transcoding workflow…”
"[It] has streamlined our digital media operations and enabled the automation needed for repurposing and managing the substantial volume of content we process."
View PDF Version
 Leading media and entertainment company NBC Universal (NBCU) has expanded the reach of its broad portfolio of media properties and content assets across multiple platforms, including the Web, VOD, and electronic sell-through (EST). From features and specials to reality programming and episodic series, current and archived NBCU shows are now available viewing on numerous devices. Even just considering the Web, NBCU content is now available through a broad range of portals, including nbc.com (on-demand streaming of full episodes), Hulu.com (NBCU’s joint venture with News Corporation) and Amazon Unbox (episodes can be purchased and downloaded). Another recent NBCU initiative, NBC Direct, makes the most recent episode of select primetime and late-night entertainment programming available for download on a limited-time free viewing license.
To enable these new distribution opportunities, NBCU needed to create an efficient digital media workflow to repurpose their existing content into the diverse distribution formats required by these new platforms. With massive volumes of content to be processed on an ongoing basis, and the timeliness of content availability important to viewer satisfaction, maximizing the overall throughput of the workflow was also critical. In addition to file-based media sources, many media assets are still delivered to the digital media production pipeline on tape, necessitating a closely integrated ingest and encoding component to the workflow.
NBCU and Digital Rapids worked closely together to develop the MICAH company-wide, multi-format digital media production workflow. Spanning NBC’s geographically dispersed operations, the fully automated MICAH system maximizes quality and speed while providing timely availability of media content in multiple formats, and eliminating the time-consuming manual interactions previously required at multiple points in the content production and distribution chain.
12
|