How does it work on a day-to-day basis? Where do you broadcast the program in the world?

Most of our events take place in Germany, mostly in Munich and Erlangen, and are broadcast to Siemens branch offices worldwide. Sometimes webcasts are streamed for a regional audience only (mostly Germany). We usually rent professional cameras and sound engineering for our webcasts with 3rd party companies, then connect their outputs to our TriCasters at the event locations, do the mixing and distribute TriCasters programme out to different devices: Streaming encoders, external HD recorder, projectors and cameramen’s monitors - so they know when they are on air. We do the encoding from the event location, not from a centralized data center like other streaming providers do. You get a better quality when you encode source signals directly to the desired streaming format.

How often do you broadcast events for Siemens?

We do about 40 live webcasts per year.

Do you stream them live or do you put them online once the webcasts have been edited?

Most of our live webcasts are put on streaming servers for on-demand access straight after the live show. We do not use TriCaster to produce recordings that haven’t been sent out live - or let’s say it’s quite seldom.

What do your colleagues think of the TriCaster™?

They also like this machine. A few weeks ago, a new colleague who produces music clips and videos joined our team. And I can tell you he was really impressed when I demonstrated TriCaster!

For what companies have you been streaming other than Siemens?

Our current external customers are Vodafone, SEN Group and Nokia Siemens Networks.

What about the audience? Do you have statistics?

It varies a lot, depending on the event. We once streamed live from the headquarters of a company located in Tel Aviv to just ONE PC, in their branch office in San Francisco -US. But the whole staff was gathered in a meeting room to watch the webcast. Another day we streamed an event to over 5.000 concurrent users [this is assessed to amount to about 13.000 different viewers]. It was our biggest event: Siemens former CEO and former German chancellor Gerard Schröder even watched it! It’s quite difficult to find out how many people have been watching a webcast because most of the times many people group together in front of the PC to watch such events. The only thing we may know about is the number of concurrent users, by analyzing log files and Windows Media built-in mechanisms. And sometimes by extrapolating empirical values too.

What are the next projects of Siemens Stream Team?

We just added Video-on-Demand Flash streaming to our portfolio. When Adobe will improve Flash live streaming capabilities, we will also do live webcasts using Flash in addition to Microsoft’s Windows Media.