VidOvation, which offers manufacturing, distribution, consulting and services for video communications equipment to government broadcasters among others, introduced a lot of new products at InfoComm11, but found its webstreaming products to be “hot.”
VidOvation saw “a pretty wide spectrum of clients [at InfoComm11], from corporate pro A/V to government and Department of Defense clients,” said Jim Jachetta, president and CEO of the company. “We have our Minicaster, which will broadcast live video to the web; that’s been a hot item. We anticipated that being a hot item and it proved to be true,” he said.
The Minicaster, produced by Communitek Video Systems Inc., is a portable, self-contained, stand-alone system for live HD and SD video streaming and webcasting, according to VidOvation. The product contains all of the necessary hardware and software resources to creat high quality streams from all types of professional video sources. Featuring MPEG4/H.264, Adobe Flash and Windows Media encoding, the company says. The Minicaster can produce streams at bit rates from 100 kbps to 15 Mbps to deliver premium performance for all types of streaming applications. The Minicaster performs three main functions including video and audio capture/compression, stream formatting/output and archiving.
Jachetta says the reason for the interest in webstreaming products in general—and the Minicaster in particular—is a growing number of the heads of organizations want to do more than podcast. They want a webcast, or video webcast, live to the public, he said. In addition, the interest in conducting webcasts is growing so that “corporate clients, colleges and educational institutions are interested in webcasting, so the mobile stream cellular webcasts have been a big interest,” he said. Because of that, VidOvation has “devices [available] that will webcast over cellular networks” when an organizational webstreamer is in the field, he said.
