Feature Story News (FSN) is the world’s leading independent broadcast news agency. FSN produces global news stories and customized live reports from more than 20 bureaus and studios across Europe, Africa and the Americas, providing its clients with a steady stream of timely and compelling news features without its clients incurring the high cost of opening and maintaining their own overseas bureaus. The agency’s clients are located all over the world and include Channel News Asia, CCTV News, SABC and ENCA of South Africa, Televisa of Mexico, France 24, PBS NewsHour, Al Jazeera, Fox News, Radio New Zealand, Vatican Radio, LBC Radio, and Classic FM. Utilizing the bandwidth efficiencies of streaming technology, the agency can deliver comprehensive coverage of breaking news and events worldwide, including, most recently, live streaming footage of President Barack Obama’s monumental visit to Cuba.
After evaluating the market for solutions that would offer the HD broadcast resolution but with less bandwidth and minimal latency, FSN determined VITEC’S MGW Ace hardware encoder and MGW D265 decoder offered the best-in-class features for its global news team. The MGW Ace — the world’s first portable HEVC (H.265) hardware encoder — takes the benefits of HEVC encoding out of the server room and into the field by integrating a high-quality, low-delay hardware codec into a professional appliance, reducing operating expenses and extending the reach of video services to remote destinations with bandwidth constraints. With built-in Pro-MPEG forward error correction and Zixi error correction technologies, the solution enabled the news agency to deliver secure, error-free video on dedicated and public networks while dramatically reducing bandwidth requirements compared to its legacy H.264 system.
Complementing the MGW Ace is the MGW D265, a high-performance IP decoding appliance with a compact footprint, best-in-class connectivity options, and low-delay processing. MGW D265 uses advanced hardware to deliver a real-time, broadcast-quality picture with the highest quality of service and resilience required in complex IPTV and full-motion-video environments, such as the President’s visit to Cuba.
With the VITEC MGW Ace and MGW D265 solution, FSN’s news team was able to make history from Cuba, transmitting the first ever HD broadcast signals from the island over the public internet. Two flawless live paths from Havana fed material to FSN’s MCR in Washington DC, and to the MCRs of its clients worldwide. With Ace’s field-proven H.265 compression and streaming technology the news agency has a reliable and simple-to-use platform to report and transmit breaking news in the field. The solution furthers FSN’s service offerings by reducing its operational costs and by delivering error-free, low-latency high-quality broadcast footage any where in the world.
last edited on: Thursday, September 17, 2020
