American flags flutter from every streetlight along Park Avenue in downtown Amherst, Ohio, despite the fact that it’s closer to Labor Day than the Fourth of July. At Ziggy’s Restaurant, the heady smell of Thursday’s perennial lunch special, the homemade meatloaf sandwich, begins to waft up into the foggy, early morning air. The Marion L. Steele Comets are just two days away from the high school football season opener, and every square foot of lawn in this town of 12,000, 35 miles west of Cleveland, is littered with signs extolling “Comet pride.” Welcome to small-town America, a snapshot of the past, frozen in time.

But not everything in Amherst has been trapped in a time warp. Over at the high school, exciting things are happening, groundbreaking stuff involving the latest technology. Every school has its strengths, a signature program it’s known for, and at Steele High School, it’s the top-notch media program. Every year for the last decade or so, the television classes at Steele High School have been winning awards, and that’s thanks in part to the latest equipment from NewTek.

“Last year, in the National Academy of Television Arts and Science’s student production awards, they gave out eight awards in our three-state region and we won five of the eight,” media teacher Mark Lowrie tells me, standing in front of a Plexiglas trophy case with six shelves crammed full of trophies. The wall behind the trophy case is also filled with framed honors, so many awards there’s no room to hang anymore. Every ambitious student at Steele High School wants to be part of the school’s media program, but not everybody gets in. For the twenty seniors lucky enough to be chosen for the media program, producing the daily newscast at Steele is far more than just a class they attend every day.

“It’s a two-year program,” Lowrie says. “Students audition as sophomores, and once they gain entrance into the class, they’re here for parts of every day their junior and senior years. Junior year is like Minor League baseball. The students learn to run the equipment, edit, shoot and write. Then, senior year is the Major Leagues. We’re producing 130 to 140 live news shows a year, an original show almost every day. We get an eleven-minute window, some days a little bit longer. When the bell rings, we are on live.”

Producing 140 Shows a Year
It’s 8:00 a.m., Thursday morning, in Steele High School’s television control facility, and both the studio and control room are packed with anxious students. Airtime for the morning’s live newscast is less than an hour away, and the production team is frantically making last-minute preparations. The show open still isn’t edited, and there are audio problems with the remote live shot that will be part of the show. The program’s anchors for the day, Marissa Gillam and Gehrig Gabrie are struggling to get their copy edited before it goes to the Teleprompter. Everyone on the production team is all business, totally focused on the task at hand. Everywhere you look, there are determined faces, an unexpected level of maturity for a group of high schoolers….[continue reading]

Enter the MediaDS—bridging the world of content creation with modern delivery, enabling content producers to quickly and easily deliver live-streaming video to their audiences from a single device. Built by NewTek and Wowza, the MediaDS enables different content-distribution models: within a firewall, to social media platforms or even to the masses through a content delivery network (CDN).

With audio and video production tools, live encoding and simple stream delivery, the MediaDS is a revolutionary live-streaming platform for a revolutionary era in video content creation and consumption.

And now, you can buy it directly from Wowza. Visit www.wowza.com/solutions/mediads to bridge your content production and delivery. To learn more, check out the video below featuring Barry Owen, vice president of engineering at Wowza demonstrating the capabilities of the MediaDS with Will Waters, director of product marketing at NewTek….[continue reading]

Click here to watch the video on YouTube 

The MediaDS™ merges NewTek’s industry-leading live production technology with the gold standard of streaming software from Wowza™.

Barry Owen, VP Engineering at Wowza, and Will Waters, Director of Product Marketing at NewTek, walk through a live demo of the Media Distribution System, a fully-integrated encoding & live streaming device.

A turnkey solution, the MediaDS establishes a direct link between producers and viewers, with local-network and global distribution. It enables users to deliver multiple streams of content to various platforms directly from the source for viewing by anyone, anywhere, on any device.
– Four multiformat SDI inputs supporting up to 3G 1080p
– Four independent, simultaneous streaming channels
– Integrated NDI™ technology supporting input and output over IP
– Built-in Wowza streaming media server software
– NewTek’s real-time video- and audio-production tools
– Support for LAN, WAN, Wowza CDN, Wowza Streaming Cloud™, and alternative streaming workflows—Facebook, Microsoft Azure, YouTube, custom RTMP, and more.

NewTek™ is honored to report that Installation International has announced the NewTek and Wowza™ MediaDS™ as a “Best of Show” award winner at Integrated Systems Europe 2017, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. MediaDS is the first local and global media distribution platform, the bridge between Program Out on your switcher and your audience on any device anywhere in the world.

MediaDS is also for producers looking for a way to bring live and recorded content to the popular content delivery networks, including Facebook Live, Microsoft Azure, UStream, YouTube, Wowza, and more. MediaDS includes easy presets for these services plus a wide selection of others. And that’s just for starters: a fully integrated hardware and software solution merging NewTek’s industry-leading live production technology with powerful Wowza streaming software, the MediaDS makes it possible to deliver content from any production—or production system—directly to viewers, no additional services required.

Offering multi-channel streaming with 4 independent video channels and support for any combination of SDI or NDI™ video sources, MediaDS effectively democratizes video encoding and streaming for producers of live and linear programming and introduces a myriad of new opportunities for distribution, expansion and content monetization.

The MediaDS™ (media distribution system) is a real-time media encoding and live streaming video delivery platform that integrates live production technology from NewTek with live streaming software and services from Wowza Media Systems™ in a rack unit. The integrated production system establishes a direct link between producers who create video content and viewers that consume it. This article describes how to use the MediaDS to deliver video from a production to viewers directly using the integrated Wowza Streaming Engine™ live streaming software (version 4.6.0) and Wowza™ Player.

 Licensing the integrated Wowza software

After you purchase and register the MediaDS, the licenses you need to use the Wowza Streaming Engine and Wowza Player software on your appliance are automatically configured. Wowza Media Systems will send you an email message with the license key information for your records as well. This includes:

• A Perpetual (lifetime) license key for the Wowza Streaming Engine software instance on the appliance. This license can only be used with software on the appliance and can’t be transferred.
   

  Note: One-year of maintenance and support is included with your Wowza Streaming Engine license key. This includes software upgrades/updates and involvement from our support engineers for Wowza related issues on the appliance. Visit contact NewTek Professional Services to learn more about submitting support tickets and renewing your maintenance and support.

• The Login ID for your Wowza account.
• A license key for the Wowza Player software. This is an embeddable HTML5 player with optimized adaptive bitrate streaming that will play your content on all devices and platforms. For information on accessing the player, see Deliver the video production to Wowza Player.
   

  Note: This article assumes basic familiarity with Wowza Streaming Engine software. If you’ve never used Wowza Streaming Engine software, our free 30-day Trial license is a good option to help you learn about the software. To get a Trial license, complete the Wowza Streaming Engine Trial request form. You can then download the Wowza Streaming Engine Trial Edition package, which includes the Wowza Streaming Engine software, documentation, and examples, onto a separate computer in order to learn more about it. The Wowza Streaming Engine User’s Guide contains instructions about how to install and use the software.

Create a live video production

First, you must connect a video source to the MediaDS appliance and configure one or more channels to encode it.

1. Connect video input to the MediaDS appliance. You can connect an SDI video source to one of the BNC inputs on the MediaDS backplate, a network device interface (NDI) source, a PTZ camera with compatible network output, or a suitable external A/V capture device connected to the system using a USB port. For more information, see the NewTek MediaDS User Guide.
2. On the MediaDS appliance, navigate to the MediaDS Desktop interface. This is the interface you’ll use to configure your video production. It is open and running by default. You can configure one or more of the four channels (we’ll use Channel 1 in this article).
    

   Note: If you need to re-start the MediaDS Desktop, navigate to the Windows desktop and double-click the Launch MDS1 shortcut.

1. In the toolbar beneath the Channel 1 viewport, click on the configuration gear next to the channel label to open the Configuration panel from which you can change the channel name (used as the stream name in Wowza Streaming Engine software), select video and audio sources, specify encoding bitrate, framerate, etc. Additionally, you can click on the configuration gear next to the STREAM button in the toolbar to select a Stream Profile for the channel. 
2. (If desired) select the same video and audio sources in another channel to create an adaptive-bitrate video production. Any channels that have the same Video Source are linked together, but you can create different different quality outputs of the same source by selecting a different Stream Profile for each channel. This lets players switch between the different bitrates in your video production on the fly to accommodate changing network conditions, CPU constraints, and display capabilities. This streaming method can provide optimal image and sound quality for viewers. The player controls switching based on player-side factors, and the Wowza Streaming Engine software performs the server-side switching, which is transparent to the viewer.

   When channels are linked together, a linked icon appears in each channel’s toolbars:

1. 1. To finish producing an adaptive-bitrate stream, you must also configure a SMIL file. See Configure a SMIL file for adaptive-bitrate video production.
2. If desired, configure other settings in MediaDS Dashboard.
   Note: By default, Wowza Streaming Engine is selected in the Connection menu. If it isn’t selected, you must select it to connect the video production to Wowza Streaming Engine.
3. Click STREAM in the toolbar beneath the Channel 1 viewport to connect the channel output to Wowza Streaming Engine.

Learn more from the full article here. 

In today’s webinar Gary Bettan announces some great protions from NewTek

• $2,000 Off NewTek TriCaster 460 with Control Surface now with $17,995 MSRP
• $5,000 Off NewTek TriCaster 8000 with Control Surface now at $29,995 MSRP
• FREE Advanced Edition Software with TriCaster 460 and 8000 bundles with control surface
• FREE Panasonic PTZ NDI software also included with TriCaster 460 and 8000 bundles
• We will discuss NewTek’s new Coupon Code redemption system for software, NDI sales opportunities and more
• Introducing NewTek MediaDS with Wowza

Click here to download the full size infographic on NewTek NDI technology

Check out these blog posts and links for more information on the NewTek MediaDS:

• NewTek and Wowza Announce Availability of MediaDS
• NewTek’s Will Waters Explains MediaDS
• Broadfield Product Page on NewTek MediaDS

Encoder offers NewTek proprietary IP inputs, world-class color correction, and an integrated Wowza Streaming Engine for live delivery.

First announced at IBC in Amsterdam last September, the NewTek/Wowza Media Systems MediaDS (Media Distribution System) is now available for immediate purchase. The MediaDS unit comes in a one rack-unit (1RU) form factor and is priced at $11,995.

Powered by the video ingest technologies NewTek is famous for, including advanced color correction demonstrated in the TalkShow100 product we covered last year, the MediaDS can act as a multi-stream distribution system for content generated by the NewTek TriCaster video mixer product line.

Like most encoders with an integrated streaming server, the MediaDS offers a 3G serial digital interface (SDI) input that allows 1080p 59.94 (or 1080p50 in non-U.S. markets) to be captured and encoded into an RTMP stream. While there’s been lots of talk about the death of RTMP, the NewTek team has championed its continued use for live streaming to a variety of social media platforms, including Facebook Live, Microsoft Azure, and even the Wowza CDN service offered by Wowza for live event streaming from its Wowza Streaming Engine media server software…[continue reading]

Will Waters, Director of Product Marketing for NewTek™ explains the MediaDS, launched jointly by NewTek and Wowza™ on January 5th, 2017, in this interview with Ryan Salazar of Broadcast Beat. Getting beyond the technical and marketing descriptions of the product as shared in the release announcements, what are the implications of MediaDS for video producers and communicators? 

Click here to read the full article

The device is meant to hook up the loose end that exists after a show has been produced, for example, using one of NewTek’s TriCaster products. Traditionally, users have had to either build out their own media server capabilities or rely on a third-party CDN to distribute their video productions over IP. That’s a hassle, especially for customers who end up sending their content out to an external service like YouTube or Ustream just to make that content accessible to users on the corporate network. But by building Wowza’s streaming software into a simple hardware appliance with a basic UI, NewTek is giving users an easier way to distribute material, whether it’s on an internal LAN or over the wider Internet.

“This allows a content producer or content owner to take a live video signal of any type, whether it’s from a studio or a TriCaster or any other video switcher, and deliver it directly to the end user,” NewTek Director of Product Marketing Will Waters told StudioDaily. “It is a delivery or distribution system — a turnkey solution for anyone who wants to have total control all the way from content delivery to the consuming viewer. Typically, you’d have to piece that together from multiple vendors.”

In a first for the industry, MediaDS enables multi-channel distribution delivered directly from venue to viewers.