Proven deployments, product enhancements, and collaborative partnerships yield powerful, efficient production platform

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – April 10, 2010 – At its 2010 NAB Show press conference today, Omneon Inc. unveiled new components and enhancements across its product line, along with key production application partnerships, that further extend the Omneon platform to support a broad range of production workflows. Building on successful deployments supporting news, sports, and studio production workflows at leading facilities around the globe, the enhanced Omneon platform offers users an optimized solution that supports the end-to-end production workflow.
“Our customers are being driven by business realities to simplify their workflows and leverage their video infrastructure more effectively in producing and distributing content,” said Geoff Stedman, senior vice president, marketing and business development at Omneon. “Supporting the production workflow in its entirety, the Omneon platform offers the best of Omneon storage and processing technology, as well as the interoperability to support the strengths of tightly integrated third-party systems. A series of enhancements to our products and ongoing work with both clients and partner vendors have contributed to the refinement of the Omneon production platform and its value in today’s demanding media workflows.”

Product Enhancements

Omneon has rolled out a series of new product components and system enhancements that together bring new levels of price/performance and capabilities to its customers.

–      A new Omneon Spectrum(TM) MediaDirector 2201 module delivers more channels and more IP bandwidth at the same price than the legacy MediaDirector 2102B model. This new MediaDirector is the second in the line of new MediaDirectors introduced last fall, offering industry-leading system bandwidth and price/performance.

–      The new Omneon MediaGrid(TM) ContentServer 2124 combines with the latest release of MediaGrid software, V2.3, to deliver industry-leading performance and exceptional cost-efficiency for high-bandwidth production workflows. The smallest Omneon MediaGrid system with just three ContentServer 2124 systems can deliver up to 1GB/sec in bandwidth, support up to 100 simultaneous Final Cut Pro(R) editors, and natively host transcoding and QC applications.

–      The company’s Spectrum(TM) and MediaDeck(TM) System software release V6.1 adds support for the MediaDirector 2201 while contributing new capabilities including support for recording XDCAM(R) HD compliant with Sony’s RDD9 standard.

–      Omneon ProXplore(TM) simplifies workflows by automatically harvesting and clearly presenting key metadata such as format, bit rate, resolution, and aspect ratio. Intelligent rules and notifications facilitate the movement of media through production workflows with minimal manual intervention, tracking content through its lifecycle and improving efficiency across the workflow. Using business rules built into the platform and using Omneon ProXchange(TM) for transcoding, ProXplore automatically formats content as required for the next step or user in the production workflow.
 

Deployments Across Markets and Workflows

In a deployment at NY1 News, the Omneon production platform supports a news workflow along with a Dalet Enterprise Edition installation, Chyron CG applications, Apple(R) Final Cut Pro editing workgroups, and a VCI traffic system to ensure seamless media lifecycle from ingest to archive.

In a studio production setting, the Omneon platform has been implemented by Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) to establish a highly efficient, fully file-based workflow from ingest through to transmission. Media is ingested via the broadcaster’s Spectrum media server and made available on the Omneon MediaGrid system, which in turn is connected to Final Cut Pro edit stations. This configuration enables an edit-in-place workflow that eliminates time-consuming media transfers and gives NDR staff simultaneous access to the local material and shared elements required for production.

Omneon also provided a platform for NBC Olympics’ production of the Winter Games in Vancouver. Integrated with the high-performance EVS XT[2] production server, the Omneon platform enabled fast, seamless access to high volumes of HD media in live and near-live broadcast production. The platform also provided transcoding of files finished in Vancouver, high-speed content delivery to New York, and staging in New York for distribution to the network’s new media outlets.

More information about Omneon products and solutions is available at www.omneon.com.