What is New in MediaCentral | Stream
The broadcast industry is in the midst of change on many fronts. Migrating to the cloud. The rise of web-based tools providing access from anywhere. The change from SDI to IP. Remote working. Mobile contribution. New distribution platforms. The growing need for efficient, cost-effective solutions. The list can seem endless.
Avid is developing and implementing tools to address the industry’s needs and the latest of these simplifies a number of these tasks - MediaCentral | Stream.
WHAT IS MEDIACENTRAL | STREAM
MediaCentral | Stream delivers simple and reliable remote contribution, enabling multiple compressed IP streams to be ingested into your MediaCentral production environment from anywhere. Capture from more sources. Move live content between remote locations at much lower costs. Even edit and playout media while capturing it for ultra-fast turnaround. It’s the easiest way to add IP contribution to any Avid production workflow.
It is a low-cost solution running in a VM that enables it to be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and accessed via a web-based UI, so your ingest operations can connect from anywhere.
MediaCentral Stream
On the fly, it encodes the incoming SRT or RTMP streams to your production house format. Critically, it ensures your production team’s workflow does not change at all. Teams can continue to use Media Composer, MediaCentral | Cloud UX, or Adobe Premiere Pro for their editing work with no disruption to their duties.
It includes the capability to ingest high-res and proxy media files simultaneously to MediaCentral | Production Management and Avid NEXIS storage, enabling editors and journalists to work with it within seconds of the recording starting. It has a simple, web-based UI with live preview of up to four incoming streams, including audio monitoring.
What is new in MediaCentral | Stream?
While the initial versions of MediaCentral | Stream focused on the ingest workflow, the latest version adds playout capabilities, delivering an end-to-end IP-based streaming workflow to the existing Avid solutions for news, media, and sports production.
In the latest version of MediaCentral | Stream, editors and journalists can work in their editing application of choice to create their finished packages ready for air and then send them for playout to MediaCentral | Stream. Each server supports playback of up to four concurrent SRT H.264 streams.
It supports play-while-transfer workflows, ensuring the vital speed-to-air capability required in a news environment. When an item is finished in the edit suite and transferred for playout, it be can be played back while the file is still transferring, and the transfer is faster than real-time.
It can be controlled standalone, for newsroom rundown playout using MediaCentral | Command, or by third-party studio automation applications.
What challenges does it solve?
Media organizations need to work efficiently—always. The array of sources is exploding – particularly the rise of user-generated content coming from any type of device. And organizations need to be able to easily make media available to their production teams as quickly as possible. There is not the time to go through a complex process to turn the streams into a production-ready format. Speed is key, and MediaCentral | Stream ensures there is no delay in getting the media to the teams that need it, nor any delay in streaming it out.
The other reality is the distributed workforce. Being able to work from anywhere is increasing in importance, but it needs to be done in a secure way. MediaCentral | Stream provides flexibility about how it can be deployed. As it runs on a virtual machine, it can be installed on-prem or in a cloud-hosted environment. Both ways provide security controls which can be implemented to ensure your production remains protected from unwanted intrusion.
With the risks of running as an edge device, security measures are a critical part of MediaCentral | Stream’s architecture, release testing, and daily operation. It has security built-in by design, with a variety of measures in place to keep your content and system safe.
MediaCentral | Stream provides a flexible, easy to deploy method for IP streaming ingest and playout, enhancing the capabilities of Avid’s solutions for news, broadcast, and sports.
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Craig Wilson
Craig Wilson is a newsroom specialist with over thirty years of experience in the broadcast industry. Craig has held various roles with Avid and is now the Global Media and Cloud Product Evangelist and host of the Making the Media podcast.