BT's network encoding services have relied on a centrally managed Agility system for more than two years to provide backbone automated encoding since 2001 from its Washington, D.C. media center. Agility's distributed computing architecture enables BT to manage its global encoding workload, set priorities and schedules and allocate jobs to available encoding resources located at its Los Angeles and London facilities.

BT recently added 20 Agility live webcasting systems to increase capacity of its BT Mediastream live webcasting service for a major live event client. Since Agility's architecture is scalable and modular, BT was able to complete the live webcasting upgrade in less than two weeks. BT now uses Agility to capture and encode live events for both corporate and sports events in real time into Windows Media and Real Web streaming formats.

Since its live webcasting client mandated full event redundancy and failover, all signals are sent to the Washington, DC media center, which operates one of two redundant Agility control systems. Network managers can remotely manage all events from both locations, reassigning work as needed and providing network redundancy. Additionally, Agility's provisional scheduling feature notifies network operators if an encoding resource is unavailable and requires reassignment.

• Hearst-Argyle Television
• Accuweather
• SPEED
• VRT
• ZDF
• RAI
• BT
• NFL Films
• SCRIPPS Networks
• CNN
• sky
• T-Online