Monday 6 February 2012

Ideal Systems Inaugural Summer Seminar

"Next Generation
Integrated Playout & Monitoring"
Including a Preview of Miranda ES (Enterprise Suite)

With Keynote Speaker

Michel Proulx, CTO of Miranda Technologies

Seminar & Demonstrations Include:
Miranda ES integrating iTX, iControl, KX, Edgevision

Options from;
SeaChange, Masstech and MSA Focus

Venue: Ideal Systems Singapore, #06-06 One Commonwealth, 1 Commonwealth Lane.

Date: February 8th

Click Images to Enlarge
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 “Increased Cohesion, Efficiency & Automation of Broadcast Systems & Workflows”

“Increased Cohesion, Efficiency & Automation of Broadcast Systems & Workflows”
Worldwide revenues for non-linear VOD are expected to grow exponentially to a projected $8.4 billion in 2014, This will create an incredible amount of extra work for media organizations with an unproven business model in the world of non-linear formats. Today’s operators are facing quite a dilemma!   Operators need to change their approach this and to increasingly automate every aspect of media workflows.



Addressing this issue is Miranda Technologies with its release of iTX Enterprise Suite with its native integration to NVision Routers, KX multi viewers, XG & Vertigo  Graphics and Extensive Network Management with iControl.
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“With Enterprise Suite, we bring a whole new level of efficiency to content preparation for playout. We wanted to optimize this process, just like we have streamlined file-based playout with iTX”, says Michel Proulx, Chief Technology Officer at Miranda.

“One of the key challenges facing playout operators today is streamlining “back-end” operations, and mitigating the risks associated with airing files from different external sources. These files now come in a wide variety of formats, and the challenge is to ensure that all mission-critical metadata has been properly set and reviewed.”

“With the traditional tape and server model, this review process has been performed during ingest, and this has offered a certain level of confidence. This has now been lost, with the increasing number of programs and commercials delivered as pre-encoded files.”

With Enterprise Suite, playout operators are able to review, normalize and approve file-based content before it goes to air. This drastically lowers risks during playout, and allows playout operators to confidently increase their channel counts.

Enterprise Suite simplifies the normalization of program and advertising content for iTX customers, using automated workflows for analysis, review and fixing of the most important file issues. The normalization offers support for AFD tagging, high-quality up/down video conversion, audio loudness correction, channel tagging and down-mixing, and support for Closed Captions/OP47 subtitles.

This new solution has been designed from the outset to unify workflows for both linear playout and TV Everywhere style VOD content delivery. The same assets, tools and scheduling processes are shared across VOD and linear television operations. The VOD versioning offers all the tools required to create professional, on-demand content across multiple platforms, including support for dynamic ad insertion signalling and Nielsen watermarking.







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iTX Central Storage
The SeaChange Universal MediaLibrary Grid (UML Grid) is a high-availability storage solution that offers high performance, high capacity, scalability, and flexible NAS and SAN connectivity for enterprise and multimedia data storage.

The UML Grid seamlessly integrates with iTX for automation and Dalet for media asset management, enabling a truly tapeless broadcast workflow. The UML Grid is central to the architecture, serving as a shared storage platform for ingest, content preparation/production, playout, and archive.

The UML Grid accommodates a massive 144TB in a 5RU storage matrix. Unlike the traditional content library that caters to transmission playout or production storage only, the UML combines the traditional linear playout support with production and streaming into an all-in-one product. It is an open storage and server infrastructure that is simple to manage and cost-effective, allowing direct ingest, edit-in-place, archive, and play-to-air functionalities.
  • Private cloud storage in a single global namespace
  • Simultaneous NAS and SAN connections for accessing iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, and FTP files without reconfigurations
  • Media-centric file layout that allows space efficiency for small files and high-streaming performance for large media files
  • Client-based bandwidth control; integration with LDAP and Active Directory for IT-friendly multi-user access administration; and file notification for efficient media inventory management. 
  • Linear scalability of capacity from 72TB per “brick” to 144PB in a grid; scalability of performance up to 17Gbps per “brick” or 34,000Gbps in a grid
  • RAID 6-protected drives, high availability servers, file-level mirroring, and replication
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iTX Integrated HSM, streamlined digital archiving & media asset management
Masstech provides Digital Archiving Management


Masstech HSM & iTX are used by Indonesia’s largest pay TV provider

TOPAZ is designed for medium to enterprise sized broadcast operation centres and post production environments to perform efficient file based archiving and content management (CMS). With active integration to various end-points including video servers and NLE’s it is the ideal framework for automated workflows in Playout, Production, Newsrooms and with 3rd party MAM systems.
Packaged for out-of-the-box operation including hardware, software, installation and first year’s support, TOPAZ is easy to implement and comes complete with Fee-FREE unlimited storage licensing.
TOPAZ integrates fully with new media and business systems. Offering the flexibility of both HSM and Stub File archiving, it is ideal for News Production with systems like Avid Newscutter, iNEWS, Gallery Sienna and AP-ENPS.
TOPAZ connects to all popular archive libraries directly by Fibre Channel using Masstech’s own embedded HSM robotic controller.
TOPAZ delivers breakthrough performance regardless of your facility’s requirements. Never before has asset management been so affordable and scalable. Any technology investment that focuses on reducing OpEx will improve the bottom line.

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Pre-integrated and multiple APAC deployments with iTx
foreTV Traffic & Billing System from MSA Focus




MSA Focus’ ForeTV is an end-to-end, integrated broadcast management solution, dealing with all aspects of the transmission timeline; from media, rights and asset management, acquisitions, scheduling and ad-sales to performance analysis, reporting and post-tx reconciliation.

The ForeTV scheduling suite takes you from rough programme planning through to the output of a fully time-checked and validated, automation ready playlist which includes all secondary events, promotions and commercials, merged from the Traffic & Ad-Sales module. This integrates directly with iTX automation for reliable, trackable play-out.





The iTX generated As-Run then imports directly into ForeTV and is verified against the original output schedule. This verified as-run detail provides the relevant information to feed back into the Sales and Programme Acquisition areas to ensure accurate billing, invoicing and programme amortisation






With ForeTV able to manage the sales process from proposal through to invoice and with the flexibility to cope with complex arrangements of deals containing multiple contracts in turn comprising multiple orders for different products targeted at different channels, regions, day parts and/or target audiences, this kind of close integration with automation and play-out is essential.

ForeTV is currently working live with iTX at installations including; B-Channel, Kompas TV in Jakarta, Xin Ya Media in Singapore and also Astro, where the ForeTV workflow module will also integrate with Miranda solutions to govern as-run imports, tape ingest and other media functions such as preparing media for subtitling/audio dubbing, QC checking and compliance editing.


To further enhance, improve and differentiate ForeTV, MSA Focus’ is leveraging the latest Microsoft user interface and system architecture technologies, as can be seen with our latest Multi-Day Booking and Non-Linear developments


Multi-Day Booking
The ForeTV Multi-day booking interface allows commercial material to be easily booked into multiple logs across a number of days, channels and regions within a single screen and a single booking process.
An entirely new set of screens have been created using the latest in user-friendly interface technology, to provide a more graphical way of selecting breaks and booking spots. This rich interface offers a simple ‘click and book’ approach to placing your commercial material, while also providing access to unplaced spots for your selected logs and showing real time performance against contract targets via an integrated dashboard.
Selected schedules are grouped by Channel then Region and if relevant Schedule type, with the schedule displayed horizontally running from left to right. Each schedule row comprises programme containers within which the breaks associated to that programme are displayed, with further information available by simply hovering over each element.
Non-Linear
The ForeTV Non Linear module provides the ability to define unlimited non-linear services and use rights based logic to auto-populate content availability catalogues. These availability catalogues can then be manipulated and finalised within dedicated non-linear content screens, which provide the ability to filter, preview and analyse catalogued content.
Rights based logic is used to auto-populate non-linear content availability catalogues, with Catch-up service content generated based upon the rights and broadcast of linear content. Multiple Non-linear as well as multiple linear rights can be applied to programme content, making it easy to share content across various channels, services and time-zones, with Non-linear specific budgets to help analyse performance against agreed targets
An entirely new set of screens have been created using the latest in user friendly interface technology, to provide the ability to manipulate content catalogued for individual or multiple services