Technology And Engineering Emmy Award Presented To XOrbit

The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) presented XOrbit and Scripps Networks with a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award at its 60th annual awards ceremony last week, held in Las Vegas in conjunction with the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show.
The Emmy Award recognises an installation of XOrbit's Proof Positive live-to-air content delivery confirmation system at Scripps Networks that instantly validates the correct delivery of content from the cable network's operations centre directly into the viewer's home.
The Emmy Award recognition of ProofPositive is the latest in a long series of innovations that have distinguished XOrbit as a leading developer of caption automation, management and distribution systems for the broadcasting, cable and new media industries.
ProofPositive was developed when Scripps Networks, producer of well-known television brands, such as HGTV, Food Network, DIY Network, Fine Living Network and Great American Country, approached XOrbit with a growing need to validate the playback of its content in various locations.
ProofPositive takes a breakthrough approach to playlist reconciliation by identifying particular attributes of the master signal and comparing them to signals in over 200 cities around the country, without adding watermarks or signal modifications. If a delivered signal does not match the master broadcast stream, the system automatically emails an error notification to the cable network.
ProofPositive's unique, patent-pending technology adapts to variations in time zones, transmission delays and other timing issues, while performing frame-by-frame analysis using less bandwidth than a dial-up modem - enabling the systems to be placed just about anywhere.
Founded in 1996 by President Steven Blumenschein, XOrbit's first project was a component in the world's 53rd-largest client/server system, built for National Public Radio.
Over the past 12 years, Blumenschein has focused XOrbit on streamlining the closed captioning process for broadcasters - an emphasis that grew after the company completed captioning projects for Turner Entertainment Networks and the National Captioning Institute.
In 2003, Turner received an Emmy Award for its use of XOrbit's first product effort, which later became the company's UltraCast caption automation system. Since then, Blumenschein has led the company through numerous other captioning product innovations including the RTX remote and live captioning system, the Xilex MPEG file caption encoding system and the upcoming AdSmart system.
Blumenschein said: "It was indeed an honour to accept the Emmy Award together with our partner, Scripps Networks, at such a high-visibility forum as the Consumer Electronics Show. The Emmy is valuable recognition of ProofPositive's groundbreaking ability to validate delivery of all types of content, which has become a critical capability for broadcasters as they strive to provide an overall higher-quality viewing experience."
Launched in 1948, the Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards honour development and innovation in broadcast technology and recognise companies, organisations and individuals for breakthroughs in technology that have a significant effect on television engineering.
Further information is available at: www.xorbit.com.
(KMcA/BMcC)