Telestream ships Wirecast Version 7
June 30, 2016
“There’s a war being fought – a war for eyeballs. What used to be the primary content vehicle for building viewership – a TV in the living room – has now become one of hundreds of ways to get live streamed content. With OTT offerings, online platforms, as well as social media channels, such as Facebook Live and Twitter, new ways are developing to build an audience and create value for viewers,” says Dan Castles, CEO and President of Telestream.
Castles was speaking at the announcement that the company has started global shipments of the latest version of Wirecast, Telestream’s live streaming production software.
The release of Wirecast 7 builds on Telestream’s strategic position in the live streaming market and follows the announcement at NAB 2016 of two enterprise scale streaming solutions in Lightspeed Live Stream and Live Capture. With customer applications dating back over 12 years, the company boasts one of the market’s most tried and trusted live streaming solutions.
“Today, Telestream is the only company that has succeeded in enabling users to take content from the broadest range of sources – from mobile devices, to multi-camera productions and real-time feeds – to produce and deliver live video content and streaming media easily and cost-effectively,” stated Castles.
Telestream’s focus on the live streaming space has been long-term, dating back to 2004, and has involved many thousands of man hours in research and development. As a result, the company is strategically positioned to solve live streaming media workflow and deliverability challenges by leveraging three core competencies: encoding and transcoding, including media compression for video and audio; partner integrations that enable best-of-breed workflows; and unprecedented commercial live streaming expertise.
These core competencies form the foundation for the Telestream strategy for live streaming. Being able to provide live streaming infrastructure, production capability and services to make it all work means content owners and event producers can look to Telestream and its broad range of solutions to fulfill all facets of their streaming media vision and business model.
Wirecast 7 available worldwide
Available now, Wirecast 7 provides users with sophisticated production capabilities and super- fast encoding for an inexpensive price tag. With an intuitive user interface users create and stream high-quality live broadcasts from their computers to multiple destinations such as Facebook Live and YouTube, as well as to custom streaming servers, with just a few clicks.
Users feel like a TV producer with multi-camera switching, graphics, titles, and live encoding. And re-editing live shows to produce highlight reels or replays is simple. With the new ISO recording feature, Wirecast Pro can save all original “clean” source camera media, enabling the editor to re-purpose content, free of any overlay graphics from the original broadcast.
With Wirecast 7 on-the-fly editing is straightforward. With the Shot Editor panel, users have more control over every aspect of a broadcast, including the time-saving in-shot source toggles that enable users to turn video and audio layers on and off within each shot for dynamic editing of complex composite shots.
Wirecast 7 adds more options for how text can be displayed on screen. Text can be entered live, via a file or from an RSS feed enabling a different user to prepare text that will be automatically picked up in the broadcast. A new audio mixer controls every source from one central location, and an enhanced “mix minus” feature selectively mutes any source, such as the user’s own voice, while otherwise monitoring the full stream audio output. A Global Hotkey Management system speeds up any repetitive task by allowing users to create their own hotkeys.
Wirecast Studio is priced at $495 and Wirecast Pro, priced at $995, adds support for more advanced production features and additional input sources. Upgrades from previous versions of Wirecast will start at $179.