NAB Event News
Newtek TriCaster coming to high school venues via Daktronics partnership
By
Apr 15, 2008 - 3:28:50 PM

By Andrew Lippe

High School Sports has been looking for a way to tap instant replay and create scoreboard video like the pros. Thanks to a major partnership with Daktronics, NewTek’s TriCaster will work with Daktronics scoreboards to provide high schools with exciting live scoreboard video and instant replay.    

“The TriCaster can feed live video directly to a Daktronics board,” says Phillip Nelson, senior vice president, strategic development for Newtek.  “Using the DataLink plugin, the TriCaster will also create reatime graphics using score and clock data from the Daktronics Scoreboard controller.    

High Schools looking for instant replay will be interested in Newtek’s TimeWarp replay controller.   TimeWarp allows instant “marking in” and “marking out” while switching live video, so that events recorded or streamed via TriCaster can be played back in slow-motion.   “Based on feedback from clients like the NBA D-League, we saw a need for affordable slow-motion instant replay.” TimeWarp is just one of several new TriCaster products. Their newest introduction to the line is their latest portable live production and virtual set system, the TriCaster Broadcast. “TriCaster Broadcast was greatly influenced by those in the sports market,” says Nelson.

Among the key TriCaster BROADCAST features are serial digital input and output with embedded audio, which provide durability and reliability for camera hook-ups. “Another important new feature was the implementation of Flash stream,” says Nelson. “Every time we did a sports demo, we were asked when we could do Flash.”

The new TriCaster Broadcast is a live truck in a backpack that weighs just 16 lbs, supports 4:3 and 16:9, streams Flash 2.0, Windows Media 11 and VC-1 and archives content as an MPEG-2 file

The TriCaster Broadcast has additional tools including LiveSet, HDV Editing and integrated DDR’s that accommodate 20 hours of storage.    

Newtek also announced that the NHL will be adding TriCaster so that each team can stream exclusive live content to NHL.com.  This content will include morning skates and news conferences.   “There is a demand to produce more live content, and we are happy to help them and others do more,” says Nelson.