Niagara SCX User Guide
What video streaming can do for you
Broadband Internet makes possible a massive new audience that broadcasters, news
services and other multimedia content providers can reach.
The audience is already poised to receive voice, data and video content on their cell
phones, PDAs, and notebook computers.
Mass media via the Internet is a new source of advertising revenue.
ViewCast empowers you to stream your content successfully to the perfect audience.
Streaming powerfully influences your key audience's buying decisions.
Streaming is extremely cost-effective.
Streaming greatly appeals to the Internet-savvy generation.
All of these applications essentially use the same technologies to create, process, manage, and
deliver live video via a network. All require the live media be captured continuously, frame-by-
frame, and made into a digital form in real time for real-time streaming delivery.
Before you can design a suitable solution, you need to understand a little about the equipment
needed to accept live video at its source and deliver it where you want.
TV-quality video contains a large amount of brightness and color information as well as picture
detail … too much to go down a small IP pipe like the Internet. It needs to be converted to a
form suitable for the Internet or a private network delivery. The technical terms for this
conversion are scaling and compression, which together reduce the amount of network
resources needed to convey a reasonable facsimile of the original picture and sound.
The conversion process is the careful balance of several factors, including acceptable video
quality, available network bandwidth, desired playback picture size, and playback device
capabilities. The device doing the compressing is called the encoder, and in the figure below, is
shown as one of our ViewCast Niagara models - the Niagara Pro II. The encoder accepts live
video and audio and compresses them into a stream of data, delivered continuously by the
encoder’s TCP/IP network port.
Figure 107 details the whole streaming video path starting with a live video source, like a
camera or video player, all the way through to the viewer.
