In 2013 Matrox won a Streaming Media Best of NAB award in 2013 with their popular Monarch HD video recording and streaming appliance. This device uses HDMI inputs, is affordable at about $1,000.00 and was especially notable for being operable via simple buttons on the front of the device once initially configured. Storage and streaming were performed via separate channels, and so could be configured with separate quality settings–i.e., you could create a local copy of the video at about 25Mbps and a streaming version at more typical bit rates for streaming.
At this year’s NAB Matrox announced a successor to this device that looks promising, the Monarch HDX. Instead of dedicated channels for recording and streaming, this device allows you to do either operation on either channel. For example, you could send streams to two separate streaming servers, or you could do two separate recordings, one directly to a USB drive attached to the machine, and another at archival bit rates to a network share. The HDX is more expensive at about $2,000.00, but also adds SDI input options and a third encoder for input preview.
You can view an article and video about the HDX on streamingmedia.com: http://www.streamingmedia.com/Producer/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Almost-Live-from-NAB-Matrox-Monarch-HDX-103702.aspx
