Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS – 14th of November, 2014
Since its launch in 1988, International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) has been one of the world’s leading documentary film festivals, dedicated to the exhibition and promotion of ground-breaking creative documentaries. With over 250 films each year it has become the largest documentary film festival in the world. It is unique for its international program, diversity of genres, political engaged films and many European and Global premieres. A great meeting place for filmmakers, sales agents, TV buyers, distributors and festival programmers and of course the individual festival visitors.
Besides the festival, IDFA offers documentaries online through Docs For Sale. The days where buying parties received a DVD after watching a trailer is behind us. With this platform all parties worldwide can find each other and do business at IDFA’s digital meeting place. Filmmakers can upload their work and buyers can browse through a large range of films. This development was made possible through Videodock, creator of video experiences, and Unified Streaming, a leading provider of cross-platform streaming technologies.
Several years ago IDFA called upon the Dutch Company Videodock to help establish this online platform. Videodock creates online video experiences for ambitious clients such as major Dutch broadcasters (NPO, NTR, VPRO) and leading cultural institutions like the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.
Using Videodock’s Management System (VMS) the management of thousands of videos is made a lot easier. A special upload module enables filmmakers to submit their trailers and movies completely digital. Unified Streaming is used for video play-out to all sorts of devices.
Videodock selected Unified Streaming’s software because it provides advanced functionality to do on-the-fly packaging to all formats and platforms including DRM protection. It detects on what device or platform you are watching and it searches the highest bitrate, so you will always get the best quality and speed possible. To address older and some android devices, progressive download of MP4 can be selected, making it possible to start watching before the download is completed. And because it all happens on-the-fly, it eliminates massive storage needs. “Now you just need one file, unlike before. This in combination with Amazon Web Services on demand server and storage provisioning resulted in a very flexible and cost efficient streaming solution” said Bauke Freiburg, co-founder of Videodock.
Since Unified Streaming technology is CDN agnostic, video delivery can be scaled when required and by connecting to different CDN’s worldwide delivery can be guaranteed.
Bauke Freiburg, explains why he feels IDFA is now a lot better equipped for future developments. “For example because of USP’s compatibility with MPEG-Dash and ChromeCast.” Freiburg points out that he is very satisfied with USP’s possibility to define your own ‘in-and-out-points’ for preview-clips.
“We are very pleased that Videodock selected Unified Streaming to build this great platform.” Says Simon Westbroek, VP Global Sales at Unified Streaming. “And we are looking forward to take part in increasing functionality and possibilities in the future, so IDFA can expand their great work”.
Altogether, Unified Streaming Platform (USP) has proven to be a stable and scalable streaming platform for use cases like IDFA, but also large deployments, like the European Soccer Championships, the Tour de France and the London Olympic games. Great streaming solutions for every company.
About Unified Streaming
Unified Streaming is a leading provider of cross-platform video-streaming technologies. Dedicated to helping companies create and execute smart video-streaming technologies, Unified Streaming products are in operation around the world, with customers ranging from broadcast networks and online content distributors to small companies and webcasters.
Unified Streaming solutions fit into existing frameworks (Apache, IIS, Lighttpd, Nginx), thus, allowing for greater return on existing investment. Unified Streaming (USP) provides streaming from one encode simultaneously to multiple players and devices. In combination with various DRM technologies, this enables Unified Streaming customers to significantly reduce delivery cost and boost time to market, in order to address a broader audience.