NAB Product News
ViewCast Introduces Niagara GoStream SURF
By
Apr 10, 2008 - 11:08:55 AM

ViewCast booth: SL13109

At the 2008 NAB exhibition in Las Vegas this month, the broadcasting industry will get its first look at the ViewCast Niagara GoStream SURF — the most powerful portable streaming media encoding appliance available. It's the newest in the Niagara encoder product line, all of which are powered by ViewCast Corporation's renowned Osprey video capture technology. 

This encoder is the smallest, lightest, and most powerful system in the Niagara GoStream portable encoder family. With this appliance, users can capture video to send multiple full-resolution streams to PCs and mobile devices in multiple formats at multiple bit rates — all simultaneously. This gives users the flexibility to stream content from a controlled studio environment or an off-site location to capture live events or up-to-the-minute news. 

By taking advantage of the power and flexibility of the portable Niagara GoStream SURF, users can shoot on location or in the studio and have access to live audiences, delivering video content in the most desired viewing formats, including MPEG-4, Adobe Flash Live, Microsoft Windows Media, RealVideo, and uncompressed AVI.

The intelligent and simplified design of the Niagara GoStream SURF makes streaming professional-grade rich media a simple, effortless process. Therefore, it's ideal for many types of organizations and applications, such as broadcasters for remote news, events, and sports; business enterprises for Webcasting and podcasting; government agencies for streaming of open meetings; and schools and universities for reaching students and alumni through the Internet.

"Streaming media technology has opened up a world of new possibilities for organizations to communicate with specific and widely-dispersed audiences who are using a wide range of platforms, devices, delivery formats, and download speeds — all at a dramatically lower cost than traditional broadcast methods," said Dave Stoner, president and chief operating officer of ViewCast Corporation. "And now, with the Niagara GoStream SURF, it's never been easier to reach your targeted audiences anywhere with tailor-made optimum delivery capabilities. You can encode different streams for intranet users, high-speed Internet users, and mobile device users — all at the same time — from a single ViewCast encoder." 

The Niagara GoStream SURF comes with pre-installed ViewCast Niagara SCX® Pro management and control software, which enables users to capture live video in a wide range of popular encoding, streaming, and capture-to-file formats. Together with ViewCast's industry-leading Osprey SimulStream software, Niagara SCX Pro empowers users to set up, control, and monitor multiple Niagara streaming encoders throughout an enterprise or over the Internet — all through a single, easy-to-use Web interface. With Niagara SCX Pro, users can also size and scale each individual stream and customize it with other visual elements, such as closed captions and bitmap overlays (e.g., logos) to propagate their brand online. 

"We designed the GoStream SURF with a combination of simplicity, portability, and power in mind — it's an ideal encoder for anyone who needs to quickly stream live events over the Internet from remote locations or from anywhere that has access to an IP network," said Mark Hershey, vice president of engineering at ViewCast. "Its durable, compact body and protected input/output connectors enhance the ability of our Niagara GoStream SURF to withstand demanding environments while shooting on location. Its simplicity is epitomized by its self-contained structure, one-touch button controls, and lack of necessity for peripheral devices — no keyboard, mouse, or monitor is required to operate the encoder."