Microsoft Interactive Media Manager Gains Traction as a Platform for Media Management
07/09/2007 06:16
PR Newswire
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, September 7 /PRNewswire/ --
- Italian broadcaster RAI to join early adopter programme; new partners
help expand capabilities to help simplify user experience and better utilise
existing technology investments within the work flow process.
Today at IBC2007, Microsoft Corp announced a new early adopter customer
and an expanded partner ecosystem for Microsoft(R) Interactive Media Manager
(IMM). Italian broadcaster RAI has joined the Technology Adoption Program for
IMM, which will enable RAI to manage the media work flow process as it
digitises assets for viewing over the web through a variety of screens and
devices. Also, Microsoft is making an expanded set of capabilities available
to media companies in conjunction with IMM. To deliver these capabilities,
Microsoft has forged relationships with independent software vendors (ISVs)
including FileCatalyst, Marquis Broadcast Ltd, Rhozet and TeleStream Inc, and
system integrators (SIs) such as Accenture, Ascentium Corp, The Computer
Merchant Ltd, Intellinet Corp, SpeakTECH and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000822/MSFTLOGO)
RAI will use IMM as a media management solution for digitising assets
from tape and MXF files and outputting the digitised files into a storage
area network. IMM provides RAI with the ability to search and browse assets
after they have been ingested, a mechanism for streamlining the review and
approval process and reporting functionality.
"Broadcasting has quickly evolved from distributing a single asset
through a single medium to a well-defined audience to now needing to fully
monetise that single asset over a variety of mediums. That change in the
business model has a tremendous impact on how we treat content in the back
office," said Robert Cecatto, head of engineering RAI TV Production.
"Microsoft has been forward- looking in trying to help organisations such as
ours identify technology solutions to the new challenges we face in the
digital age."
New and expanded features enabled through these alliances, such as fast
and efficient file transfer, real-time media encoding and edit decision list
(EDL)/sequence transfer, will help improve and simplify the user experience
and allow media companies to easily utilise existing technology investments
within the work flow process. The new offerings, from many of the leading
companies in the media and entertainment industry, demonstrate the important
role that IMM provides as a central hub for the media work flow process and
platform.
"The interest we've received from the media industry since our initial
launch at the NAB2007 conference in April has been tremendous," said Gabriele
Di Piazza, managing director for Media & Entertainment in the Communications
Sector at Microsoft. "The support that we're announcing today is an important
validation that the media industry recognises the value IMM provides in
simplifying the digital content life cycle by connecting people, processes
and rich content."
IMM is a server-based solution that provides a web-based interface for
accessing and interacting with media files. An extension of Microsoft Office
SharePoint(R) Server 2007, IMM provides powerful tools for quickly building
complex work flows, monitoring the performance of those work flows, and
facilitating the reviews and approvals in the work flow process. For example,
via a common user interface a company can utilise IMM to connect a variety of
activities, starting with the ingest of content from tape to an automated,
pre-defined transcode session and moving through the review and approval
process. IMM automates many of the manual processes that often are the
bottleneck of productivity, while helping ensure the inclusion of human-based
work flow activities.
IMM Integration With ISV Products
IMM is highly interoperable with top-tier partner applications and
services that many media companies already have in place. The following ISV
partners are currently building adapters to integrate their systems or
products with the IMM platform:
-- FileCatalyst. FileCatalyst enables a company to "upload" files of
unlimited size to the IMM-attached storage area network. With the
right security, reliability and bandwidth appropriation, a company can
enable file import, transfer and delivery in line with its established
work flows and day-to-day operations.
-- Marquis Medway. The Marquis Medway media highway system works to
provide seamless integration of media files between post-production
(Avid solutions, Apple Final Cut Pro and/or Adobe Premiere) and
broadcasting systems, irrespective of hardware and software platforms.
With Marquis Medway integrated with IMM, users have the freedom to
utilise best-of-breed systems and can enable the seamless flow of
media and metadata.
-- Rhozet Carbon Coder. Rhozet enables IMM customers to automate
transcoding activities in an open, accessible application programming
interface. An end user initiates a job to be sent to the Carbon Coder
without leaving the familiar, extensible user interface of IMM. The
newly available IMM extension to Rhozet's Carbon Coder helps decrease
time to market and ease of integration by bringing together the asset
management platform and the transcoding server.
-- TeleStream Pipeline. By integrating IMM with Pipeline, companies with
a dedicated transcoding engine can initiate work flows rapidly with
direct access to control tape-based ingest units through the network,
and then trigger a series of activities once encoding is complete via
managed IMM work flows. This allows tight integration across multiple
job types and systems, helping to speed up the entire work flow
process because IMM begins to automate processes directly upon ingest.
Additional SI Partners Help Deploy IMM
SIs are critical to enabling a smooth, productive deployment experience.
Microsoft works closely with its SI partners to help ensure they have the
information and training required to deploy the IMM solution and can meet the
demands of customer requirements. This includes the development of a
comprehensive software development kit, which includes the following:
-- Tools enabling advanced, custom web parts to be developed
-- Easy developer interaction with RDF metadata repository
-- Scenario-based work flow templates
-- Guidance about common IMM deployment tasks
-- Reference information for external sources about relevant, integrated
technologies such as SharePoint, SQL Server(TM), .NET, work flow,
RDF/OWL/SPARQL, AJAX and all partner application extensions
More information about Interactive Media Manager can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/imm or by visiting the Microsoft booth in the Topaz
stand at the RAI Congress Centre at IBC2007.
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