“[Since April] we’ve been tolerant, patient and inventive,” said Dan Castles, CEO and President of Telestream, adding that the COVID-19 virus has hit home for the company, as three of its employees—two in the U.S. and one in Germany—had been affected but recovered.

Despite this, Castles said Telestream is still profitable and growing.

“We are a company of many moving pieces. Some are up [in revenue] and some are down,” he said. “The focus now is on helping our customers with processing workflows for remote working and disaster recovery.”

At the company’s virtual IBC press briefing, Telestream announced a remote working initiative targeted at media professionals working on live and file-based production and post-production workflows. This includes editors, post-production engineering and operations, production engineers and technicians. Customers also include video quality assurance personnel working at content producers and engineering/operations personnel working for linear and OTT distribution companies.

“We have done our homework during lockdown,” said Scott Murray, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Telestream, while introducing the latest features for a number of its products.

GLIM is a new product, introduced by Telestream in July that’s designed for ingest QC, engineering, master control, news, post-production, and more.  The technology enables media professionals to play full resolution, mezzanine grade media files from their centralized storage over the Internet in a web browser.

Telestream’s PRISM waveform monitor can provide both SDI and IP-based Waveform Monitoring tools required in operations, compliance, quality control and post-production workflows up to 8K resolution. The PRISM user interface and API are remotely accessible, enabling remote work and social distancing production environments, which are especially relevant in the current pandemic.

Murray said that the PRISM user interface can be accessed remotely for testing, so in today’s COVID-restricted world, projects can be kept on track by remote socially distanced staff.

IQ Video Quality Assurance monitoring helps operators find and fix faults fast, even while staff work remotely. OTT services and bandwidth have experienced explosive growth during the pandemic, often straining parts of the network. Operators who have deployed IQ monitoring systems can ensure highest quality operation even during the surge in demand. All of this is done remote from the monitoring points and collected onto a central management system for rapid issue discovery, isolation, and resolution. 

The Vantage Media Processing Platform offers several options for remote working from simple remote login to fully hosted, cloud-based workflows. Using Vantage Cloud Port and the Cloud Port Designer, entire Vantage workflows can be hosted in the cloud without needing any Vantage systems running on premises. This technique can be used for remote access to powerful Vantage workflows and can be part of a disaster recovery plan since the workflows are running in the cloud and are not susceptible to events preventing access to on-prem equipment.

Murray said that in 2020 remote working is being driven by external forces, such as COVID-19, new production tools from basic to sophisticated, and new policies and processes which encompass remote working and disaster recovery for media companies of all sizes and scales.

“Many companies in this industry will be stronger because we’ve adapted to the conditions as they are forced upon us,” Castles said. “Here at Telestream we’re going to continue to be aggressive, not passive. What our customers are doing with our technology [under such challenging conditions] is inspirational.”