Lincoln Center Adds HD Streaming With Digital Rapids

A top provider of tools and solutions for bringing television, film and web content to wider audiences, has announced that Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts has chosen Digital Rapids' StreamZHD high-definition media encoding system for live HD streaming capabilities from Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall.
Lincoln Center is the world's leading performing arts centre, located on 16.3 acres in New York City.
The centre's 12 resident organisations combine to present thousands of performances, educational programmes, tours and other events each year on the Lincoln Center campus. StreamZHD is part of a complete HD production environment at the Alice Tully Hall, which also features four robotic HD cameras linked over fiber to servers, routers and switchers in the facility’s data centre.
The StreamZHD system, supplied by systems integrator HB Communications, encodes content in real time for external distribution as live streams or on-demand files.
Lincoln Center’s live streaming capabilities recently supported the concurrent worldwide debut performances of “The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later”, the epilogue to the acclaimed Tectonic Theatre Project play. On-stage pre-show and post-performance events, including an interactive question and answer session with questions submitted via Twitter, were streamed through StreamZHD to audiences in over 150 theatres worldwide, supporting local live readings of the new play at each location. Three live streams and three on-demand archives at varying bit rates were created in the H.264 format for web viewing through Adobe Flash technology with StreamZHD producing all six outputs simultaneously in real time.
"It is important that our technology infrastructure is at a level of excellence commensurate with the calibre of events that we host, and the ability to stream at HD quality over the Internet is phenomenal," said Rob Tarleton, Chief Technology Officer, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
Brent Ross, Director of Sales for the Americas at Digital Rapids commented: "StreamZHD’s simultaneous multi-format output capabilities, outstanding quality and reliability make it the ideal solution to enable innovative streaming experiences, and we’re thrilled that Lincoln Center for the Performance Arts selected us for their world-class space."
StreamZHD continues to raise the bar for high-definition encoding solutions, delivering multi-format video ingest, encoding, transcoding and live streaming in a versatile configuration that integrates easily into any media environment. Combining the quality and performance advantages of hardware-based preprocessing with a format-flexible and feature-rich software application, Digital Rapids systems seamlessly support live and on-demand multi-platform distribution opportunities and production workflows.
For more information visit: www.digital-rapids.com
(BMcN/BMcC)