StreamVu Producer Station Review

Over the past several weeks I have been testing the StreamVu Producer Station from StreamVuTV, as you all well know I stream multiple times a week to services like Ustream, Livestream and my own personal Flash Media server that is hosted on Amazon. So I was excited to test the commercial StreamVuTV Producer Station offering.

This is a pretty powerful service / product offering. Lets start with the Producer Station (PS-102) box that you input your source video to, you input a HDSDI, Composite or HDMI source video which then pushes it in the desired format to the StreamVU TC Control center. Through their web interface you set the service / streaming box up to ingest and push at the exact stream size / desired bitrate from 32kbps to 10Mbps. Giving you the flexibility to scale down the stream rate when you have limited bandwidth.

For a commercial broadcast product it is very versatile, and the folks at StreamVu have designed their platform so that you can easily set your service up, so as to charge for access to your programming and hold a pay per view event. From the time you get your gear, set it up and configure your broadcast channels you should be able to be up and running in a hour or less.

Their service control panel takes a little getting used to, but it is relatively straight forward. Administrators though should take some time and learn the interface and put the streaming service through some test runs. Like many other services you setup your channels, and once you have done so they provide the embeds for you to put on your site. They also have set it up so that you can upload a video trailer that people can watch to be informed of your upcoming event.

This is a commercial service and is designed for the serious webcaster. They have three packages starting at $15.00 a month plus .50 cents a GB going all the way up to $500.00 a month which includes up to a TB of bandwidth.. While the pricing is not for the faint at heart, if you are a serious webcaster and you are doing on demand events the cost is very reasonable. The also offer an addon service for $6.00 a month plus bandwidth that enables the stream to be seen by iOS users.

The StreamVU TV Producer station itself comes in three models with prices starting @ $399 for the composite only box, $999 for Composite & HDMI and $1999 for the unit I tested that takes Composite, HDSDI & HDMI.

I want to thank the team at StreamVu for being patient we both attended NAB and I have had the box a little longer than I wanted to.. Their team is excited to start working with folks in the New Media space and is a viable player in the streaming media space.