StreamGuys Accelerates and Simplifies Podcast Management with Major Upgrade to SGrecast Platform

Pioneering SaaS-based streaming and podcast solutions provider StreamGuys today announced a major new upgrade of its flagship SGrecast podcast management and live stream repurposing system. Available immediately, highlights of version 4.0 include a significantly improved user interface to speed and simplify operations; an expanded waveform editing toolset; and further enhancements to the solution’s powerful automated publishing capabilities.

“Our goal with SGrecast 4.0 was to maintain the proven workflow and processes that users are already familiar with, but modernize and streamline their interactions with the platform,” said Jason Osburn, executive vice president, StreamGuys. “Everything happens in real time in a single pane. The new interface provides faster and easier access to SGrecast’s powerful toolsets in a more elegant and attractive way, while laying the groundwork for even more advanced features and feedback in the future.”

New overlay windows enable users to quickly access and edit information about a particular item or task – such as the details of a particular podcast episode – while preserving their current place in the main interface and workflow. The result is faster and more intuitive operation, saving users valuable time when publishing podcasts and making it easier to train new staff.

Expanded Editor

SGrecast’s integrated, browser-based Waveform Editor also sports an updated user interface and expanded functionality. New interstitial cutting capabilities enable operators to remove unwanted sections in the middle of recordings and recombine the remaining segments for republishing. This offers immediate benefits for content repurposing – for example, removing ‘baked-in’ advertising to enable subsequent dynamic ad insertion – while representing a key step towards broader SGrecast applications.

“SGrecast offers a comprehensive toolset for repurposing already-produced podcasts and live streams for revenue-expanding monetization opportunities and audience growth,” said Osburn. “With version 4.0’s interstitial cutting tools and future functionality including multi-track editing and in-browser content production, we are extending SGrecast’s scope to enable complete workflows in the cloud.”

Automated, Metadata-Driven Publishing and More

SGrecast 4.0 further refines the automated podcast publishing capabilities added to the platform earlier this year for effortlessly repurposing broadcasters’ live streams without user intervention. SGrecast’s enhanced AudioLogger recording feature offers the option of preserving mid-roll ad break metadata from the live stream, thus enabling subsequent dynamic ad insertion in the published podcast without requiring manual marker insertion. Combined with the ability to automatically trigger podcast publishing based on metadata in the live stream, this enables fully automated, metadata-driven publishing workflows.

Version 4.0 adds new functionality for publishing to Google Audio News, including support for the mRSS format required for advanced Google News features. Users can specify episode-specific intro and outro audio files in the mRSS feed, providing greater granularity than the global, publisher-based start and end clips available with generic RSS. The new update also expands the range of standard RSS fields supported by SGrecast, including linking to specific webpages related to particular episodes in a feed.

A new Audit Log feature provides an integrated, historical log of automated or manual actions initiated by SGrecast or its users, which is particularly valuable for tracking activities in organizations with multiple users.

Last but not least, StreamGuys is bundling SGrecast’s optional Audio2Video and ENCO-powered automated captioning features for new and existing customers. Audio2Video enables users to turn on-demand audio content into compelling video clips for social media and other outlets, combining the aural content with graphics, custom text, visual waveforms, motion backgrounds and transitions. ENCO’s cloud-based enCaption technology enables users to automatically generate transcriptions of new or existing recordings, and to caption pre-recorded, archived files for web and mobile streaming. Resulting captions can be exported as SRT, WebVTT or JSON files, while complete transcripts can be saved for later use.