TANDBERG – TCS Intervention :: INLET – Spinnaker 7000 :: Shoot out immeinent

Hello gorgeous!  Just when I was ready to give up on my industry and technology partners, faith is restored… allegedly.

We shall see how the follow-through plays out in the real world, but it appears that our friends at Tandberg not only have no fear of the Nico implementing their TCS (Tandberg Content Server) and telepresence systems into our Broadcast facilities, but they SAY they will allow me to demo AND execute a “shoot out” against the INLET Spinnaker from our HD Digital Hub and “Digital Meet Me Point” Azzurro.  I did, in fact, invite “others” to participate, but companies such as Digital Rapids and Kulabyte were not interested nor would either permit a demo longer than a week, which is ridiculous.

I am still waiting on Inlet for an agreement that extends for the duration of time I require for the set-up and engineering from the various broadcast points; however, I am sure they will respond postively, at the end of the day 😉

We had a very proactive conversation yesterday with Tandberg and the sales rep seemed pretty gung-ho about the challenge.  My hesitation on a total ‘buy in’ with Tandberg comes from a bit of reasearch i did a year or so ago.

An industry peer at an Enterprise organization reached out to me who was considering a Tandberg TCS for their streaming & VTC bridge/Archival system – so I am “somewhat” familiar with the product.  They already had an Accordentlicense and were designing a more robust broadcast environment for their internal communications and eLearning systems.  At the time, it seemed there were some limitations on the system and I really do not recall how the conversation ended – what I do recall was an issue with the routing and a firewall – maybe.

Regardless, since I am planning on incorporating the Accordent PresenterPro EE into our broadcast environment, what ever the choice for encoder winds up being, it needs to be compatible or scalable to accommodate the Accordent Encoder Controller and allow windows media streams that have a scripting layer embedded within it.

My intention is to take the Inlet Spinaker and the Tandberg TCS and run a POC (proof of concept) head to head and measure success.  Since this will be a POC, I will invite all my Enterprise colleagues, anyone sitting behind a firewall, globally, to hit the stream and report their experience back via this blog in real time.

Let’s see who follows through and what the results are.  This will also be a good test for the Accordent ProEE and I am hoping to have some controversial subject matter to broadcast, in order to get folks to want to tune in.

We shall see….