As a technology-centric company with a passion for innovation, Switch Media is always looking for ways to encourage creativity and new ideas. A good example of this is our recent Hackathon which generated some fantastic successes and achievements across our talented technology teams. One of which is the Watcha Tool – a valuable addition to Switch Media’s MediaHQ product suite. Read press below:

Source: Rapid News, 23 July 2019 

Switch Media enhances MediaHQ with encoding tool

Online video technology provider Switch Media has launched Watcha, a tool designed for its MediaHQ product suite to highlight and report automatically issues during the encoding process. 

Aimed at broadcasters and content owners, the solution is said to have been designed to answer the changing needs of the industry as firms continue to adapt to on-demand services.

What is claimed as a key differentiator compared with other encoding tools, is that Watcha tracks content at the same time it’s being encoded, reporting issues, such as pixilation that may arise. The report is immediately sent to the engineer detailing when and where those issues arise. This is said to be particularly useful for 4K and CPU-intensive projects. If encoding fails, Watcha can automatically restart the process.

Watcha is also designed for providing support in production environments. In a use case such as sports broadcasting, Watcha could assist a vision mixer by detecting camera issues, automatically telling the operator to jump to another camera that could cover action in the same area. Watcha would continue to monitor the cameras and would automatically revert to the previous camera if required.

Users can tailor their workflows, selecting any or all of the components in MediaHQ’s product suite to manage and assist in the delivery of content for both online distribution and traditional broadcast. As well as providing detailed reports, Watcha can encode and stitch together sections of content again, saving, said Switch Media, ‘significant’ time and costs.

“Prior to Watcha, if a 4K movie took eight hours to encode, the report may take another eight hours to prepare,” noted Kevin Staunton-Lambert, solutions architect, R&D department, Switch Media and project lead for the Watcha tool. “With Watcha the two work together simultaneously. That’s a huge time saving for broadcasters who are under pressure to get their content to multiple platforms quickly.”