Background: The Saarland Broadcasting Service (SR) offers four radio programmes, one television programme, and maintains a comprehensive Internet presence. The radio programmes produce more than 1.6 million broadcasting minutes each year – a portion of which is also available in the Internet.
The radio editors of SR have access to all of the broadcast material available in uncompressed WAV and compressed MP3 files. From these files, they can choose the contributions that they want to provide for listeners as streams in the Internet.
The task: The selected files must be converted into streaming formats and processed for delivery through Akamai.
Our solution: We programmed a central server service onto which the editors can upload their WAV and MP3 files via FTP. For each editorial team, a separate directory is created and labelled with the streaming formats in which the files are to be converted. Thus, the files can be simultaneously converted into Windows Media and Real.
Once the files are encoded, they are automatically stored on an Akamai server via FTP and a special Akamai URL is generated. XML fragments are generated and also stored via FTP on the CMS server for integration into SR's content management system.
The system is administrated using an easy to use web interface.
Overview of our services:
• Configuration and provision of all hardware,
• Development of the entire server application,
• Remote maintenance.