At IBC 2011, Miranda Technologies launched Enterprise Suite, a set of signal processing software tools that streamline content preparation for broadcast playout and VOD publishing.
Michel Proulx, Chief Technology Officer at Miranda, said one of the key challenges facing playout operators today is streamlining “back-end” operations and reducing 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,” Proulx said. “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 it 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 signaling and Nielsen watermarking.
