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August 2004 Starz!Encore Powers Movie Service with StreamZ
www.starz.com
by James Porter, Executive Director, Post Production and Broadcast Operation
“The quality of the video encoding was the best we had seen, in fact, it is fabulous"
We have 5 Digital Rapids StreamZ server units at Starz. These servers are used everyday to perform encoding with the variety of requirements we have within the many facets of Starz.
Starz is the largest provider of premium movie services in the United States with approximately 164 million pay units. Starz offerings include the Starz Super Pak®, with up to 13 digital movie channels and more than 750 movies per month, Starz On Demand®, the only on-demand pay TV subscription service available on cable, satellite, and broadband platforms, and a suite of advanced video offerings.
In June, Starz announced the immediate availability of the first premium subscription movie service delivered over high-speed broadband connections to PCs. Offering major, recently released motion pictures, the service, called Starz!Ticket on Real Movies, is available at http://www.starz.com. In order to make this happen, we needed a solution that provided the best encode quality for Real 10, and we needed a suite of tools that would meet the needs of a traditional broadcast facility. When saw a demonstration of the Digital Rapids product we knew we had found the solution. The quality of the video encoding was the best we had seen, in fact, it is fabulous, and the features of the StreamEnterprise software, such as RS422 control with frame accurate VTR control, audio controls, video proc amp controls, and graphics overlay were features our production facility had to have.
We use the Digital Rapids solution to for many projects at Starz. The StreamZ is used to create media files for internal approvals on projects, provide media files for video promotion and download on our Starz web sites (such as for Starz!Ticket), and other marketing web
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