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October 2007 Digital Rapids StreamP Portable Encoder Powers Mobile Webcasting Services for NetStreamLive
Back in 2004, with their early webcasting hardware and software obsolete and not upgradeable, Holloway set out to find a new solution that would meet NetStreamLive’s growing requirements. He discovered Digital Rapids StreamP-500 at the NAB trade show, and found it superior to competing solutions.
Portability was critical to Holloway. “Because we focus on live, remote webcasting, we need to be as portable as possible. The StreamP units are very handy for traveling, especially to foreign countries, as we can simply pack the Digital Rapids unit in a suitcase, with no heavy equipment to transport. Portability is even more critical now with our Mobile Broadband vehicle, which allows us to bring our own bandwidth to each location.”
 NetStreamLive’s Mobile Broadband vehicle features full production capabilities including switching, character generation and audio mixing. StreamP can be fed from a third-party video feed in cases where separate production facilities are also deployed, or from NetStreamLive’s own production chain. If production must be done within a venue, StreamP is used inside the building for encoding, with a WiFi bridge from the venue to the truck’s satellite connectivity providing delivery and avoiding cumbersome cable runs.
“We’ve done events where our truck is simply supplying network connectivity, and the service provider doing the encoding laments lugging a full-sized system around for encoding chores. We just smile and look at the backpack we carry StreamP in.”
Holloway also found that the advantage of StreamP’s portability was matched by its exceptional output quality. The hardware-based pre-processing at the heart of StreamP’s superior quality – including motion adaptive de-interlacing and 2D and 3D noise reduction – provides performance benefits as well, reducing the workload on the laptop’s CPU and increasing the efficiency of the compression engine, thus enabling faster on-demand encoding and more simultaneous live streams.
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