Producing a Webcast: the Bell Atlantic experience.

Bell Atlantic, the telco that provides local phone services for a good portion of the East Coast, has a Digital Production Studio (DPS) that is considered a leader in the area of Internet-based streaming video.

The Studio specializes in producing high quality video and audio destined for broadcast on the Web. With more than 200,000 minutes of content under its belt, DPS is one of the most experienced encoding bureaus in the Internet Solutions division. DPS ensures that the necessary bandwidth and infrastructure will be available to support the Web sites of the next century. DPS' Webcast content has been ready for delivery over ADSL lines since last month (by using ADSL lines, the content can bypass the "router hops" and slowdowns of the Internet).

Asked about the costs for encoding, Bell Atlantic New Media Director John Stewart said that DPS doesn't have a rate card. Rather, encoding jobs are priced on a case-by-case basis. Variables such as video format (MPEG-2, RealVideo, etc.), bit rate and clip length are all factored into the cost spreadsheet. Per minute costs for archival encoding range from $10 for RealVideo to $50 for short-run, high-bit-rate MPEG-2. The costs for live encoding a satellite feed and Webcasting the content through multicast-enabled routes to the Internet also vary according to frequency and format.