COMMENTARY: Ferncast’s aixtream presents a customizable swiss army knife solution

As industries expand in depth and complexity, new challenges appear, and thus new solutions are necessary. Broadcasters and audio professionals can especially profit from novel approaches and taking advantage of solutions designed with their latest needs in mind — like reducing logistical problems, adapting to changing workflows and the ever-present issue of compatibility. Among available solutions, Ferncast’s installable software solution aixtream was envisioned from the ground up to tackle these challenges while staying adaptable for future challenges.

So how can aixtream help the contemporary challenges of broadcasters and audio professionals?

Saving Power and Rack Space

When it comes to electronic devices that require maintenance and power, space is always at a premium. Combining multiple devices into one that requires less total space, power and maintenance is, therefore, a win for the bottom line and the customer’s peace of mind.

This is precisely what aixtream’s flexibility in use and scalability of operation achieves. The various ways aixtream can be used as one installation to tackle many different tasks allow users to scale the underlying hardware to their requirements — they are not bound to specific hardware setups. Customers can use the hardware platform that best fits their needs.

Migrating to Software With Operational Workflow Changes

Ferncast’s aixtream has other tricks up its sleeve. In the past, updating operational workflows and technologies to meet the rising demands of the consumer was next to impossible to do on the fly. However, in an era of on-demand content and users’ growing expectations, the need for broadcasters and audio professionals to continually adapt is critical. Online audio streaming consumers, for example, expect ever-higher quality, better coverage and convenience of access.

When it comes to electronic devices that require maintenance and power, space is always at a premium.

It’s not only the expectations of end consumers that are changing, so too are those of users and operators. In an age of rapid software development, everyone expects intuitive user interfaces and customizable applications. This is when conventional package solutions show their limits — they are only a snapshot of what was modern at the time of their development.

However, aixtream is a living software solution that is constantly improving. Every release adds new features and brings further refinement to the user interface. This constant development also makes it easy to realize customer wishes after their initial purchase. When you have a software solution kept up-to-date, you don’t need to buy a whole new system every few years.

Interoperability for Cost Savings

Even when operators can minimize the number of different vendors and individual hardware pieces they require in their setup, their system must still be compatible with other sections, partners and customers’ systems.

Accordingly, a significant focus of aixtream is the compatibility with other systems used in an audio broadcasting and streaming workflow. Protocols implemented are standards-compliant and flexible, ensuring that aixtream can work with both standard and custom implementations of the same protocols. In the field of web streaming, we invested specific effort making aixtream comply with leading CDNs like Akamai and nacamar, and it is now certified as a premier platform for web streaming by both providers.

Learn more about aixtream in this video.