Michel Proulx
Q. What kind of products or services does your company offer for broadcasters?
Miranda provides a wide range of solutions for production, playout, and delivery-to-home applications for broadcasters and pay TV operators. This includes infrastructure systems, playout for linear and on-demand television, master control and graphics, as well as monitoring systems.
Q. What's new that you will you show at the NAB Show and that TV broadcasters should look for there?
We'll be highlighting new playout solutions which streamline traditional, linear television delivery, and also address the demand for more efficient file publishing for VOD.
Our new, fully integrated IT-based playout solution is called the Playout Glass Cockpit. It combines highly automated, multi-format content delivery, with rich graphics and advanced monitoring systems. It's based our iTX IT-based automated playout, with new graphics authoring and rendering capabilities. The iTX system is tightly integrated with our Kaleido multi-viewers, and our iControl Playout Manager facility monitoring. With this system, control room operators can monitor more channels with greater effectiveness, and also respond more rapidly to any signal problems.
In addition to minimizing the cost of linear television channels, our playout solution also provides highly automated VOD publishing for non-linear platforms, including cable, satellite and IPTV VOD, as well as web-based delivery and mobile platforms. Broadcasters can instantly convert their on-air content into non-linear assets, complete with rich graphics for proper branding of non-linear content. Importantly, this VOD solution also provides Nielsen watermarks, and this allows non-linear content viewing to count towards overall Nielsen ratings.
Q. How is your new product offering different from what's available on the market?
Our Playout Glass Cockpit brings together many of our most advanced products to deliver outstanding cost and workflow efficiencies for linear and on-demand television. Facilities can improve their channel to operator ratios, while also increasing their overall quality of service, and decreasing the Mean Time to Repair when problems occur. They also benefit from much greater operational agility, with the ability to quickly add more channels and support new formats.
The tight integration of VOD publishing within the iTX automated playout system also allows broadcasters to instantly share assets and playlists across both linear and non-linear delivery. In essence, this next generation solution allows broadcasters to air more channels, and deal with emerging non-linear delivery requirements, while lowering their operational costs.
Q. Where are you based, and how many employees do you have? Anything else we should know about your company?
We employ approximately 680 people at our Montreal headquarters and at our global facilities located in Wallingford and Loughborough (UK), Denver (Colorado, USA), Grass Valley (California, USA), Paris (France), Tokyo (Japan), Zaltbommel (Netherlands), Dubai (United Arab Emirates), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Singapore, Beijing (China) and Hong Kong. In September 2010, Miranda acquired OmniBus Systems Limited, the UK-based pioneer of IT-based automated playout solutions. Miranda is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
