Multiple Sclerosis expert streamed worldwide An e-cast produced video featuring international multiple sclerosis expert Professor George Jelinek continues to attract a strong online viewership. The lecture ‘Taking Control of Multiple Sclerosis’ was live-streamed by e-cast from the Auckland MS Society’s headquarters on August 30 2009 and then turned into a Video on Demand on the Society’s website www.msakl.org.nz/ The video has now been viewed thousands of time and demand has been particularly heavy in New Zealand, Australia, United States and United Kingdom. Professor Jelinek is a strong advocate of the role diet, exercise and Vitamin D have in the management of MS and his inspirational lecture continues to provide advice and encouragement to people with MS and their support networks. e-cast live streams Big Day Out 2010 Auckland's Big Day Out streams live on the C4 website on Friday 15 January 2010 http://www.c4tv.co.nz sponsored by Telecom with streaming services provided by e-cast. C4's Non-Stop Gig in December also sponsored by Telecom attracted more than three thousand viewers to the live stream online - peaking between midnight and one in the morning! Thousands of New Zealanders are now choosing to watch local special event coverage on the internet using facilities provided by e-cast Limited. Nearly 24 thousand internet viewers have watched the Greenpeace "Sign On" Concert for Climate Change from Myers Park in Auckland on the Ziln online television service since December - including both live and delayed viewers. New Zealand film showcases the future of cinema Press Release: Summit Pictures Limited Note: Embargoed until 9am Thursday 1 October At 12.01am on Friday 2 October 2009, independent film 'When Night Falls' will be the first Kiwi movie ever available as a 'pay-per-view/pay-per-download' film. It is being released 'on demand' through the newly-formed Ziln television and cinema network (www.ziln.co.nz). Ziln offers film-makers the technology to stream their films at DVD quality over current New Zealand broadband standards – as well as allowing film downloads and DVD sales from the website. This historic launch paves the way for New Zealanders to see and purchase films whenever and however they like. It is a first glimpse into the future of cinema in this country. The new distribution channel changes the entire cinema retail experience. The public could well be able to watch the cinematic release of a film and afterwards download the film or buy the DVD. For film-makers, this low cost distribution option gives independent films a competitive advantage. The Director of 'When Night Falls', Alex Galvin says, “This format will not only enable films to be released, but will also help them to make money from instant downloads and DVD sales. This can be used to invest in future projects. For most independent films, money is made from the retail release, not the cinematic release. This is a whole new approach to film distribution.” 'When Night Falls', a suspenseful thriller, had a successful cinematic release in late 2007. However, like many independent films, recent economic pressures made it difficult for the film to get into retailers. That environment changes this Friday. As a direct result of the Ziln release, retailers are coming on board to sell the 'When Night Falls' DVD and a North American distribution deal has been secured. This historic launch will be supplemented by a special online Question and Answer session with the film's Director. This will be streamed live on Ziln. TelstraClear is also giving away 100 'buys' of the film, see the TelstraClear facebook page or TelstraClearNZ on twitter for more details. The future of New Zealand cinema has arrived and you can be one of the first to experience it. WHAT: 'When Night Falls' online launch WHEN: Friday 2 October (from midnight) WHERE: www.ziln.co.nz EXTRA: Live online Question and Answer, Wednesday 7 October, 7.30pm Film trailer and photographs available. Media Contacts: Alex Galvin (Director, Writer, Producer) - 021 297 4011 James Partridge (Executive Producer) - 021 925 252 'When Night Falls' - www.whennightfalls.co.nz Ziln Press Release August 2009 TelstraClear joins forces with e-Cast and NetsideTV to introduce New Zealand’s first free internet TV network; ‘Ziln’. Ziln is the very New Zealand name of the new service that is set to change the face of television broadcasting in this country. The combined production and video streaming platform technology of e-cast and Netside TV, has led to the launch of Ziln on Friday 28th August. Launching with a strong line-up of live multi-language international news, business and current affairs channels: Alzajeera Bloomberg BVN, Holland CCTV 9, China Channel News Asia, Singapore DWTV, Germany Euronews TV5 Monde, France RTP Portugal Russia Today Stratos, NZ TVE, Spain Voice of America, USA Zee News, India Ziln has been developed as a quality internet View-on-Demand (VOD) broadcast option to attract mainstream TV audiences and to meet the pent-up demand for local low-cost entry ‘micro broadcasters’ and New Zealand niche content producers to capture specialist audience tastes and lifestyles which don’t get picked up by the major TV networks and traditional terrestrial broadcast. Ziln will bring to the screen virtually any topic with a committed following and will feature VOD channels such as: AirsideTV, dedicated to aviation Archives New Zealand, rarely seen historic NZ footage Car Torque, dedicated to all things automotive ex-stream.tv, NZ’s first online sports channel HotScience, research, discovery and innovation The Shopping Channel, online shopping with product videos TrendsTV, contemporary design and interiors And as another Kiwi first, Ziln's On-line Film Festival from launch day will allow Kiwis to watch a retrospective Festival of classic Kiwi movies, as well as a potpourri of rarely released documentaries, short films, experimental video, music videos and popular culture. Angel Mine - 1978 Rating R18 - Fri, Aug 28 Goodbye Pork Pie - 1981 Rating - PG - Sat, Aug 29 Utu - 1983 Rating PG - Sun, Aug 30 Death Warmed Up - 1984 Rating R16 - Fri, Sept 4 Constance - 1984 Rating PG - Sat, Sept 5 Mr Wrong - 1985 Rating M - Sun Sept 6 Silvia - 1985 Rating PG - Fri, Sept 11 Ngati - 1987 Rating PG - Sat, Sept 12 Desperate Remedies - 1993 Rating M - Sun, Sept 13 Rain - 2001 Rating M - Fri, Sept 18 1 Nite – 2004 Rating M - Sat, Sept 19, When Night Falls - 2007 Rating M - Sun, Sept 20 “TelstraClear considers that presenting this quality, free concept to its broadband customers is important to enable our customers to take advantage of exceptional performance our broadband network, particularly in Wellington and Christchurch.” says TelstraClear’s Jeff Doyle. Free to view for anyone with a broadband connection, Ziln extends a high quality viewing experience to viewers by streaming content from its specialist Auckland servers automatically at bit rates from 128kbps to television quality 768 kbps. Ziln adapts the "You Tube" and "Flash" internet video experience for New Zealand’s diverse multi-ethnic audiences with a unique mix of local and international content. Ziln… watch this space … www.ziln.co.nz Contact: Gresham Bradley| gresham@ziln.co.nz | 09-300-6888 Paul Brennan | paul@ziln.co.nz | (04) 5627404
Educational TV content now available for research Canterbury University staff and students can now access television content from more than 30 domestic and international channels for research. The University’s Library has subscribed to e-cast education, an online teaching and learning resource which provides access to recorded programmes and live broadcast streams. Humanities Information Librarian Dave Clemens said UC was the first New Zealand university to sign up for the service, which he likened to “channel surfing on KAREN”. Some departments do their own off-air recording but e-cast offers a pool of resources on one website. It’s one of the things I like about it — it’s a shared collection of pre-recorded material that all subscribers can add to, creating a library of resources that everyone can access.
e-cast education is also accessible via the KAREN network and those registered as KAREN users, including students with approval from their head of department, would not be charged for e-cast traffic. Staff can download and use content for UC educational purposes and access e-cast’s live-stream content. Staff can also request that e-cast record a broadcast and add it to its archives. Students can only access the live-stream content. Mr Clemens said the University’s subscription to e-cast was a joint initiative between the Library, Information and Communication Technology Services, and Dr Vladimir Mencl, E-Research Services and Systems Consultant, BlueFern Supercomputing Services, who helped set up the University’s connection to the website. To log onto e-cast go to http://www.e-cast.co.nz/education/uoc_login. For more information on how to use e-cast, email dave.clemens@canterbury.ac.nz.
How will technology change the way we live and learn? RNZ's Sean Plunket to host on-line live debate. Join in! Date: Tuesday 31 March 2009 Time: 7:30pm Venue: www.thinktech.co.nz People are invited to register on Tuesday 31, March on the new site - 'Think Tech'. www.thinktech.co.nz    Once registered you will be able to take part in the debate. All New Zealanders, whether registered or not, will be able to view the debate live by visiting the site. Leading New Zealanders will debate live on-line, the effects of technology on education and society twenty years from today. For the first time, people across New Zealand will be able to listen to a policy debate on-line and send in their comments and questions for the panel in real time. Radio New Zealand's Sean Plunket will facilitate the debate, which will be held at Te Papa. The eight panelists are: – Seddon Bennington (CEO Te Papa) – Maria English (Student and award winning debater) – Oscar Kightley (Entertainer, writer and commentator) – Bernice Mene (Secondary Futures 'Guardian' and former Silver Ferns captain) – Luke Nola (Producer of TVNZ 'Let's Get Inventing') – Richie Poulton (Director, Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Research Unit at Otago University at Otago University) – Antony Royal (IT entrepreneur and business leader) – Kevin Norquay (Senior journalist with NZPA) Professor Paul Callaghan from Victoria University introduces the 'Think Tech' site via video. Panelists will look at what sorts of new technologies, in ICTs, nano-technologies, or bio-technologies, are likely to emerge in the future, and the effects these could have on our society and on our education systems. Are we prepared for this future? Are we equipping New Zealand children to succeed in the future? Are we scared or excited about this? What do we need to do today to be ready? The debate will launch 'Think Tech' which is a web site set up by Secondary Futures (an education think tank), and built by e-cast. People interested in technology can continue to talk to people interested in education, and New Zealanders from all sectors will be encouraged to share their views on the place of technology in the future of education in the days and weeks ahead; by contributing their own film clips, uploading resources, holding meetings and discussions. For more information: www.secondaryfutures.co.nz or www.e-cast.co.nz Josie Pagani: josie@sugarmedia.tv M. 029 9050207 Click here to find out more. You can instantly unsubscribe from these emails by clicking the link below: http://email.campaignhq.co.nz/t/r/u/tlsji/xtlidiki/
New e-cast Shop goes live Mar 09 e-cast has launched its new online media shop with a completely new look and features that make it easy to find and purchase television and video programmes from a growing line up of New Zealand producers. The e-cast Shop offers a fully online experience for customers to find and buy a wide range of top quality content. All of the Shop videos are available for downloading direct to PC’s and traditional DVD ordering is available for selected programmes. Unlike most online video stores, the e-cast Shop provides a unique Preview before you buy service and offers features such as easy to use Browse and Search tools to quickly find programmes of interest, many of which have never been made available for public purchase before. Click here to go to the e-cast shop.
Taking our films directly to New Zealand schools A contract which will take films preserved by Archives New Zealand to schools throughout New Zealand has just been signed by Chief Archivist Dianne Macaskill and Gresham Bradley, Director Online Development e-cast Limited. Gresham Bradley and Dianne Macaskill sign the contract, watched by from left to right, Brendon King, Business Development e-cast Ltd, David Smith, Senior Adviser, Audio-Visual Records, Archives New Zealand, Mark Everton, Director of Production, e-cast Ltd, Alan Ferris, Access Development and Operations Manager, Archives New Zealand and Alicia Wright, Group Manager Access and Regional Services, Archives New Zealand.
A large selection of films produced by the New Zealand National Film Unit will now be distributed by e-cast Education free of charge to New Zealand primary, intermediate and secondary schools and tertiary institutions for educational purposes. Established to publicise New Zealand's participation and achievements during World War Two the National Film Unit expanded from producing weekly newsreels to making documentaries and films to the order of government departments.
Now students will be able to access many of those films online. The service is not limited to viewing. Students will be able to download clips and use them in their own projects. e-cast Limited is New Zealand’s premier video streaming and hosting service. The company delivers high quality content directly to schools and is the perfect conduit to link students to the wealth of historical moving image content preserved by Archives New Zealand. The new service is set to begin in a few months and new content and services will be added on an ongoing basis.
e-cast Documentary and Series become a Book! The e-cast television documentary ‘Beyond the Farm and the Theme Park’ and series ‘Paul Callaghan Presents’ have now been turned into the book “Wool to Weta - ‘Transforming New Zealand's Culture and Economy’ published by Auckland University Press Much of the book’s content comes from interviews Paul conducted with New Zealand science and business leaders during the production of the documentary and his lecture tour promoting his vision of New Zealand’s future prosperity. The book was launched at a function at Parliament on March 11th hosted by Hon Jim Anderton who gave a powerful and timely speech backing science, research and technology as the ways New Zealand can lift itself out
e-cast directors Gresham Bradley and Mark Everton were present at the book launch and grabbed a photo opportunity with the man of the moment.
The collaboration between Paul and e-cast shows the strength of such multi-media initiatives and the development path is interesting. Initially e-cast was contracted to live stream Paul’s Beyond the Farm and the Theme Park lecture tour and provide Video on Demand of the lecture. Then, encouraged by Glenda Lewis from The Royal Society of New Zealand, e-cast and Paul decided to action Paul’s “Al Gore doco” vision – resulting in the Beyond the Farm and the Theme Park documentary available online, on DVD and broadcast on TVNZ 7 (and soon to be on TVOne).
The full interviews conducted during the lecture tour were compiled into the 11-part series ‘Paul Callaghan Presents’ for online distribution and broadcast on Stratos. Now the whole enterprise, with additional interview content, has reached the printed page. This coincides with online and DVD distribution of the documentary giving considerable traction to Paul’s vision with the result of him being asked to deliver keynote speeches to several business and manufacturing conferences throughout 2009.

Something finally to sing about in Song's release
[Headstrong press release – Wednesday 25 Feb – 459 words]

Chaos ensued after Gregory King's award winning feature film A SONG OF GOOD streamed free on the internet to the New Zealand public a week ago. The online experiment, a first of its kind for New Zealand, was highly successful.

Initial estimates of 500 viewers, were exceeded after reports on Close-Up, TV One News and Sunrise drove 2500 people to their computers to watch the acclaimed feature. Local content delivery company, e-cast's Gresham Bradley said the result was "fantastic and an exciting preview of things to come".

Unfortunately for producers, a miscommunication between the New Zealand distributor (Rialto) and the sub-distributor (Vendetta) resulted in the film being pulled from release the morning after the streaming.

Vendetta's Jill Macnab released a statement to all retailers intending to stock the film, "We were not made aware of the free streaming and understand fully the threat this poses to you, our customers. Therefore we have made the decision to cancel the release of the DVD as we do not think it is fair to supply you with a product which is legally available for free in the marketplace already. We will be cancelling all orders of this movie."

Luckily many others in the industry saw the enormous value of the online promotion and the resultant media coverage. First up to the support the film were movie champions Video Ezy who boosted their initial order by 500%. Then other believers (JB Hifi, Warehouse and Fatso) joined suit, much to the relief of filmmakers and producers. Rialto's Distribution Manager Karen Cartwright is shocked by the reversal of fortune, happily exclaiming "the stock intended to cope with demand has run out already!"

The film is finally being released to DVD today, Wednesday Feb 25th.

Exec Producer Ant Timpson is reflective after the roller-coaster week, "In the end, the film will be enjoying a much larger DVD release, which at the end of the day is all that counts. It should enjoy a long life as its topical subject matter makes it compelling viewing in these turbulent times. I completely understand Vendetta's initial reaction and I hope they understand that all parties had the best of intentions with this successful experiment."

A SONG OF GOOD is the story of 28-year-old Gary Cradle’s struggle for redemption after committing an horrific crime.

The film stars Gareth Reeves, Danielle Cormack, Ian Mune and Matthew Sunderland. The film was invited to Rotterdam Film Festival for its World Premiere and also won Best Film* at the New Zealand Film and Television Awards.

This online screening was made possible by the good folks at Headstrong, Robbers Dog, New Zealand Film Commission, Rialto Distribution, Cactus Lab, e-cast and of course the film gurus at Flicks.co.nz

 

Kereru Discovery Project goes live Dec 08
Working with Te Papa and Victoria University of Wellington's Kererü team who are conducting important research into the behaviour of kererü, e-cast completely revamped the Kererü Discovery Project website to make it livelier, more interactive and richer in resources.

e-cast built in new features including the ability for visitors to upload and view video clips, access resources and interact with other people who are interested in building a future for New Zealand's iconic and beautiful native pigeon. The site now has more resources: photos, useful links and information about kererü and our natural environment.

We also expanded and improved the way data is collected and then reported from the site's Registered member "Sighters" and then reported to the VUW research team.

http://www.kererudiscovery.org.nz/

 

PlanetFM - Planetaudio goes live Nov 08
e-cast designed and developed this innovative website for Auckland's PlanetFM radio station.

Capturing weekly programmes in over 60 different languages directly from the broadcast transmission, the site offers listeners from throughout NZ and around the world on demand listening both live and recordings of each broadcast programme.

An archive service gives listeners access by their language to these recordings along with a large library of other programmes of importance and interest to New Zealand's diverse ethnic communities.

http://www.planetaudio.org.nz/

High Performance Sport NZ goes live Nov 08
The e-cast designed and built site for High Performance New Zealand has begun building a new online community dedicated to expanding the knowledge base of New Zealand sport by giving sports professionals easy access to information, innovation and support.

www.highperformancesport.co.nz offers a secure environment in which sports can create their own individual spaces while taking advantage of the resources and functionality of the whole site. Members are able to log on to live coaching and sports science seminars (and participate through live chat), upload and share their own videos on HPTube and absorb a whole raft of material in areas such as medical support, coaching practise, nutrition, recovery and performance psychology.  

 

New e-cast Documentary premieres on TVNZ 7 - November 2008
“Beyond the Farm and the Theme Park” presented by internationally renowned physicist Professor Paul Callaghan, premieres on TVNZ 7 on Tues Nov 4th at 9.10pm.

The documentary, produced by e-cast in association with the MacDiarmid Institute, will be repeated on Wed Nov 5th at 12.10pm, Thurs Nov 6th at 9.10pm and Fri Nov 7th at 12.10pm.

It is also freely available for streaming and downloading from the e-cast HotScience site. http://www.hotscience.co.nz/video_detail.php?videoid=169

The documentary presents Paul’s vision of New Zealand’s economic future – a vision beyond reliance on farming and tourism to greater emphasis on science and technology to create high value high-tech exports.

“Beyond the Farm and the Theme Park” follows Paul on a lecture tour promoting his vision during which he visits the high-tech companies he champions and interviews business leaders, financiers, scientists and commentators.

 

e-cast Live Streams Armageddon 08 from Aotea Centre - 25 to 27 October 2008
e-cast and TelstraClear joined forces over Labour Weekend to live stream three days of the pulp culture expo Armageddon 08 from Auckland’s Aotea Centre.

All together, 27 hours of content was streamed on www.clearnet.co.nz including roaming reporters in the thick of the action and live studio interviews with film stars Margot Kidder, (Superman), Doug Jones (Hell Boy), Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters), TV stars Andee Frizzell, David Hewlett, Kavan Smith (Stargate Atlantis), Gary Jones (Stargate SG-1), comic book creator Jim Lee, voice actors Crispin Freeman, Michelle Ruff, Grey Delisle and Dave Wittenberg.

Other highlights were two fascinating interviews with key people at Weta Workshop – designer/sculptor Greg Broadmore and designer Daniel Falconer – who provided unique behind-the-scenes perspectives on the production of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong.

Videos from the e-cast/TelstraClear coverage of Armageddon 08 are now available by following the links at www.clearnet.co.nz

Zip and Mac - July, 2008.
Interactive website introducing children to the Alphabet through this innovative animation series for children?fs educational television.
http://www.zipandmac.co.nz

e-cast installs Flash Media Interactive Server to match advances in video delivery technology
8th May, 2008.

The Flash Media Interactive Server utilises the very latest technology from Adobe to provide both video streaming of Flash video files and also MPEG-4 files encoded using the H.264 video codec. Our Flash Media Server uses the latest RTMP and RTMPS technology to deliver secure video streams intelligently. It is capable of negotiating firewalls that might otherwise block streams, and features automatic bandwidth detection to monitor individual user connection speeds and make dynamic changes to the way video is delivered to them. 

The e-cast server can deliver Live streams using the latest version of Flash Media Encoder as well as View on Demand streaming. The server is also capable of hosting interactive material such as webcams, voice over IP and games for a variety of media rich social applications.

More than 96% of the world’s computers already have Flash Player installed and Flash video is currently the most ubiquitous video format for personal computers. The recent release of the Adobe Media Player means Flash video will become one of the most widely used video formats in the computing world and will open up a whole new method of delivering truly interactive video content to viewers. The rapid development of HD technology will also see an increase in the delivery of MPEG-4 HD video as network speeds improve to accommodate extra bandwidth.

The e-cast Flash Media Interactive Server software is running on an Apple X-Serve with 64-bit Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors allowing seamless integration to our existing X-SAN RAID storage volumes through our high-speed fibre channel network.

Email us now at info@e-cast.co.nz or call on (64) 9 300 6890 to discuss how the e-cast Flash Media Interactive Server can work for you.

The Innovative e-cast "Safe Sex Poster Boy Website" featured in 'express' Newspaper 21st November 2007 Click here

Documentary Premiere

“SuperPlasticsMan”
The Alan MacDiarmid Story
Premieres in Association with Royal Society of NZ
James Cook Fellows
Wellington 7 August 2007
Auckland 12 September 2007

Then view on Hot Science – http://www.hotscience.co.nz

“SuperPlasticsMan” is a 43-minute video documentary that celebrates the life and work of Professor Alan MacDiarmid, the international man of science instrumental in the discovery of conductive polymers – plastics that can conduct electricity just like metals. In fact, Alan is known as the “father of synthetic metals”  - the building blocks of the 21st century revolution in consumer electronics, renewable energy, molecular electronics and nanotechnology.

The documentary traces Alan MacDiarmid’s life from his boyhood in Depression-era New Zealand to his work overseas, notably at the University of Pennsylvania, and his winning of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 with his colleagues Alan Heegar and Hideki Shirakawa, It includes interviews with family, friends and colleagues as well as rare footage shot during Alan’s tour of New Zealand in 2001 during which he strongly pushed for increased scientific literacy and investment in science and technology.

“SuperPlasticsMan” is presented by Professor Paul Callaghan, director of the MacDiarmid Institute of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology in New Zealand.

Produced by e-net limited, the producers of www.hotscience.co.nz

 

Global TV streamed to your school with launch of e-cast education
Matt Freeman
m-net – ICT business news and information
Thursday, 23 August 2007

An exciting new media service is now available to New Zealand schools and tertiary institutions.
e-cast education is a media aggregator and distributor that specialises in educational video and TV delivery to schools using the internet.
The service was launched on July 31.

Auckland-based e-cast limited was formed in 1999 and has been pioneering digital TV in New Zealand with its e-net production company. e-cast has a solid pedigree in developing multimedia education science. One of its websites, Hotscience.co.nz, won a Qantas media award for best feature website.

The directors of e-cast, who boast a wealth of experience in new media, television and educational programme delivery, include Brian Oliver, Gresham Bradley and Robert Boyd-Bell. "Our objective is to be the premium video streaming service in the country," says Boyd-Bell.

e-cast education offers four distinct products:
Ready To Watch - Off-air recordings of television programmes of educational value from national and international channels under the terms of the NZ Copyright Act 1994 and the Screenrights Licencing scheme

Live Streams - Sixteen live television channels and live video streams of events specifically relevant to education. Channels include French and German language channels, all received over satellite and streamed out.

The Library - An online archive of videos available at no direct cost to educational users.

The e-cast education Shop - Television and Video programmes available for purchase at pricing levels set by the rights holder. Programmes are purchased through a secure online payment system and are delivered either by high quality downloads or as DVD discs.

The service has been built to accommodate all flavours of bandwidth, with the service available for dial-up speeds and above. The view-on-demand service is currently offered at 56 Kbps, 256 Kbps and 512 Kbps. The download service is offered at 512 Kbps and 768 Kbps. The company plans to offer 1Mbps for the download service in the future and may look at this for view-on-demand too. "As connectivity improves we can offer faster speeds to schools," says Oliver.

When prompted about their competitors, Oliver says schools could do aspects of it themselves with say a DVD recorder or VCR, but the channels e-cast is receiving over satellite, such as the language channels, could only be done with a satellite receiver.

Schools are offered a free one-month trial of the service. To join, they pay a one-off entry fee of up to $500 per school depending on size. A number of subscription models then exist. Schools can either pay a per student per annum subscription rate of $4 or $10 per download.

One of the highlights of the service is schools don't have to wait for a frustrating buffering period or progressive download; everything is streamed thanks to some smart technology. The streaming and on-demand files sit on a separate streaming server, which uses hinted track, that allows the user to move to any place within a video file without having to wait for a download.

The technical solution at e-cast's Airedale St office boasts some pretty neat devices. In particular is the satellite receiving kit.

The heart of the off-air Ready-to-Watch section is a Kramer VS-162AVRCA 16 x 16 AV switcher. This is fed from six Winersat WDM-200L rack-mounted terrestrial receivers and twelve Traxis DBS2800 rack-mounted satellite receivers, providing reception of local and international television channels. An array of roof-top terrestrial and satellite antennas feed the receivers.

The output of the switcher drives a bank of Apple Xserve G5 Cluster Nodes ingest units through Firewire DV Converters with multiple bit-rates being generated by Wirecast software. These ingest units are coupled to an XSAN storage solution using two Apple Xserve RAID units configured as RAID5+0 with a hot spare module per controller.

An Apple PowerMac G5 workstation fitted out with a Quartz Extreme-capable CTO ATI Radeon X850XT GPU card gives multiple outputs using Wirecast encoding software.

The underlying service architecture has been in development in-house for 18 months. The programming language is written in PHP and Flash, the database is MySQL. The back end multi-channel recording application is written in Applescript.

Two Apple Xserve G5 Cluster Node units acts as streaming video servers offering true QuickTime streaming for the on-demand videos. Two Xserve G5 Dual Processor units act as Web Servers hosting web pages and downloadable video files.

Connection to the Internet is through a 1GB fibre cable direct to the Auckland Peering Exchange and supplemented by a 100MB connection through ICONZ.

 

HotScience Wins Website Award
18 May 2007

‘HotScience’ is planning to deliver an on-line Live Science Television Channel on the e-cast service as a world-leading development this year.  It’s the first major upgrade planned for the innovative ‘HotScience’ website that won the inaugural Feature Website category in this year's Qantas Media Awards.

‘HotScience’ is hosted and distributed by e-cast Limited for our associate company e-net Limited which designed, built and managed the site funded initially by a grant from the Science & Technology Promotions Fund (MORST). First launched in May 2006, HotScience is now home to more than 100 videos featuring New Zealand scientists and science stories.  In its first year, the site has attracted 3.8 million hits and 19,000 visitors with more than 5,000 videos downloaded or viewed. 70% of visits to the site are from within New Zealand.

The HotScience site currently has three main sections where videos can be freely viewed or downloaded by viewers from all around the world:

The ‘Freemason’s Big Science Adventures Competition’ is run in collaboration with The Royal Society of New Zealand and attracts entries from secondary schools all over the country. The winning and finalist videos from the 2007 Competition are now posted.

The ‘HotScience Videos’ section features custom-made profiles of NZ scientists explaining their research from The MacDiarmid Institute, The University of Otago, Lincoln University and the Ministry of Fisheries, with more in pre-production planning.

The ‘Extra Science Videos’ is a growing collection including the e=mc2 video series produced by e-net, NASA Connect videos and many other resources.

Later this year ‘HotScience TV’ will be launched on the e-cast service as a live on-line science television channel running 24 hours a day. With the support of The MacDiarmid Institute, additional enhancements will enable HotScience to offer valuable text, graphic and interactive support information for selected videos.

This Premium Quality Video website is hosted by e-cast Limited, New Zealand's specialist provider of Internet-based video hosting, streaming and IPTV television services.

Contact: Gresham Bradley, Director of Business Development, e-cast Limited Ph. +64 9 300 6888 | Mob. +64 21 473 741