ViewCast Corporation has announced that Swagit Productions has selected ViewCast's Osprey video capture cards and SimulStream software to underpin its streaming media services portfolio. With advanced ViewCast technology at the heart of its digital infrastructure, Swagit is able to deliver professional-quality, high-performance streaming media services for government agencies desiring a cost-effective, convenient means to connect with their citizens and increase civic participation without adding additional staff or responsibilities.

"At all levels of government, there is a growing effort to enhance citizens' visibility into the decision-making processes that shape public policy," said ViewCast President and CEO Dave Stoner. "By helping to enable live and on-demand coverage of government proceedings – accessible to anyone with Internet access – ViewCast and Swagit are on the forefront of the growing movement to promote greater government transparency in the digital age."

Swagit provides government agencies with 'hands free' streaming media and content management capabilities that automate and offload labor intensive workflows, enabling these agencies to engage the local community in government processes via the Internet. Through a mixture of onsite streaming media encoders, management software, and offsite support personnel, Swagit provides municipalities with the ability to record official meetings and events, index and cross-link content with documents for easy navigation, and stream this content to constituents live and on demand without the need for additional city staff.

Swagit selected ViewCast's Osprey video capture cards to underpin its custom-built streaming servers, achieving a seamless PCI Express interconnect for high-speed throughput and unmatched system performance. Providing professional-grade reliability and audio/video capture quality in a low-profile design format for easy integration within Swagit's customized hardware, Osprey cards enable advanced features such as hardware audio gain control, closed-caption extraction, hardware cropping and bitmap overlay to ensure maximum management flexibility and control.

Swagit also implemented ViewCast's advanced SimulStream  technology, which enables a single Osprey card to stream content in the broadest possible range of formats – simultaneously – in order to provide constituents with the best possible viewing experiences regardless of their supported media playback environment. SimulStream allows Swagit to generate several video streams across a range of formats, including Windows Media, VC-1, Silverlight, Flash, H.264, 3GPP mobile and more, all while saving the same content to a storage device for post-processing and other applications.

Swagit clients, including the cities of Galveston and Southlake, Texas; White Plains, New York; and Wilmington, Delaware have recently implemented the Company's streaming services with great success, providing live and on-demand streaming of council meetings and municipal channel programming to residents, business owners and property owners throughout the city and beyond. On-demand meeting coverage is indexed and time-stamped by Swagit according to the corresponding meeting agenda, enabling viewers to search for and quickly locate the content in which they're most interested.

"Our clients in the government sector count on Swagit to provide affordable, flexible streaming media services that promote accessibility, transparency and accountability," said Bryan R. Halley, President, Swagit Productions LLC. "ViewCast's solutions afford us an elegant, feature-rich streaming media platform upon which we'll continue to build the digital infrastructure for Democracy 2.0."