NAB Perspectives: Telestream’s DeHart Sees Opportunity in Proliferation of Screens

The world of content distribution seems to change dramatically with each passing year, as new devices for consuming video pop up everywhere you look. At the 2010 NAB Show, the iPad was the talk of the show, with nearly every vendor seemingly offering new products to feed this new device. Now, in 2011, a stable of other tablets and the second iteration of the iPad have complicated matters even further, forcing companies like Telestream to create products that streamline the delivery of video to a growing number of devices.

“The No. 1 thing we’ve seen in the last year — and it’s going to continue — is the demand for people to get their content to all of these different devices,” says Telestream VP of Marketing Barbara DeHart. “There are just so many platforms now. We used to talk about three screens, then it was four screens, now it is five screens. Our solutions enable that delivery, whether it is on-demand or live. That is what is really pulling the company forward right now.”

As part of this effort, Telestream has unveiled Vantage Enterprise, an expanded version its Vantage software platform, which integrates technology from recently acquired Anystream. Telestream’s Vantage server-based workflow products automate content ingest, video-file interoperability, multichannel distribution, and other video-production workflows for content owners and creators, broadcast, cable, and new-media companies. Vantage unifies video capture, transcoding, analysis, metadata processing, delivery, and notification into a single workflow framework.

“The world of distribution is moving so quickly that the businesses can’t keep up with it,” says DeHart. “However, the individual consumers don’t really understand how much work goes into distributing [content] to all these platforms, and they are always wanting more. So our role is to take the complexity out of the process and make the tools available to everyone from grandma all the way up to big broadcasters.”

Telestream acquired Anystream in August 2010, and NAB marks the first major integration of the two companies’ technology. Vantage Enterprise system-management products are available in two configurations: Vantage Enterprise Control and Vantage Master Control (which features a higher-tier workflow-management layer). In addition, Telestream has built a bridge between Vantage and Anystream’s Agility 2G suite, which allows Agility users to integrate with Vantage.