A major producer, distributor, and broadcaster of Spanish-language programming in the U.S. has aligned itself with a digital media tools and workflow solutions specialist to aid in rapid channel growth and services.
Olympusat, which provides more than 100 channels from across Iberoamérica to Hispanics who prefer to consume content in Spanish, has placed Telestream‘s Vantage media processing platform at the core of its video production operations.
While Olympusat produces six movies each month and delivers the content from its West Palm Beach, Fla., headquarters, it is the distributor of Cine Mexicano, which RENTRAK says has “a regular audience of 60 million people.”
In addition to Latino tiers found on MSOs and DBS providers, Amazon Fire TV users can access Olympusat via OTT platform VEMOX, providing 70 Spanish-language and 30 English-language channels to viewers.
For each program, Olympusat’s video production division, Olympusat Entertainment, typically produces 30 to 100 different versions to suit different platforms and markets.
To help automate this vast undertaking, a Vantage system was installed with nine nodes of transcoding. Three are GPU-accelerated Telestream Lightspeed servers and six are generic Intel machines at the center of their transcoding operations.
Larry Dalton, Broadcast/IT Specialist at Olympusat Entertainment, said, “Producing and distributing this much content for so many platforms can only be achieved with a lot of talent and a high degree of process automation. We added the Lightspeed servers to help when we were faced with an urgent task to encode over 5000 titles to high quality H.264, and had very little time to respond.”
Dalton and his team edit their shows on Adobe Premiere, then export the finished edits to the Vantage system. At present this process requires some manual data input from the edit staff, but Dalton plans to implement the new Adobe Premiere panel in Vantage version 7 to streamline this procedure and automate the submission process to Vantage workflows.
“We are adapting the workflows within Vantage to quickly cope with any changes in requirements, and the workflow designer in Vantage is incredibly powerful and easy to use, yet allows us to make changes in the workflows without relying on the supplier or development of new software,” comments Dalton.
