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digiDELIVERY—Lots of action to be sure at the Africa Cup of Nations 2008, hosted by seven-time finalists Ghana, together with 15 qualifying teams that compete with Egypt, the current title holders. The football competition is from January 20 through February 10 at the Ohene Djan stadium in Accra—and Arqiva is bringing all of this excitement to the United Kingdom. Numerous British-based African players will be featured during the 32 matches. Arquva will have live studio facilities for BBC3 highlights show; 32 matches are downlinked and streamed for BBCi, and millions are expected to tune in for the final on BBC2. Arqiva’s Chalfont Grove facility was selected for connectivity capabilities and the ability to co-locate many of the elements of the broadcast chain. The availability of a fully outfitted studio space, supported by a full range of post production facilities, enabled Sunset+Vine to establish its entire broadcast operation on a single site. The co-location of satellite and fiber links further simplifies the downlinking of matches from satellite, and the on-pass of the live match highlights programs to BT Tower for broadcast on BBC3. The final will be similarly downlinked and broadcast live on BBC2. In addition Arqiva is providing broadcast services for BBCi. All the downlinked games are being fed through a purpose-built transmission facility at Chalfont Grove where some will have live English language match commentary added. The live matches are then independently fed to BT Tower for broadcast on BBCi—Hampshire, England
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digiCREATION + DELIVERY—Dalet Digital Media Systems develops software solutions that manage audio and video assets for their clients and they have just announced Warner Bros. has deployed their Dalet News Suite to produce “The TMZ Show.” This is a daily show in HD that covers the Hollywood scene. Further, in addition to production of the show, the Dalet News Suite is used to update the TMZ.com website. There were 90 Dalet News Suite workstations deployed in the product offices, all providing journalists and editors with a fully integrated newsroom and tapeless news production system. Transfers of filed material from FireStore HD-4 Pro camera hard drives, as well as the ingest of feeds, are all ensured by Dalet. HD packages use a combo of Dalet and Final Cut Pro editing tools—New York, New York
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digiCONTENT + DELIVERY—Firstcom Music, a provider of music services, is pleased to announce their migration toward complete electronic delivery via their website and alternative delivery options. “The industry has known for some time that the CD is in the final phase of its life cycle and that it will soon be history. As industry leaders, we believe that their is no better time than the present to move toward a future that is both environmentally friendly, as well as convenient and cost efficient for our clients,” says Carol Riffert, Vice President / General Manager for FirstCom Music. In 2005, FirstCom Music started this migration with the release of online only discs and the launch of their Director’s Choice compilation series, which is available exclusively online. FirstCom Music will now take their environmental commitment a step further by using reusable USB drives for their new release demos. This will eliminate the need for over 30,000 demo discs each year. While the complete migration to electronic delivery will take several years, FirstCom Music clients who are interested in online only or hard-drive delivery options should contact their FirstCom Music representative. FirstCom Music will arrange to replace their library with an alternative delivery option and at no cost to the client have their FirstCom Music CD library returned and recycled—Dallas, Texas
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digiDELIVERY—
Envivio Inc. provides IP video convergence editing solutions for telcos, enterprises, and broadcasters and they have a new agreement with RealNetworks for them to resell the Envivio 4Caster Mobile Series hardware encoding platform. The platform includes the real-time M2 and M4 encoders and the 4Manager redundancy stream. RealNetworks can now offer a complete carrier grade mobile streaming solution. The 4Caster M2 and M4 encoders support the full range of 3GPP and 3GPP2 video and audio codecs as well as live bit stream switching and the Envivio Network-Aware Rate Control feature for low bit rate bandwidth smoothing. When combined with the 4Manager headend management system, a fully automated M:N redundant mobile TV encoding platform with the same QoS capabilities as a Tier 1 satellite or cable TV video headend are provided—South San Francisco, California
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digiBIZ—
A provider of media industry management solutions, SintecMedia is going to showcase their Addressable Content Tools (ACT) at NAB 2008. This is a significant addition to the company’s OnAir family of products. pTV is OnAir’s advertising campaigns management tool and provides an advanced audience matching tool using sophisticated data mining and pattern recognition algorithms to ID persons in target groups, all with high precision. Their eTV enables the managing of telescoping, which is the union of long-form advertising messages with traditional 00:30 commercials, with support for RFI and polling apps. With eTV, the viewer has the option of using his or her remote to display the long form commercial should they wish additional product info. Speaking of which, there is more info available right here—New York, New York
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digiDELIVERY—XOrbit provides content verification and MPEG caption encoding services and develops the technologies for automating such services, including distribution and live-to-air solutions for broadcasters. At the 2008 NAB show, the company will be displaying their ProofPositive Content Monitoring System, a system for instantly validating the correct delivery of their content over the “last mile” of the broadcast chain, from the satellite or cable provider to the viewer’s home. ProofPositive provides non-evasive, watermark-free technology that monitors when programming and commercials are played and, more importantly, when the did NOT play. Also being demo’d is their Xilex MPEG File Caption Encoding System, a direct-to-MPEG offering that eliminates videotape and does not require any edit suite time, with captions inserted directly into SD, HD and VoD on both program and transport stream MPEG files. Also on display will be their RTX Remote and Live Captioning Systems which provides a live video and audio confidence signal direclty to stenographers, anywhere in the world, resulting in more accurate caption placement. Lastly, their CaptionSmart encoding service, client controlled, automatically embeds caption data into MPEG files. XOrbit’s Digital Encoding Server Center (DESC) receives data via the Internet and process the info to predefined specs—Columbia, Maryland
- digiBITZ
- BBC World could soon be on an acquisition spree as the commercial arm of the broadcasting giant is chatting it up with folk who have money to invest for equity positioning, with some believing as much as £1 billion is the amount being tossed about…
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The new President and Chief Operating Officer for Narrowstep Inc. is Barak Bar-Cohen, who previously served as the General Manager of European Operations for the company. He brings more than 12 years of international experience and ops knowledge within the telecom and media industries to this leadership position. His responsibilities include management of the sales organization, product development team, network group as well as customer support for the United Kingdom and European territories. He holds a B.A. in Economics with Honors from Brandeis University as well as an M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.
- In a Peter Kaplan bylined story for Reuters online news service, seems as though a key House of Representatives lawmaker has voiced concern regarding the scant bidding for the D block spectrum through the FCC auction… Read the entire story…
- REVVER, a pioneer site in the video/revenue-sharing environs, has put itself up for sale for one-half million, and a $1 million debut assumption. Competition from YouTube and We’reJustLikeYouTube sites has left revenues flat for the once-original site…
- There could be additional moves afoot after Time Warner split off the AOL dial-up Internet service from their online ad biz, which is experiencing tremendous growth. In the works… a possible sale of AOL, or at least a significant realignment of both of these properties… other possibilities for the company include the merger of their New Line Cinema with one of the more productive Warner Bros. studios as well as separation, or spin off, of their Time Warner Cable division…
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