Pharos reports accelerating adoption of broadcast process management
Media management remains the big issue for most broadcasters in
2005. Key buzzword at the industry’s largest annual exhibition, the
NAB Spring Convention in Las Vegas, was ‘workflow’. Roger Heath,
Sales & Marketing Director of Pharos Communications comments: “Workflow has always been a concern for broadcasters; the transition
from tape-based workflow to server-based programme archiving
sounds easy but has to be managed carefully or you can end up with
a system that keeps switching back to tape because there is a
comfort factor in having the physical asset. It is no longer good
enough just to build an effective library filing system. It needs to be
media centric and map the processes of a broadcast operation. Pharos
has the flexibility to operate on a customer by customer basis rather
than impose black-box solutions.”
“Pharos is continuing to focus on building its brand and reputation in
broadcast process management. Media asset management is central
to this and we have rolled out some significant systems that make the
handling of rich media files a far easier element of the broadcast
process. We see ourselves as a software systems provider for rich
media logistics.”
“In development terms Pharos has delivered systems that meet
broadcasters’ requirements in terms of deployment, management and
reliability. All three of these are important when considering solutions
in terms of ROI (return on investment) and SLAs (service-level
agreements). This infrastructure technology has been included with the systems delivered throughout 2005 including Advanced Broadcast Services,
Manchester United Television and TWI-SNTV.”
“Advanced Broadcast Services chose a combination of Sony Flexicart,
Sony PetaSite and Pharos Playtime for its expanded transmission
centre. Manchester United Television ordered Pharos Playtime as the
core of a new state-of-the-art technical gallery and transmission
suite. SNTV, the world’s only dedicated sports news television agency, began using Pharos Playtime as the heart of a highly versatile
production system delivering six daily bulletins of sports news.”
“On the exhibition front, IBC2005 was Pharos’ busiest show ever. We
launched Mediator on an enterprise architecture that allows it to be
scaled to many thousands of users. Mediator for broadcast process
management meets the demands of media asset management, integrating library management, media browsing and workflow control. Mediator’s web-based GUI is revolutionary in its simplicity of use, employing tasks that lead logically through each step of a
broadcast or pre-transmission operation. New operators find
Mediator’s control routine very easy to learn and enjoy the freedom it
offers to tackle non-urgent tasks in any order.”
“Mediator plays a central role at Technicolor Network Services UK
which selected Pharos for its new multi-channel playout facility.
Mediator provides Technicolor with workflow management which
integrates asset tracking, audio file uploads, processing, archive
management, reporting and status.”
“Media file exchange is becoming an increasingly popular technology
among broadcasters. We introduced three Pharos Rich Media Appliances: Rewrapper. Reflection and Transcoder. Pharos Rewrapper enables MPEG2 metadata to be matched precisely between different video servers. This eliminates the need for slow and lossy decompression and recompression processing of the video and audio data stream. Pharos Reflection is an MPEG4 browse proxy server enabling web based browse for any video server.”
“Pharos Transcoder allows video files to be converted between a wide
range of formats by dragging and dropping between source and
destination folders. Applications include downconverting broadcast-
quality content for internet-based distribution and upconverting
internet-delivered ENG feeds.”
“Outlook for 2006? Ongoing confusion in the world of file formats and the linking of different platforms together in the terms both of data
format and process workflow. We see a great opportunity for Pharos
as broadcasters will need to get systems in place fairly rapidly to
meet the accelerating demands of IPTV and HD delivery. The broadcast world will align itself increasingly to the publishing model, hence our emphasis on ‘Smarter Media Publishing’.”