Today, conferences and meetings are rarely one-off or standalone events, says exhibitor Arbor Media: increasingly, they are part of a broader multichannel communication platform. The same is true for courtroom sessions and city council meetings.
In response, Arbor Media has introduced SARA (the Streaming and Recording Appliance) which it describes as a standardised, fully automatic and thus easy-to-use digital webcasting and recording solution.
SARA is available as a standard, off-the-shelf H.264 encoder for webcasting applications that will capture incoming audio and video signals, create live streams during the sessions and produce a preservation master and video-on-demand files for publication on the internet. It is designed for multi-lingual applications, creating live streams and VOD files for each language separately.
The SARA system automatically connects to the digital conference system, and, says the company, supports all major brands, allowing it to be used unattended; streaming will automatically start when the meeting starts. During the meeting, the conference system will supply speaker names and other relevant information, so that this information can be shown on the live web portal.
When the meeting is stopped, the system will automatically create VOD files and a preservation master.
If users want to interact with the system (because a name was misspelled or an agenda item is misplaced, for example) they can access the recordings via a web-based client application called Mediaboard which allows authorised users to modify metadata information and re-publish the meeting with just a few mouse-clicks.
