Volicon Expands Digital Video Systems

Volicon has announced a significant expansion of its award-winning Observer family of digital video logging and monitoring systems.
At the 2010 NAB Show, the company will unveil a new product family that includes three versions of the Observer: Observer Professional, targeted for budget-conscious television stations and companies that require streamlined features and workflows for scheduled recording, searching media mentions, and clipping for quick export; Observer Enterprise for larger broadcasting networks that require 24x7 multichannel media monitoring and compliance logging; and Observer Enterprise Plus for the largest and most complex editorial production facilities that require multiple bit rates and resolutions for high-resolution finishing.
At the same time, Volicon will introduce a streamlined user interface for the Mac and Windows platforms and expanded Web browser support, plus enhancements to the Observer's search capabilities and the Scheduled Recording Module.
"For broadcast facilities of all sizes, the Observer brings new levels of efficiency to tasks as varied as troubleshooting transmissions, ensuring compliance, verifying advertising, and analyzing demographic viewer ratings for each channel being monitored," said Michael Asebrook, Senior Marketing Product Manager for Volicon.
"As we've learned from our customers, different organizations have different monitoring requirements depending on their size, platform, and the complexity of their workflows. With the new product family, our customers can now select the Observer version that's the best match to their operation and budget.
"The new features from the expanded Observer family of products will provide an unsurpassed level of portability and productivity to a wide range of user workflows within broadcast organizations."
The Observer Professional is Volicon's new offering for budget-conscious television stations and companies that require quick and easy scheduling, recording, and searching to support simplified media monitoring workflows.
A key feature of the Observer Professional is Volicon's new streamlined user interface, based on the latest Microsoft Silverlight technology. This new version will support the Windows and Mac operating systems, as well as Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox Web browsers, and boasts integrated capabilities for exporting video files to h.264, Flash, or MPEG-4 formats.
It also features the latest enhancements to the Observer's search capabilities, including advanced Boolean search queries, auto-complete search of recorded closed-captioned text embedded in the video stream, and a folder categorization tree that enables collaborative groups to organize and share bookmarked video clips.
It also supports one- to four-channel inputs and up to five concurrent users, and it offers up to 90 days of storage for archived video.
In addition, the Observer Professional includes a revamped EPG (electronic programming guide)-based Scheduled Recording Module for scheduled, selective recording of specific broadcast channels within designated time periods.
The Observer Enterprise includes integrated Nielsen Ratings for side-by-side competitive analysis based on viewership, and it also supports Volicon's optional Content Matching and Producer modules for audio fingerprinting and content repurposing workflows. The system supports monitoring of unlimited channels and unlimited user access, offers inputs for analog, SD-SDI, and HD-SDI sources, and provides up to two years of storage.
The Observer Enterprise Plus builds upon on the robust functionality of the Observer Enterprise solution to support high-resolution editorial workflows in large production facilities.
The system includes a unique capture card that enables dual encoding of full-frame HD (1280x720, 6 to 9 Mbps) and a corresponding low-resolution SD proxy (320x240, 384 to 512 kbps) for efficient network bandwidth browse editing and high-resolution conformance. It provides a fully integrated, automated transcoding engine that converts Observer-based broadcast content to more than 40 codecs and containers for easy import to industry-standard nonlinear editing systems, Web sites, video servers, and mobile applications.
The system offers multi-bit-rate encoding from a single input, and it includes inputs for analog, SD-SDI, and HD-SDI sources, plus composite and component I/O for RF inputs into a wide range of supported set-top boxes.
(BMcC/GK)