Success Story
Taktik delivers Unicast.

The most advanced podcasting capture and automated compositing solution of the Belgian academic world runs at the Universiy of Liège.

A highly publicised launch

Unicast project has been covered extensively in the media and has made the prime time at the 19:30 JT on the belgian television.

A scalable infrastructure for the publication of all university lectures

Our goal with Unicast was to build a modern, highly scalable solution that would fit the needs of a University that generates up to 200 hours of video content a day. That's why we built a completely automated cluster based solution that scales easily from one classroom to fifty.

A customised solution based on Apple Podcast Producer

Apple Podcast Producer running on a 7 XServes encoding farm is central to the solution we have developed for the ULg. A Tomcat/Spring/Hibernate application server written by Taktik takes care of centralising the recording requests, starting the capture stations, interfacing the Unicast consoles and submitting the podcasts for encoding and publication. A custom easy to use management console is available in each classroom.

Technologies we have used

Spring

  • The best and most popular Java IoC container.
  • The foundation of the Unicast application server.

Hibernate

  • The leading Open Source Java ORM.
  • The link to the podcasts database.

AXIS SOAP webservices

  • The standard Apache WebServices API.
  • Used to communicate with the University servers.

Cocoa - Core Animation

  • Fully adjustable iPhone® like interface.
  • Designed for easy-to-use standalone touch screen consoles.

Podcast Producer Server

  • The cornerstone of the solution.
  • Workflows based customisation

XServe/XGrid

  • Xeon based hardware and flexible grid encoding.
  • Integrates tightly with Podcast Producer Server.

Quartz Composer

  • The technology that drives automated compositing.
  • An easy to grasp interface that allows for templates customisation.