ViewCast Niagara Streams Local Government Access Content in Wisconsin

In the Wisconsin city of
West Allis, a ViewCast Niagara streaming media encoder is playing a central role
in expanding the audience for public, educational, and government
access television programming.
The system also potentially opens up a new outlet for regional high school and middle school sporting events.
“Thanks to ViewCast,
we’re able to bring our government access programs to an even broader
audience via leading-edge IPTV,” says Jerry Musial, video and cable
coordinator for the City of West Allis. “The Niagara system was
extremely easy to adopt, and its budget-conscious pricing played a big
role in our choice. As a non-technical person, I really appreciated the
excellent support and assistance we received from ViewCast, which
enabled us to get up and running quickly and smoothly.”
Musial also serves on the
board of the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and
Advisors (NATOA), an association that represents the communications
needs and interests of local governments and their advisors.

A city of 60,000 in
Milwaukee County, and the site of the Wisconsin State Fair, West Allis
offers a wide range of government access programming to its citizens.
The programs are locally produced as well as supplied by state and
federal agencies, and include information about state and city
services, community events, and coverage of city council meetings. The
ViewCast Niagara system encodes the video for transport over a T1
network to the U-verse system, which began serving the West Allis
viewing area in February.

All Niagara encoders have
AT&T’s U-verse PEG streaming specifications programmed as a menu
item, and ViewCast is one of only four providers noted in U-verse’s PEG
encoder information collateral. This makes ViewCast an ideal solution
for municipalities that are seeking to deliver PEG content over this
new, rapidly growing IPTV platform.

ViewCast President and
Chief Executive Dave Stoner adds, “Musial’s involvement in NATOA is a testament to West Allis’
leadership in the area of municipal communications, as is the city’s
commitment to embracing advanced new media technologies such as IPTV.
Moreover, we see
continuing and rising adoption of video streaming for sports and
entertainment applications, as well as public access, as evidence of
the growing trend toward using the Internet as a major channel for
streaming all varieties of programs, information, and other content.”