News-Bureau-for-Hire A2P Studios Gets Those Live Interviews for Broadcasters With Help from Telairity Encoding

OAKLAND, Calif., Jan. 12, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Engineer/videographer Jay Williams can almost hear the frenetic crowds at nearby Oracle Arena cheering on the Golden State Warriors in their record-shattering 2015 NBA run. But he's usually too busy feeding live on-camera interviews to CNN, NBC and Fox from San Francisco and Silicon Valley personalities to revel in the team's victories.

William's A2P Studios provides a unique Bay Area service to TV broadcasters here and abroad with the help of Telairity's next-generation BE8600 HD/SD encoder. "I needed an industry-standard encoder that could support the live broadcast-quality feeds that A2P provides," he said. "My network clients call on A2P when they need a live on-camera feed-out from a Bay Area newsmaker, business leader, sports figure, celebrity, or other person of topical interest. For example, if CNN has a live panel on consumer tech, one of the panelists might well be sitting in our studio—and often is.

"To support these live feeds, I need an absolutely reliable professional low-latency broadcast-quality encoder, backed by a company willing to help a small entrepreneur like myself get up and running. Telairity provided exactly the right product to fit my needs with their small BE8600 contribution encoder, and answered all my questions about how to make it work in the context of my overall live-video-over-IP flow."

Telairity's BE8600 contribution encoder is a versatile HD/SD unit with both 4:2:2 mode for archival use and 4:2:0 low-latency mode for high quality encoding over bandwidth-constrained contribution links or direct-to-viewer transmission over MPEG-4 distribution networks. A small 5 lb. half-width 1RU unit with dual-redundant power supplies for non-stop reliability, the "go anywhere" BE8600 is easy to tuck away anywhere convenient inside a studio like A2P, or fits readily into ENG vehicles of all sizes and types.

A former engineer at local TV stations including KGO, KPIX and KTVU, Williams built his studio to acquire the feed-out interviews when KTVU became a Fox-owned station. The facility has a 20-by-20 studio, and is equipped with a Panasonic HPX-500 P-2 HD/SD camera, 12-channel Yamaha audio mixer and Sennheiser lavalier mics.  Background studio images for interviews are run through a 70-inch HDTV. Interviews typically last eight to ten minutes.

Feed-outs are only the beginning for Williams, who sees live video over the Internet (LVI) as the next major shift in TV production. "Live Internet video is already attracting millions of viewers to a variety of subjects," he said. "Sophisticated viewers want the same quality productions from Internet video that they get from TV set productions. That's where A2P Studios and others like us come in. We provide the affordable professional broadcast-quality studio production equipment with industry-standard real-time encoding to make quality pictures available for any form of production."

According to Harlan McGhan, Telairity vice president of marketing and sales, news bureau for hire operations like A2P studios are only one corner of an exploding market for Live Video over the Internet (LVI). Using affordable low-maintenance technology like Telairity's BE8600 encoder, backed by Telairity's support, studio productions, music shows, live theater, church services, medical procedures and corporate meetings can all go LVI affordably.

"A2P studios is just the tip of the LVI iceberg. We encourage anyone interested in providing broadcast-quality live video over the Internet to give us a call."

SOURCE Telairity