Nevada City, California, June 27th, 2017 –Telestream, a leading provider of digital media tools and workflow solutions, today announced that YANGAROO, a Canadian digital media delivery service provider for the music, advertising, and awards industries, has chosen Telestream solutions to improve and speed its media processing, QC and captioning workflows.
YANGAROO provides its customers with forward-thinking technology solutions that enable high-quality audio and video content to be managed and distributed quickly, securely and cost-effectively. YANGAROO’s patented cloud-based platform, Digital Media Distribution System (DMDS), automates dozens of manual steps in a streamlined workflow, eliminating errors and increasing efficiencies. Content, such as music, music videos, and advertising can be quickly distributed to television, radio, media, retailers, awards shows, and other authorized recipients safely. Additionally, the platform manages a number of workflows—such as execution of traffic instructions, award show submissions, and approvals of on-air content.
“In the highly competitive market for digital delivery services, any provider needs to offer some unique values that set them apart from the competition,” says Richard Klosa, YANGAROO’s CTO. “With an ever-growing number of destinations, formats, and variations in metadata, the state-of-the-art workflow automation we have put in place makes our service easier to use and more adaptable to rapidly changing delivery requirements. Our delivery tools are also highly flexible, allowing a client to pause delivery of a long-form item to dedicate their network bandwidth to ingest of an urgent spot, then resume the long form delivery once the process is complete.”
The video content that YANGAROO processes covers an enormously wide gamut. From short form ads to long form programs, and high-quality “broadcast-ready” HD content to low budget music video productions that are not always technically suitable for broadcast -- all this content needs to be managed quickly and efficiently, with minimum operator interaction.
To continue to support its rapid business growth, YANGAROO chose several Telestream products to support its methodology.
At the point of ingest, YANGAROO uses Telestream’s Vidchecker QCsoftware to inspect video files and determine if they are technically suitable for broadcast. This is especially important for music video files. Source files are rated by a traffic light system: green is OK to broadcast. Yellow means some corrective action needs to be taken on the files. Red means the files need to be rejected and sent back to the producer and the music company, together with associated reports, so that they can improve their processes.
The API in Vidchecker allows YANGAROO to easily customise the QC reports to suit their needs, and to extract the error data from the reports so that it can be used in the next stages of their workflows. They also use Vidchecker to check that TV spots meet broadcast technical standards before they are delivered.
The workflow management and transcoding in the Vantage Media Processing Platform is the workhorse system that enables YANGAROO to deliver so many varied formats and versions in an efficient automated process. According to Klosa, what sets Vantage apart is the powerful and simple API that enables YANGAROO to manage the entire process from its own DMDS system while being powerful enough to create customized workflow processes. The Vantage workflow orchestration is also integrated with YANGAROO’s Teletrax and Nielsen systems to add appropriate watermarking, as well as with Aspera to aid in accelerated network delivery of files.
Telestream CaptionMaker is used to add legally required closed captions as part of a seamless process.
Although the YANGAROO system is predominantly cloud-based, the media processing is hosted on physical servers at their data center in Toronto. YANGAROO has recently added Telestream Lightspeed K80 servers. Klosa said that using Lightspeed servers gives them an average performance gain of 50% to 100% compared to the generic Dell servers that they initially used.
“We owned CaptionMaker and Vidchecker before they were acquired by Telestream,” says Klosa. “Now that they are all under the Telestream roof, we are finding many workflow benefits, with Vantage acting as the orchestrator between all the elements, managing the QC and captioning processes from a central location.”
