Multi-platform content distribution and efficient multi-format workflows are necessities for content owners and providers striving to stay ahead in today's competitive media environments. Maximizing the value and reach of your content means dealing with an ever-increasing array of formats to support the network-enabled platforms and devices that have changed how audiences consume video. From creating file-based deliverables to live to stream, StreamZ Ingest encoding systems give you the power to efficiently capture and transform your media at a top quality in any format for applications from revenue-expanding multi-screen delivery to post-production and archive.

Multiple Formats, One Easy Workflow

StreamZ Ingest supports standard and optional compression and container formats including AVC/H.264 (including Adobe® Flash®, Microsoft® Silverlight, Transport Streams and Elementary Streams), MPEG-2, XDCAM HD, Avid DNxHD®, DVCPro, AVC-Intra (Panasonic P2), JPEG2000, VC-1 (Windows Media), QuickTime®, MXF, GXF, LXF, Omneon and many more, with a flexible architecture for easy future format expansion. Strict output compliance ensures broad compatibility with devices from mobile phones and PCs to set-top boxes. Stereoscopic 3D content can be encoded in H.264 with the optional Digital Rapids Studio AVC Encoder for frame-compatible (side-by-side or top-bottom) 3D delivery.

Source video can be encoded to files or streamed in multiple formats, resolutions and bit rates simultaneously, giving you exceptional productivity while targeting multiple distribution channels or adaptive bitrate delivery. StreamZ Ingest offers the industry’s highest quality for live and on-demand adaptive streaming technologies including HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) with Adobe® Media Server; Apple® iPhone® and iPad™ HTTP Live Streaming (HLS); and Microsoft IIS Smooth Streaming.

Hardware-Powered Quality and Reliability

To keep your audience engaged, looks really can be everything. The StreamZ family is renowned for its exceptional output quality. For analog and digital video input signals, that starts with the advanced video preprocessing capabilities of our Flux hardware technology. Hardware-based preprocessing features (such as motion adaptive de-interlacing with pixel-level analysis) ‘groom’ the input signal to be more ‘compression-friendly’, resulting in superior visual quality and the most efficient use of bandwidth in the compressed output. Preprocessing in hardware also leaves greater system horsepower available to encode more multi-format outputs simultaneously. Robust handling of irregularities or disruptions in incoming source signals ensures superior reliability. An incoming SDI signal on StreamZ Ingest can even be switched between HD and SD sources without interrupting in-progress encoding and streaming. Meanwhile, additional hardware features such as graphic overlay and video controls let you brand and refine your video.

Tightly Integrated with Superior Software

Encoding is more than just compression. StreamZ Ingest systems feature the powerful and flexible Stream FE™ software, providing you with the industry’s deepest feature set and a streamlined workflow from ingest through delivery. The Stream FE software lets you adjust compression settings and hardware pre-processing options as precisely as you want, from production-tested presets to deeply configurable controls. A wide array of video and audio processing plug-ins can be applied, and output can be directed to a variety of options including archive files and live streams.

The parameters associated with each encoding session can be saved in whole or in part, letting you recreate an entire project with a single click or reuse portions within other jobs. Productivity is increased, the effort is reduced, and the cost of training is minimized.

StreamZ Ingest includes a comprehensive set of tools for automation and easy integration into any environment. Features such as RS422 deck control, GPI triggers, e-mail notification and automated FTP delivery help you automate and organize your workflow. Watch folder support can be combined with powerful template-based publishing to streamline your workflows, enabling automated encoding and publishing to websites, archives, FTP servers and more by simply dropping source content into a specified folder. For ingest automation and live streaming management, the optional StreamZ Live Manager software provides centralized control, scheduling, management and failover for multiple StreamZ Ingest systems.

StreamZ Ingest also features a wealth of advanced functionality to help content owners and publishers more effectively monetize, manage and protect their media. Script commands and cue points can be inserted into select output formats to trigger downstream events such as advertising insertion or replacement. Closed Caption support bolsters content accessibility and enables regulatory compliance. Support for content access technologies such as Microsoft PlayReady ensures that high-value content is used only as specified by the content owner and only by authorized users, while ‘fingerprinting’ support enables automatic content identification. Optional Nexguard forensic watermarking by Civolution bolsters content security, while the Civolution Teletrax option embeds watermarks for content tracking and monitoring.

External scripting and XML-based project files let you extend StreamZ Ingest’s functionality and customize how they work in your environment. For more advanced requirements, a robust Web Services API is available for integrating StreamZ Ingest tightly into your custom applications.