Viz Reporter brings the mobile evolution to the journalist on the move. Until
now video transfer to the TV station was often a time-consuming process,
involving copying the clips from a camera to a PC, converting them and then
transmitting them, over the Internet or a direct line. Viz Reporter
radically simplifies this workflow. The application allows journalists to
use mobile phones for capturing low-resolution content. The full feature set
of modern phones, from audio recording, to high-resolution pictures and
video recording, can be used from within Viz Reporter. Viz Reporter Servers
automatically transcode and organize the captured content after transfer and
prepare it for playout.
Mobile content capturing
The complete Viz Reporter solution consists of two parts: a client that
resides on the mobile device and a server application. Once installed, the
mobile client takes control of the phone’s multimedia hardware, allowing
video capturing from within the application.
To standardize and organize the content, the client supports predefined
templates that the end-user has to fill in before the material is sent. In
these templates, the recipient can configure necessary and optional
descriptions. The sender can then add metadata like keywords, location or
subject to video clips and images before they are sent from the mobile phone
to the Viz Reporter server. This ensures that there is always enough meta
information attached to the submitted content for a future search in Media
Asset Management solutions.
Content can be transferred using either a Java application or the phone’s own
browser.
Controlling the mobile clients
Viz Reporter Server communicates with the back-end systems and controls all
clients in the field. It is also responsible for transferring received
material to a Media Asset Management system like Viz Video Hub or Viz
Ardome.
The server supports several hundreds or even thousands of clients, and the
number of parallel incoming streams is only limited by the number of servers
used.
The application server has four major tasks: it distributes the client
application to the respective end-user devices and collects the content sent
from individual mobile phones. The server receives incoming requests from
all connected clients and processes this content on the server-side,
preparing it for review or playout.
Dual server setup
Viz Reporter Server consists of two applications with dedicated tasks: The
Application Server receives the data from the different clients, indexes it,
prepares a preview, and then exports the content to the system requesting
it.
The Encoding Server encodes the content to DV25 before it is exported.
Server administration
On Viz Reporter Server, all captured content will be listed and presented for
review. The content can be deleted or forwarded/ exported to an external
system. For storage and management of the ingested content, Viz Reporter
supports the Vizrt range of Media Asset Management solutions. Viz Video Hub
and Viz Ardome are used to store and organize the content. From there, video
material can be played out to TV or be forwarded to the streaming servers,
such as Adactus’ Mobilize server. The Mobilize server then encodes the
content for further use on Web or mobile devices.
The video transcoding server prepares video content to be used by external
systems. It supports MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video in both PAL and NTSC, as well
as JPEG pictures for snapshots. The Server Components can be scaled
independently, according to how many users need to be served.
- Runs on standard multimedia-enabled mobile phones
- Takes direct control of the mobile hardware
- All hardware features available from within the client
- Support for predefined templates on mobile devices
- Uncompressed transfer of captured video to the Transcoding Server
- File size limited only by the storage capacity of the mobile device
- Easy addition of meta-information on the mobile device
- Captured video material is instantly available in the Media Asset Management system
