Videoship and Bluefish444 Help NBC News Channel Serve Affiliates

Thursday, April 10, 2008

NBC News Channel is situated in Charlotte, North Carolina and provides 24/7 news services to 300 NBC Affiliate stations located across the U.S. and abroad. Time is of the essence with breaking news, and the News Channel team delivers top stories quickly and efficiently using state of the art technologies.

In August 2007, VideoShip, a privately held Canadian corporation with offices in Atlanta, was awarded the contract to provide system development and support services to News Channel in building their next generation news aggregation and distribution backbone. The new system is powered by NetWave, VideoShip's core Content Delivery Network (CDN) product offering. NetWave is a highly scalable solution that supports the aggregation/delivery of files and live streams concurrently over both terrestrial and satellite networks.

As part of this upgrade, VideoShip worked closely with News Channel staff to select hardware components in replacing aging News Channel servers situated at each Affiliate location. These servers act as repositories for delivered content, and provide a number of facilities to assist with local workflow integration. VideoShip integrated/configured these systems at their Atlanta office, and shipped them to Affiliate locations by December 2007.

A key function of the new system is the ability to ingest and play-out video at Affiliate locations, allowing each site to integrate delivered content into their local workflow, as well as contribute local news stories of their own to News Channel headquarters in Charlotte. Required functionality of the new hardware's integrated video card component included play-out with concurrent dual capture inputs, along with support for both Analog and Digital I/O.

After an extensive evaluation of video cards from multiple vendors, Bluefish444 SD Greed was selected as the most versatile and cost-effective solution for the News Channel deployment. While other vendors offered a 3-card solution, a single SD Greed supports concurrent play-out with dual encoder inputs, and provides the quality and reliability required for this mission-critical application.

During the development and deployment phases, Bluefish444 and VideoShip engineers worked very closely to guarantee tight product integration. Tom Grimes, CEO of VideoShip, states, "Bluefish444 was definitely the right company for us to partner with. They have provided top level support, and have gone to great lengths to ensure the success of this project."

Bob Horner, president of NBC News Channel states, "News Channel prides itself as being an innovator in digital news gathering and distribution. Our new generation system - delivered by VideoShip and its partner Bluefish444 - strengthens our position as the technology leader in our domain."

Labels: Bluefish444, Bluefish444-Case-Study, Bluefish444-SD-Greed

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