NAB NY 2018: The Video Call Center To Debut Two Way Production Services

The Video Call Center (VCC) announced a significant lineup of new features that enhance the company’s patented two-way video call acquisition technologies, management platform, and expert video call production services. These will be on public display for the first time at NAB Show NY 2018 in booth N1017 of the Javits Center, NY, October 17-18. The highly configurable VCC platform and services are in regular, widespread use to support popular live and live-to-tape programs for content leaders including Discovery Networks, MLB.com, Fox Sports, Tegna, and many others.

Product highlights of the NAB NY presentation will include:

• Updated VCC Caller Queue Call Manager Pro software brings new controls to improve the visual quality of remotes and an advanced suite of tools to automatically resize and remove buttons from popular video call apps.
• Expanded, OS-specific functionality and options that enable callers to benefit from the unique characteristics of their preferred platforms including Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows devices, without a software download.
• Updated hardware that reduces the size of the VCC cloud endpoint to fit in just 1 rack unit. Installed in a client’s facility, the platform delivers hyper-low latency for effortless two-way video conversation on air.
• New native Gruveo WebRTC-based video contribution support for Apple Safari (already supported on Android). VCC also provides native support for FaceTime.
• Support for Jitsi, which offers an additional high-quality, multi-platform, web video contribution option for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Android.
• A new text chat feature enables video callers to chat with the production team while waiting to appear on air.
• Advanced insight tools provide showrunners with critical caller analytics.

The VCC platform is the video call production platform of choice for many programs. Among the workflows to be demonstrated at NAB Show NY are:

• Discovery networks, which makes extensive use of the VCC platform under a recent multi-year, multi-network agreement. This includes the popular 90 Day Fiancée franchise, one of cable TV’s most watched shows, which uses live video-caller contribution from its stars, and has just introduced its first audience participation segment. Discovery, alongside producers at Sharp Entertainment, uses the technology to create both live and pre-taped programs with participants from up to five continents in a single shoot.
• Tegna’s Daily Blast Live (DBL), which just renewed for its second season, uses VCC to bring live contribution to air from celebrities and “as-it-happens” breaking news such as live commentary on the Bill Cosby sentencing.
• MLB.com, which just completed its first, complete regular season of the Chatting Cage with VCC, connects live audience video callers with baseball’s biggest names for one-to-one questions and conversation. MLB makes extensive use of VCC’s patent-pending Caller Queue system for managing callers.

“We’re proud to demonstrate the significant progress our technical teams have made,” remarks Larry Thaler, The VCC’s CEO, “but even more excited to share how our growing list of clients are leveraging our platform across national cable, syndication, tv stations as well as digital distribution.”

The expansive Video Call Center suite of production technology and services includes:

• Acquisition of callers via Internet video call using favorite (and native) apps including FaceTime, WebRTC, and Skype. Each caller can use their own preferred device.
• Call producing, quality control and scene optimization to ensure the best possible appearance, lighting, and connectivity for cast members.
• Proprietary methodology and technology to stabilize consumer video caller applications and keep high-quality connections open for long periods of time.
• Every remote contributor receives hyper-low-latency live video and audio monitoring to ensure that contributors see each other and the studio hosts in real-time for effortless dialog and enhanced engagement.
• Isolation and switching of return feeds to enable remote contributors to see each other and react to secret videos.
• Broadcast-quality ISO recordings of each caller for use in post-production.
• Facilitation of communication between in-studio guests, production personnel and remote callers for direction and management production.
• Workflows that enable connection with traditional control rooms, or fully automated and host-driven workflows for full-featured production without a control room.
• Five levels of editorial control and safety including BleepITTM online program censor protection.