Vitec - Delivering Real-Time and On-Demand Video to PC and TV Screens Across the Base

THE CUSTOMER: The PICATINNY ARSENAL, located in New Jersey, is the home of the Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center of the United States Army. Its highly skilled workforce develops new technologies to address the requirements of the modern Army and often adapts existing commercial technologies to the high-performance requirements of the military. The arsenal's primary mission is research, development, and pilot-plant production of explosives and propellants for the U.S. Army. To distribute cable TV and other media content throughout the facility, the Arsenal IT staff recognized IPTV as a way to enable streaming of audio and video content to users' desktop workstations via the base's local network infrastructure. The Arsenal's IPTV system serves over 1500 personnel at the facility, accessing weapons shooting range monitoring cameras, informational presentations, inbound news and information cable channels, and real time local events and announcements, all as high quality MPEG-4 H.264 streams. THE CHALLENGE: Picatinny Arsenal IT Services was faced with the sun-setting of its legacy IPTV platform. While the incumbent system was capable of meeting the Arsenal's core broadcast requirements, the system offered limited scalability, mediocre video quality using MPEG 4 part 2, a severely limited user interface, was cumbersome to administer, suffered from periodic outages, and couldn't interface with TV monitors and plasma screens. Within its budgetary constraints, the customer sought a system that would deliver: *Broadcast-quality video using advanced, bandwidth-conscious H.264 compression, with more channels delivered on the existing local area network (LAN) infrastructure. *Reliability and quality of service suitable for 24x7 mission critical applications. *Support of streaming and playback of locally generated content, external video sources, and offline VOD assets. *A powerful yet user-friendly IPTV PC player that would support multiple video formats and that would enable viewing multiple sources in real time on PC monitor. *A scalable system that would allow back end channel lineup growth in a cost-effective manner. *A site license fee for the front end IPTV Portal and Players with no recurring costs or seat-based licensing. ADDITIONAL NEEDS: Discussions with the client in the implementation planning phase revealed additional needs related to the compliance requirements of applicable security regulations. The incumbent system’s inability to segment end users by groups or locations had restrained the usability of the system for distribution of classified content. If VITEC could provide a resource-efficient way to incorporate security permissions already implemented in the IP network’s Active Directory Service, the IPTV system would then be capable of delivering restricted content securely to appropriate end-users with minimal administrative overhead. In addition to requiring robust encoders for the core channel lineup of externally-sourced TV programming, the client also expressed a need for smaller, portable units that would make real time local feeds possible from wherever needed on the facility. With VITEC portable units, the Arsenal staff could originate (as well as archive for VOD) local content for emergency channels, for live classroom training events, for informational presentations using PowerPoint, or for monitoring locations such as a weapons target range. Furthermore, the ability of the VITEC EZ TV to override end-user viewing choices to force-focus users' desktops onto a designated video stream provided useful options for emergency and command-center communications.