Munich, August 25th, 2008 - Global cooperation, content sharing and integration of proprietary systems are most demanding challenges for broadcasters today. There is a strong demand for complete solutions from a company that understands the unique requirements of the broadcast industry while at the same time managing and reducing risk. At this year's IBC, solution provider Silex Media is highlighting its wide range of professional services and sophisticated solutions. With a customer base including the leading broadcast networks in Europe and the United States Silex Media has further strengthened its expertise in providing workflow solutions to the media market. The projects were realized in close cooperation with leading technology companies including Apple, HP, Sony and IBM.
Silex Media's proven solution portfolio includes best of breed products from their partners coupled with the expertise and support of their global professional services team to help customers addressing today's challenges and opportunities and bringing out the best of their content. Silex Media accompanies its customers through all steps of the project, from consulting and planning to the turnkey solution and subsequent support.
During IBC, three solution areas will be highlighted with practical examples; these solutions are in the fields of: production management, content distribution and archiving.
Production Management
Tailoring solutions for individual production tasks
Modern production environments consist of highly diversified systems, each of them using different formats dedicated to specialized production workflows. Silex Media's production management solutions streamline these workflows by optimizing the single production steps and making content available company-wide. Using the same content for different tasks from every production factory in the broadcast organization - independent of format or technology restrictions - easily integrates NLEs from different vendors, offloads the production storage and accelerates production tasks.
Production management solutions have been successfully planned and implemented e.g. to realize a completely tapeless bi-medial broadcast workflow at the public broadcaster SWR, the ARD station covering south-western Germany. Tapeless workflows include all production steps from ingest to playout. Another example is EO, a major Dutch cross-medial public broadcaster, where Silex Media integrated BUG.tv, and implemented workflows using AtomFactory as an MXF gateway to their Final Cut Pro production environment. This way EO connects several MXF sources and the MXF playout to their QuickTime based production system.
Content Distribution
Time and cost saving transfer to and distribution within a broadcast organization
Live event coverage relies upon seamless coordinated workflows. But a closer look at integration of processes and systems often reveals an enormous breakdown in productivity. Most radio and television operations find that the flow of content creation is impeded - even between different bureaus or the station and its team of correspondents - because they depend upon several proprietary systems.
Silex Media's solution portfolio includes new possibilities for fast and reliable global distribution of multimedia content. Solutions based on the DAVID Systems Moves Media technology have been in regular operation in major broadcasting networks like Norway's NRK and Germany's ARD for many years now. Currently NRK uses Moves Media solutions for their covering of the Olympic Games in Beijing. Also at ARD the audio and video file transfer with thousands of files per week is completely operated by Moves Media applications - not only to bring content from all over the world into the organization, but also to automatically redistribute it within the network to different locations or systems like video servers.
Archiving
Transparent and accelerated access to existing archive infrastructure
Archiving solutions are an essential part of modern asset management systems. The challenges in organizing, managing and integrating existing broadcast archives infrastructure have risen significantly. Especially with regard to the huge amount of data to be archived in HD environments the time to find and retrieve material or selected scenes is the essential issue for editors normally working under extreme time pressure. In most cases archive hardware and software already exists and must be integrated in a way that enables new workflows but also speeds them up and makes them accessible in a cross-media environment.
Silex Media offers solutions that integrate archives seamlessly and efficiently into the daily workflows, including partial file restore, automated low-res generation or transcoding. The reuse of existing hardware and software is possible as well as planning of a completely new system. At a large broadcaster in the UK, Silex Media is strengthening its existing partnerships with Quantum and DAVID Systems by providing a solution based on Hydrogen Archive Catalyst to enable the customer's archive project to benefit from intuitive timecode-based partial file restore. Over the next few years, this project is expected to grow up to many petabytes of media files stored on a mixture of both disk and robotic data tape.
Silex Media's proven solution portfolio includes best of breed products from their partners coupled with the expertise and support of their global professional services team to help customers addressing today's challenges and opportunities and bringing out the best of their content. Silex Media accompanies its customers through all steps of the project, from consulting and planning to the turnkey solution and subsequent support.
During IBC, three solution areas will be highlighted with practical examples; these solutions are in the fields of: production management, content distribution and archiving.
Production Management
Tailoring solutions for individual production tasks
Modern production environments consist of highly diversified systems, each of them using different formats dedicated to specialized production workflows. Silex Media's production management solutions streamline these workflows by optimizing the single production steps and making content available company-wide. Using the same content for different tasks from every production factory in the broadcast organization - independent of format or technology restrictions - easily integrates NLEs from different vendors, offloads the production storage and accelerates production tasks.
Production management solutions have been successfully planned and implemented e.g. to realize a completely tapeless bi-medial broadcast workflow at the public broadcaster SWR, the ARD station covering south-western Germany. Tapeless workflows include all production steps from ingest to playout. Another example is EO, a major Dutch cross-medial public broadcaster, where Silex Media integrated BUG.tv, and implemented workflows using AtomFactory as an MXF gateway to their Final Cut Pro production environment. This way EO connects several MXF sources and the MXF playout to their QuickTime based production system.
Content Distribution
Time and cost saving transfer to and distribution within a broadcast organization
Live event coverage relies upon seamless coordinated workflows. But a closer look at integration of processes and systems often reveals an enormous breakdown in productivity. Most radio and television operations find that the flow of content creation is impeded - even between different bureaus or the station and its team of correspondents - because they depend upon several proprietary systems.
Silex Media's solution portfolio includes new possibilities for fast and reliable global distribution of multimedia content. Solutions based on the DAVID Systems Moves Media technology have been in regular operation in major broadcasting networks like Norway's NRK and Germany's ARD for many years now. Currently NRK uses Moves Media solutions for their covering of the Olympic Games in Beijing. Also at ARD the audio and video file transfer with thousands of files per week is completely operated by Moves Media applications - not only to bring content from all over the world into the organization, but also to automatically redistribute it within the network to different locations or systems like video servers.
Archiving
Transparent and accelerated access to existing archive infrastructure
Archiving solutions are an essential part of modern asset management systems. The challenges in organizing, managing and integrating existing broadcast archives infrastructure have risen significantly. Especially with regard to the huge amount of data to be archived in HD environments the time to find and retrieve material or selected scenes is the essential issue for editors normally working under extreme time pressure. In most cases archive hardware and software already exists and must be integrated in a way that enables new workflows but also speeds them up and makes them accessible in a cross-media environment.
Silex Media offers solutions that integrate archives seamlessly and efficiently into the daily workflows, including partial file restore, automated low-res generation or transcoding. The reuse of existing hardware and software is possible as well as planning of a completely new system. At a large broadcaster in the UK, Silex Media is strengthening its existing partnerships with Quantum and DAVID Systems by providing a solution based on Hydrogen Archive Catalyst to enable the customer's archive project to benefit from intuitive timecode-based partial file restore. Over the next few years, this project is expected to grow up to many petabytes of media files stored on a mixture of both disk and robotic data tape.
