BBC Technology Debuts Solutions for Enterprise-wide Media Lifecycle Management in North America

Business Wire, Feb 10, 2003

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 10, 2003

Company Targets Broadcasters and Media Companies with Three

Solutions: Broadcast News and Sports, Collaborative Production and

Broadcast Network Control

BBC Technology, a leading provider of rich-media technology solutions, today announced three solutions that will enable North American media-driven enterprises to produce high quality content more efficiently, at every stage of the media creation, management and distribution lifecycle. The benefits include a tape-less production environment, reduced facility costs and faster speed of content production.

BBC Technology's Media Lifecycle Management solutions: News and Sports, Collaborative Production and Broadcast Network Control, have been created specifically for broadcasters, film companies and other media-driven organizations who have an immediate need for true collaboration across digital production, media management and playout. These previously disparate elements now come together in a single system known as an integrated media platform. The platform includes digital production workflow tools; media and metadata management infrastructure; and playout, archive, routing and business interfaces. Content and its associated meta-data (i.e.: information about rights, usage, embargoes, location etc.) become ubiquitous in the entire enterprise.

"In today's tough economic climate, major media-centric companies need to improve the financial return on their 'content' assets, which means getting more programs, to more market segments, in less time, with better control. However, that's not easy to accomplish. For years, we've been watching the industry to see if someone could actually build an open, standards-based solution that pulls libraries of legacy 'content' as well as fresh, real-time footage, into a streamlined, all digital workflow. We believe that the digital product suites from BBC Technologies are a true industry breakthrough, providing solutions that can be adapted to a wide range of real world business needs," said Gerry Kaufhold, principal analyst with In-Stat/MDR, a market research firm based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

"Traditional systems haven't allowed the depth of functionality and rich integration we're now offering to news, sports, and collaborative production environments with an integrated media platform approach," said Ann Wilson, President, BBC Technology. "Our strategy recognizes the need to protect our customers' existing legacy systems and provides a commercially viable transition path for the future."

In order to gain competitive advantage by adopting new technologies (e.g.: displaying relevant content on PDAs and cellular phones) and re-directing capital expenditures, broadcasters and media companies can deploy these solutions to leverage more efficient and cost-effective processes and collaborative tools, and deliver high quality programming and content to audiences more quickly across multiple platforms.

Broadcast News and Sports

The offering for Broadcast News and Sports is a scalable, enterprise-class and collaborative solution, automating the production and playout process for newsrooms, sports production centers and other real-time environments. The Broadcast News and Sports solution, within a few frames of ingests, ensures access to the media is possible for all clients, enterprise-wide, including clients located remotely. For example, central and local news teams can access media at the same time, improving speed-to-air and enhancing the quality of output.

It combines sophisticated ingest, management, and workflow tools developed by BBC Technology with leading Quantel(TM) storage and editing systems, as well as a range of best-of-breed components by other third-party vendors, including Oracle, Sun, and others. The entire solution is designed to provide high up-time with dual resiliency in critical systems and multiple levels of back-up based on multiple hosts, clients and applications serving multiple duties. Content metadata and essence can be backed-up, with multiple levels of priority assignable to ensure faithful ingestion, storage and retrieval of critical media.

The full implementation offers full-scale transmission by both conventional broadcasting and the Internet. In either interface, journalists can edit text, audio and video as well as create graphics at the desktop and assign the item to particular users as required or store it on a 'virtual shelf' for later use.

Key features and benefits include:

-- Promotes a distributed and fully collaborative workflow

-- Tight integration with existing legacy systems

-- Ingest, encoding and management of video in variety of resolutions

-- Single user interface for all systems

-- Live access to archive material at the desktop

-- Plug-in API's enable deep functionality and future extensions

-- Supports open standards (MOS, AAF, MPEG, SMEF)

-- All components built to withstand the rigors of broadcast production and playout

-- Fully scaleable - horizontally and vertically