Digital Rapids, through Swiss distributor VCS, completed the multiple encoding and live streaming of the award ceremony surrounding United Nations Secretary General Mr. Kofi Annan's receipt of the Freedom Prize from the Max Schmidheiny Foundation.

VCS was approached by Swiss TV to provide services for the ceremony, which was broadcast in real time to a worldwide audience over the Internet. The ceremony, which included a speech from Mr. Annan and a Q & A session with the students, was part of the 37th St. Gallen Symposium, which is organised by the ISC (International Students Committee) as the world's leading neutral platform to foster fundamental debate by raising issues of global concern.

With such a high profile speaker and event, it was important to Swiss TV to work with VCS, on whom they could rely to provide the most versatile equipment, delivering the highest quality output. It was essential that the encoder provided by VCS was able to encode and deliver multiple formats, both video and audio, at the same time.

VCS supplied one Digital Rapids StreamZHD encoder to provide simultaneous real time encoding and delivery of WMV streams at multiple rates for the Internet, MP3 audio for radio stations and MPEG-2 output for South African TV.

Says Sascha Klement, Chief of Production Management for TPC TV, Swiss TV: "The Digital Rapids technology exceeded the expectations of both the customer and everyone involved. The easy handling and virtually limitless performance ma kes this kit, in my opinion, a must-have for reliable, all-round distribution in the IPTV field".