Global Faith-Based Streaming Network HisChannel Upgrades Its Encoders With Osprey HD-SDI Capture Cards

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Osprey Video today announced that HisChannel Ministries, a global online TV network that streams on-demand, faith-based content, has purchased Osprey 815e HD-SDI PCI Express capture cards for its 24-hour streaming operation.

“Our capture cards are well-known and beloved in the video-streaming industry for their professional-grade capabilities, robust features, and unfaltering reliability,” said Scott Whitcomb, business development manager at Osprey Video. “Thanks to those qualities, we’ve been fortunate to have a long relationship with HisChannel, supplying all the capture cards for its streaming encoders as its operation and audience have grown.”

Each 815e video-capture card has one input that can accept video in three different formats — SD-SDI, HD-SDI, and DVB-ASI MPTS/SPTS — along with four stereo pairs of embedded SDI audio. The card comes standard with Osprey SimulStream®, a feature that allows the input to produce multiple parallel output streams with completely independent settings for color space, cropping, scaling, closed captions, and overlays. Thanks to this capability, HisChannel can deliver video to multiple applications simultaneously.

In the event of signal loss, the 815e card automatically replaces lost video with color bars and presents options for text overlay and audio tones. This feature guards against failure of downstream applications due to signal loss.

In terms of video preprocessing, the 815e handles functions such as VBI/VANC closed-caption extraction/on-screen rendering; scaling, cropping, deinterlacing, and inverse telecine; and vectorscope and lumascope readings.

The 20-year-old HisChannel network, which saw 385 million live player page views in January alone, has been using Osprey capture cards since the beginning. HisChannel operates in more than 110 data centers and throughout the years has used just about every Osprey capture card available — from composite, component, and DV cards to SDI and now full-HD cards.

“Our journey started back in the days before Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Facebook, and our first capture card was from Osprey. Over the years, as our viewership increased and the Osprey cards evolved, we upgraded to new cards with new capabilities,” said DL Swick, founder of HisChannel. “To this day, Osprey is the heart of every one of our encoders. The cards are extremely reliable 24 hours a day. In fact, we can trust each Osprey Video card to keep working years beyond our standard encoder replacements.”