In the Wisconsin city of West Allis, a Niagara streaming media encoder is playing a central role in expanding the audience for public, educational, and government access television programming. A product of
ViewCast Corporation, a leading global provider of streaming hardware and software, the Niagara encoder has enabled the city to port its government access programs to AT&T's U-verse residential IPTV service, recently launched in the greater Milwaukee area.
Musial also serves on the board of the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, an association that represents the communications needs and interests of local governments and their advisors.
A city of 60,000 in Milwaukee County and the site of the Wisconsin State Fair, West Allis offers a wide range of government access programming to its citizens. The programs are locally produced as well as supplied by state and federal agencies, and include information about state and city services, community events, and coverage of city council meetings. The Niagara system encodes the video for transport over a T1 network to the U-verse system, which began serving the West Allis viewing area in February.
All Niagara encoders have AT&T's U-verse PEG streaming specifications programmed as a menu item, and ViewCast is one of only four providers noted in U-verse's PEG encoder information collateral. This makes ViewCast an ideal solution for municipalities that are seeking to deliver PEG content over this new, rapidly growing IPTV platform.