ViewCast Powers Live Streaming Of 2008 MTV Europe Music Awards

ViewCast Corporation, a developer of industry-leading hardware and software for the transformation and delivery of professional-quality video over IP and mobile networks, has announced that its Niagara Pro media encoder streamed the 2008 MTV Europe Music Awards live over the web to millions of viewers globally.
Supplied by Garland Partners Ltd (GPL) of the UK, the Niagara Pro allowed fans to watch the 15th annual awards show, hosted November 6 at Liverpool's Echo Arena, on their computers and mobile devices.
Celebrity blogger Perez Hilton hosted the show's live webcast, bringing red carpet interviews with the stars and backstage reports to MTV's multi-platform offering. An estimated 30 million viewers from more than 40 European countries, plus China, India and beyond, tuned in to this year's award show.
Alec Hendry, Director of Digital Media Operations & Development at MTV Networks Europe, said: "Every year something sensational happens at this awards show, and we wanted to ensure our audience could feel that they were part of the action as it occurred.
"Last year, after we asked GPL to assist us in implementing a web streaming solution for the event, we had 3.2 million vide streams and a 35% increase over the previous year on unique visitors to our web site. GPL had suggested we use the Niagara Pro, which was so reliable and easy-to-use that we immediately knew that would be our choice again this year."
At the 2008 MTV Europe Music Awards, GPL worked with ViewCast to assist MTV in covering the show's dynamic performances and award presentations with two Niagara Pro units. Throughout the evening, the Niagara Pro media encoders provided professional-quality live streaming of Adobe Flash and Windows Media Player 9 content, which in turn were delivered to Akamai for live streaming on: www.mtvema.com.
Dave Stoner, ViewCast President and CEO, said: "The MTV Europe Music Awards has been an exceedingly popular television event, and fans around the globe have quickly embraced the opportunity to view it live on their computers and handheld devices via live streaming technology.
"We're pleased that for the past two years Niagara Pro encoders have enabled global audiences to not only watch the live star-studded event in real time, but to interact with the MTV Europe web-site and vote for the awards."
Stoner added: "Streaming of an increasing number of high-profile events, such as the MTV awards, reflects the growing use of this digital medium not only to reach huge audiences but also to generate advertising revenue for broadcasters and content owners. And, because of the high-performance needs of this segment of the digital media industry, our professional-grade Niagara encoders are becoming more widely adopted into their communications networks as a cost-effective enabling technology."
The Niagara Pro dual-channel encoder is a professional rack-mountable streaming media appliance capable of delivering two channels of full D1 high-quality streaming video.
ViewCast's SimulStream technology enables simultaneous streaming of multiple resolutions at multiple data rates in multiple streaming formats. The Niagara Pro's three preprogrammable "A-B-C" buttons allow users to execute predefined encoding profiles simply by pressing a single button on the encoder's front panel.
More information about ViewCast video streaming solutions is available at: www.viewcast.com.
(KMcA)