Cadent Selects Telestream Vantage Media Processing Platform to Up Productivity

Telestream announces that Cadent is using the Vantage Media Processing Platform to automate processes and boost productivity across its media planning and buying operations.

From the moment a spot arrives at Cadent’s network operations center in Mount Laurel, NJ, technicians know the clock is ticking. A massive influx of media files must be transcoded, timed, checked, slated, and captioned, among other things, in time to meet hard delivery deadlines.

To ensure that deadlines are consistently met, and that their media processing capabilities keep pace with an ever-increasing workload, Cadent migrated to an automated file-based workflow that enables a much faster turnaround using Telestream’s Vantage Transcode Pro Media Processing Platform.

Vantage Helps Cadent Reduce Turnaround Time

“To stay competitive in the advertising business, we need to deliver media that is consistently on-time and high-quality. So, we needed a solution that would scale with our company’s growth in a stepladder fashion. With Vantage, we’ve been able to scale the platform incrementally to support our growing workload without interruption. I’m very pleased with the system’s reliability and rapid return on investment. Vantage is the backbone of our operation,” says Joe Kovach, Vice President of Technical Operations for Cadent, in Philadelphia, PA.

At Cadent, source media arrives in a variety of file formats that need to be transcoded. Vantage performs many automated tasks to process this media including: identifying media files that need to be transcoded, executing automated workflow instructions, converting between ProRes, H.264, MPEG2, MPEG4 and other common formats, performing media analysis for quality control, generating low-res proxies of full-res media, and adding Nielsen watermarks (using the optional Nielsen plug-in).

Cadent technicians can view the status of all workflows across the operation on a 65-inch multiviewer that serves as a dashboard. This gives them visibility over how things are moving throughout the complex, multilayered infrastructure.

This includes a proprietary browser-based technology that Cadent built and deployed to support applications like customer service, production and management. External clients such as advertising agencies can use this portal to place orders, access media in Cadent’s database and perform other activities. And Cadent’s own internal departments can access media, such as low-res proxies, that they need for creative and production tasks.

“By the end of 2016, we determined that our media processing volume was 500,000+ files annually, compared to just 38,000 six years ago. And our turnaround time to distribute a group of 100 spots decreased from 24 hours down to two. So, with the same five-member team, we’re now able to ingest, process and deliver a much higher volume of media because of the automated workflow enabled by the Vantage Media Processing Platform,” says Ron Dernoski, Director of the Network Operations Center at Cadent, in Mt. Laurel, NJ.