Telestream Grabs Anystream

Late last week it was announced that Telestream was purchasing Anystream from Grab Networks.  Anystream was the transcoding piece of a multi-company merger (first Anystream bought Cauldron Solutions, then merged Voxant, when they were renamed Grab Networks).   I spoke briefly with Dan Castles (Telestream's CEO) this morning regarding the acquisition.  Some, including myself, have questioned where this acquisition fits in at Telestream, as they have appeared to outsiders to be primarily focused on desktop and Mac based solutions for the past several years.  Dan says thats not quite right. "While we have focused in recent years on desktop solutions, it's only because this market didn't exist previously for us.  We started in the enterprise space and have stayed committed to it - in fact most of our engineers are still focused on products like Flip Factory and Vantage for our enterprise customers," said Castles.

Vantage is a newly announce addition to Telestream's offer at this years NAB and combines a number of features (such as transcoding and quality control) to create a more an automated workflow than previously offered.

Castles concluded by stating, "With this purchase, Telestream can deliver file based transcoding workflows for everyone from the consumer to enterprise customer, both on the Mac and PC."

Thats a pretty broad swath, but if you look at their portfolio, they do indeed have the products to back it up.  Telestream offers a range of products with a good mixture of both PC and Mac based solutions (though not all solutions are cross platform, it should be noted).

For desktop customers, Telestream offers a variety of tools including:  

Flip4Mac,  a plugin component for QuickTime that allows it to playback and trancode Windows Media Video on the mac.  Prices for Flip4Mac range from free (player only) to $179 (HD and SD, 2 pass encoding support, integration with Compressor and Final Cut Pro). Flip4Mac is a Mac only solution.

ScreenFlow Screencast ($99), a Mac desktop based screen and video capture and editing tool for creating your own video podcasts.  

Wirecast ($449) allows you to broadcast a live stream from your desktop or laptop (Mac based).

Episode Encoder ($495 and up) is their desktop based transcoding solution.  It is geared towards the prosumer set with solutions that start relatively inexpensive, but scale to include distributed encoding nodes and other high end features not typically seen in desktop applications (See Episode Engine on the enterprise list). Episode 6, the newest release is expected to ship in the next 30 days.  Episode is both Mac and PC based.

On the Enterprise side, Telestream has:

Flip Factory(starting at $5495) is their original high-end transcoding system designed for broadcasters to deliver content to a variety of platforms (mobile, web, TV, etc).  Flip Factory is a PC based solution.

Vantage (price undisclosed) combines transcoding from Flip Factory with capture, media analysis, management, and QC for completely automated infrastructure for transcoding content.  Vantage is a PC based solition.

Episode Engine ($3950 and up) expands the reach of Episode Encoder by allowing it to distribute its encoding tasks to server based nodes.  Like its front end cousin, Episode engine is both Mac and PC based.

Update on Monday, August 16, 2010 at 4:33PM by Andy Beach

Industry Analyst and friend of the blog (and better writer than me), Tim Siglin covered the news for EventDVLive and added some details about Vantage and where Agility may fit into the overall solution:

The company has also been hard at work creating a brand new workflow-based transcoding and live encoding product, Vantage. I’ve had several days of extensive hands-on work on Vantage over the past month as part of a larger comparative study of professional encoding solutions,  which will be released just prior the IBC international broadcasting tradeshow in Amsterdam next month.

Can't wait to see more of his comparative study as well as hear more about the merger at IBC next month!