PRESS RELEASE
SYDNEY, 26 February 2014 – Media Management software specialists Cambridge Imaging Systems, the company that has successfully been developing software for media archive management systems since 1991, is expanding into the Asia Pacific region with its partner Magna Systems and Engineering.
Magna Systems Group Engineering Manager Barry Pegg explained, “Cambridge Imaging Systems technology has been developed working on large-scale projects for corporate and government clients including the BBC, ITN, international defence forces, police forces and the telco giant BT to name a few. Their software systems have been developed over the last twenty years to provide a flexible architecture that is able to interface with existing software and able to integrate with existing working practices. There is a big call across the broadcast, production, education, security and governmental industries in the Asia Pacific region for these types of clever software solutions.”
Cambridge Imaging Systems’ archive management system, Imagen, contains a number of modules that are designed to work together in a coordinated way to reduce the manual intervention required to manage very large-scale media archives. It is possible to use Imagen as a complete media asset management system, with a customisable website for publishing online.
Tom Blake, CEO of Cambridge Imaging Systems said, “We are delighted to be working with Magna Systems. There are three principle components to success in the region, a clear market need, a product which simply addresses that need and a highly competent partner that can deliver complete solutions and a high quality of customer service.”
Pegg continued, “In the broadcast industry you can use Cambridge Imaging Systems’ Orbital Enterprise Video Recording tool to capture feeds from one or more IP stream encoders or DVB-IP gateways, connected to terrestrial or satellite receivers. Users can playback the buffered transport streams, edit and export the raw content. The exported files can be used in third party video editors or stored in a long term archive. The captured stream is stored without any loss of quality or EIT (Event Information Table) data, making it suitable for compliance recording. Orbital systems can be configured to manage between one to forty eight Channels for ninety days. As Orbital integrates seamlessly with Imagen, the combined system enables content owners to easily record, archive and republish TV programmes or encoded streams. EPG and subtitle information can be automatically extracted from the transport stream to create rich, searchable metadata records. This makes the Imagen/Orbital solution ideal for content owners who wish to create an online VOD portal, a TV catch-up service, an educational resource or an online prorgramme library.”
Imagen is also used so that visitors to an online archive can create comments, thereby increasing engagement and building communities of interest. Features include support for Gravatars, formatting and full moderation by administrators. Imagen also has powerful embed options where the client can decide who can embed, and how their content is accessed in third party websites. Longform content can also be edited in a web browser to create new, searchable items in a database.
Pegg added, “Just the editing component in Imagen alone means any TV programme could be edited into a five minute highlights package and saved. All this can be done online in a standard web browser using intuitive controls.”
Recently, Imagen was implemented in a major upgrade of the British Universities off-air recording and media archive service, known as BoB National (short for Box of Broadcasts). The project has created a link to the BBC broadcast media archive, providing educational institutions with online access to over 1 million television and radio programmes that were broadcast between 2007 and the present day. Access to the archive provides rich media resources that can supplement teaching and improve student engagement, and it also provides a vast amount of research material for academic use. Imagen provides a secure platform from which TV and radio programmes can be easily searched and retrieved; users can also create and share clip compilations and playlists. There is also an EPG menu that allows users to record programmes scheduled in the next seven days from over 60 TV and radio channels from the UK and abroad, and any recordings are then made available for all users.
Cambridge Imaging Systems also recently became central to making the British Library's 'Broadcast News' service available for public use in their reading rooms. The system uses Cambridge Imaging Systems' Orbital Enterprise Video Recorder and Imagen software to record, store and index news content and provide a powerful research tool for researchers and the general public.
Barry Pegg concluded, “Cambridge Imaging Systems has many powerful and flexible tools, such as Imagen and Orbital that are perfect for modern day media management. Their systems and solutions are particularly suited to ever-growing media requirements of the Asia Pacific region.”