Signiant Chosen By Siemens For BBC Digital Media Initiative

Signiant Inc, a leading developer of digital media distribution management solutions for the telco, media and entertainment industries, is proud to announce that its Digital Media Distribution Management Suite (DMDMS) has been selected by Siemens as a core component for the forthcoming BBC Digital Media Initiative.
Siemens is providing the integration and delivery services for the provision of the Digital Media Initiative within the corporation and after an extensive consultation process where many solutions were investigated and tested, Signiant was identified as the most suitable and relevant technology to enable the Media Mover component. The Digital Media Initiative will provide the broadcaster with a flexible, multiplatform-enabled, digital production capability with the associated technology infrastructure.
David Nortier, Managing Director of Signiant Europe, said: "We are delighted to be working with Siemens on this exciting initiative, which will transform the way content is created and delivered to multiple platforms. Signiant's technology will play a key role in the move away from costly, time-consuming and environmentally unsound tape-based workflows to file-based digital production."
Media Mover is an infrastructural component of the DMI architecture, which will manage effective movement of media across the BBC network by throttling transfer rates based on priority and available bandwidth. This component will be enabled using the Signiant DMDMS and, in this first phase of the DMI, will be used for two main purposes.
Firstly, the DMI will exploit the Signiant SOA Interface (Simple Object Access protocol) to manage, prioritise and accelerate the movement of media between the BBC Archive (the central repository for the corporation's digital assets and related asset information) and the Work In Progress Library (a client application that allows users to ingest and retrieve content and perform logging, local searching, storyboarding and synchronisation retrievals) across all sites within the BBC Network. This will allow multi-platform programme making teams to work together throughout the production lifecycle, providing instant access to the work-in progress content.
Secondly, the Signiant DMDMS will be used for the bundling, packaging and distribution of video, audio and graphics material to the various broadcast platforms. Signiant's Adaptive Policy Engine will be used to perform digital media transfers based on business rules to ensure that the highest priority items are assigned the appropriate levels of networking bandwidth and priority within the file-based workflow.
Founded in 2000, Signiant is headquartered in Burlington, MA with development facilities in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and offices in New York, Los Angeles and Manchester. Further information is available at: www.signiant.com.
(KMcA/JM)