Front Porch Digital, the global leader in solutions for migrating, managing, and monetizing media content, and Broadcast Centre Europe (BCE), a European leader in technical services, today announced that their nomination of the European Parliament's Centralized Audiovisual Migration and Management System has been shortlisted for the IBC Innovation Awards in the content management category.
The European Parliament's (EP) audiovisual unit provides broadcasting on an internal cable television network, transmission to Europe by Satellite (EBS), the news exchange networks, and to selected television channels. It also supplies video streaming to the Web, publication on FTP servers, and oversees a media archive kept for the legal and historical record and for the use of parliamentarians, journalists, and scholars.
According to IBC, the Innovation Awards are unique because they celebrate not just technology but how it is applied. To make the shortlist, an entry has to demonstrate how the end user is achieving something new. This could be using a creative approach, delivering better image and sound quality, or making something practicable that till now was not.
"Judging the Innovation Awards gets harder every year," said Michael Lumley, jury chairman, IBC Innovation Awards 2010. "This year the panel was greatly impressed with the quality of entries, and those on the shortlist are the best of a very fine group."
Front Porch Digital and BCE nominated the EP's Audiovisual Unit, which implemented its centralized migration and management system following a public call for tender. The implementation coincided with its move into a new building in 2008. Today, the operation is the first in Europe to include an integrated end-to-end system for migrating analog content into the fully managed digital realm, as well as an important means of supporting government transparency.
Because a fundamental goal was preserving the historic record, a key component of the project was migrating some 12,000 hours of EP's legacy media content from storage on videotape into the managed digital environment. To accomplish this, the EP Audiovisual Unit deployed six Front Porch Digital SAMMA Solo systems to perform real-time, simultaneous encoding of content into multiple digital files that then come under the management of Front Porch Digital's DIVArchive(R) content storage management solution. For access, the EP relies on Front Porch Digital's DIVAdirector application running in combination with DIVArchive and Harris T-Rex media asset management to enable cataloging, tracking, browsing, and retrieval of archived clips.
Some 100 nominations were received by IBC across three categories, and seven were shortlisted. The winners will be announced Sunday, Sept. 12, at IBC2010 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
"The European Parliament is one of the first media organizations to reap the benefits in efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and transparency of an integrated, end-to-end migration and management workflow," said Rino Petricola, senior vice president and managing director of Front Porch Digital. "It is gratifying that IBC has recognized the technological significance of an innovative system that preserves, secures, and makes more readily available invaluable and irreplaceable content."
Added Laurent Seve, marketing manager for BCE: "By migrating historic media assets from vulnerable videotape into secure, managed digital storage, the European Parliament is safeguarding the heritage of a unique democratic institution. In singling out the nomination, IBC recognizes that the implementation is not only a perfect example of applying advanced technology to deliver something new, but to promote the common good."
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