Deluxe Acquires Assets Of ITFC

An entertainment services group has acquired the business and assets of ITFC, a leading provider of post production, content management, authoring, media access and asset management services to the UK and European television and cinema industry.
Chris Higgs will continue as Managing Director of Deluxe Entertainment Services Group.
ITFC’s expertise covers the entire spectrum of broadcast content. The business provides editing across a wide variety of formats including HD, and offers mastering and duplication services from legacy formats such as Digital Betacam, Betacam SP and 1"C. Content management services include quality assurance, file transfers, encoding and transcoding, metadata capture and digitisation of assets prior to delivery online and across a variety of media platforms, in addition to standards and aspect ratio conversions. ITFC's asset management services involve storage and delivery of content in a number of formats for broadcast, online distribution and cinema release.
ITFC's media access services are well known in the industry and include approximately 38,000 hours of subtitling each year for major UK and European broadcasters including ITV, Five, Virgin Media Television, GMTV and RTÉ. It provides cinema subtitles for 35mm and digital release, together with subtitling for home entertainment and online corporate video.
ITFC is also an acknowledged expert in audio description services for blind and partially sighted audiences, successfully delivering more than 2,000 hours each year for transmission by UK broadcasters. The ITFC team is proud to have pioneered the use of audio description in feature films for UK cinema release, a technology that has now been extended to Blu-ray and DVD.
"I am very pleased to welcome Chris and the ITFC team to the Deluxe family. The ITFC business has a tremendous reputation and I am sure that the broad range of skills and expertise acquired by Deluxe will help us to deliver a fantastic range of added value services to our clients," commented Ken Biggins, Deluxe’s European Managing Director.
Chris Higgs, ITFC's Managing Director added: "We are excited about joining Deluxe and look forward to working with them to further expand our services to customers."
(BMcN/KMcA)