From a distance

Telestream is a company that proposes the sending and receiving of videos as if they were emails. It reaches more than acceptable qualities and becomes an economical alternative to satellite transmissions.

Networks are, are becoming cheaper and tend to be secure and easy to use. Why not use them to deliver video and audio remotely? From this premise came the company Telestream, a pioneer in a genre that has more and more players.

Basically, the company proposes Clip, a hardware that allows you to send video through a network cable, either by an internet connection or by a corporate network, regardless of bandwidth. It works in the stand alone format (i.e. you don't need an additional computer) and has its own operating system (whose name is VXWorks) and hard drive.

It works with standard formats (MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encodes) and has a wide range of compression levels, allowing you to send from a sample in very low quality to enough to check a material or develop a master' degree. Specifically, the compression ranges from 1.5 MB to 50 MB.

Capturing the video can be done from almost any source. It is possible to broadcast in PAL and NTSC and offers the flexibility that the receiver can download it in the standard of its choice, independent of the source standard. Allows recording to virtually any tape or disk storage format. It offers professional inputs and outputs: SDI, analog components, composite, S-Video, analog audio and AES/EBU, among others. The equipment is approximately 45 by 48 centimeters and is 8 centimeters tall. Its weight is barely close to 9 kilograms.

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This technology is a cheaper and simpler alternative to satellite transmissions and much more agile and secure than sending cassettes or other physical devices through couriers.

You have an e-video
The basic configurations are two: ClipMail Express, the most elementary and simple, which operates with remote control, and ClipMail Pro, the most advanced, which allows you to operate through a touchscreen system.

It was originally intended to generate a viable and economical alternative to the segment of news production, which generates materials physically away from the place of editing. But then it was used for other functions, such as the approval of parts.

Sending video through Telestream solutions is simple and very similar to the scheme followed with email. The video receiver must have a Clip computer with its IP address, which must be known to the sender. A message is built in which a title can be placed, in the best style of the subject of the common email. There is also space to write a message. Then the video is attached. The computer has the ability to send and receive at the same time and can even receive more than one video simultaneously.

Some considerations should be taken into account before purchasing Telestream. The first is that there is no real-time "transmission" of the video between the source and the destination, but the movement of the material is asynchronous and depends on the bandwidth available. Although Clip has no limitations in that sense, the truth is that communication takes much longer if you have a connection of 128 Kbps than if you have a direct link of 2 MB. Of course: as soon as the reception ends, the video is ready to be used.

Another point indicates that the technology proposed by Telestream is very "proprietary", so that in the face of a change in standards in the market or the emergence of new alternatives, the equipment may become obsolete or have difficulties connecting. The cost of the equipment can be another barrier to its rapid deployment in the market: the cheapest model falls into the range of approximately US $ 8000, while some more advanced can climb up to 20,000.

However, the evolution of the networks makes the services proposed by Telestream only the first step of an inevitable evolution.