Victory for Telestream
The Victory Sports One, which covers sports in the upper Midwest, is the first commercial customer to use Telestream's MAPreview system. The system allows Victory Sports to capture, organize, search and retrieve multiple live video feeds. Victory Sports VP of Technical Operations Mark Durenberger says it will be used for online analysis of video feeds during Minnesota Twins baseball broadcasts. The system automatically records feeds and stores them as files in the Windows Media 9 format. Pricing starts at $10,000 for a single-server configuration.
Crawford Goes HD
Crawford Satellite Services is offering transmission and exchange of high-definition material from its 12 transportable earth stations. The company added Tandberg HD encoders to the stations, a move that Senior VP Jim Schuster believes will allow the stations to keep up with HD growth. Crawford is one of the leaders in the transmission market, having performed more than 35,000 uplinks for clients in various industries and also originating 28 full-time cable networks.
BBC Technology for Sale
The BBC, in an effort to outsource its telephony, IT and other technology services, is selling off its BBC Technology division. It will be sold to the company or companies that eventually win a 10-year contract to supply the services that BBC Technology provides. The move to outsourcing is expected to save the BBC about $40 million per year. According to BBC Technology Chief Marketing Officer Craig Dwyer, there will be no impact on existing customers or upcoming contracts. The BBC hopes to have a deal done by next autumn. There should be little change because the division's 1,500 employees will remain on staff to maintain the BBC systems. Companies that have already expressed interest include IBM and British Telecom, but the eventual purchaser could be a consortium of companies that supply parts of the outsourced services.
"Here at the BBC, we're managing about 20,000 desktops," says Dwyer, "but the economies of scale change when you get into supporting the hundreds of thousands."
