BBC Monitoring select Optibase solution

BBC Monitoring (BBCM), a supplier of news and information from mass media around the world, has selected Optibase, a provider of streaming media solutions, to provide its TV streaming platform for use in its advanced monitoring system.
BBCM operates around the clock to monitor more than 3,000 radio, TV, print, Internet and news agency sources, translating from up to 100 languages. This extensive and growing range of sources enables BBCM to provide distinctive, authoritative and reliable coverage of political and economic news to its subscribers, consisting of government departments, journalists, academics and businesses with international interests.
BBCM partnered with Cambridge Imaging Systems to create a system that would simultaneously deliver live TV and audio channels to up to 120 users on the BBC Monitoring network.
The requirements were professional encoding of 5Mbit MPEG-2 video that satisfies the demanding requirements of government and news broadcast customers. The video streams are multicast to ensure that that the network is used efficiently and a sophisticated scheduling application ensures that the streams are started and stopped at the appropriate times and are correctly identified to the end user. Imagen storage severs are connected to the network and are able to provide 4 TerraBytes of space for 36 hours of video and audio streams before the data is purged.
Cambridge Imaging Systems chose Optibase’s MGW 2000 TV streaming platform to complement the Imagen technology. “We needed quality encoding that was reliable 24/7 with no single point of failure and a well-supported software developer’s kit. Optibase’s MGW 2000 was a perfect fit,” said Paul McConkey, Managing Director, Cambridge Imaging.
BBC Monitoring’s head of Technology Kevin Ryan said the project was a solid foundation for future development that provided customers with a high quality multimedia based service.
Optibase’s MGW 2000 is a multichannel MPEG-1 & -2 TV streaming platform designed to enable large companies and organizations to deliver high-quality video communications over IP-based networks. The MGW 2000 can encode up to six live channels in realtime to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 and then stream over an IP network in multicast or unicast mode.
Compatible streaming software creates a complete video-on-demand and playback solution for applications such as training, news distribution and corporate communications.
(SP)