Imagine Communications, EVS team up to deliver new capabilities to live production facilities
Imagine Communications and EVS announced a partnership that embraces industry standards for IP signal distribution to deliver a best-of-breed, end-to-end solution for live production, slow motion and instant replay operations. The integrated solution will focus initially on utilizing the SMPTE 2022 and JPEG2000 (J2K) standards for moving and managing SDI and compressed signals over IP to bring increased agility and cost efficiencies to live production facilities, as well as helping to enable broadcasters to seamlessly transition to an all-IP ecosystem.
The alliance strengthens EVS’ global live enrichment offering, comprised of its video production and content management solutions, and Imagine Communications’ routing and processing platforms. The combined end-to-end solution is designed to deliver the reliability, quality, and performance that news, sports, and live production operations demand.
“As a true pioneer of live video replay and instant video enrichment, EVS has always been at the forefront of practical technology innovations offering real benefits to our clients,” says Muriel De Lathouwer, managing director and CEO, EVS. “Our open collaboration with other industry leaders such as Imagine Communications enables us to present our customers with comprehensive IP-based workflows relying on our legendary robustness and flexibility for future live operations.”
Shifting video consumption patterns and new competitive demands are putting increased pressure on media and entertainment companies to improve the quality, productivity and efficiencies of their production facilities. By embracing industry standards that enable multivendor interoperability and a gradual and pragmatic migration to next-generation technologies, broadcasters are able to build out future-proof facilities that deliver higher-quality content, are operationally efficient and possess the agility needed to pursue new monetization opportunities. The flexibility of IP also relieves live production environments of many of the architectural constraints of proprietary solutions, including dependency on inter-site connectivity for wide area workflows.
By leveraging industry standards to forge an end-to-end, best-of-breed solution, Imagine Communications and EVS are providing its customers with a seamless migration path to next-gen IP technologies. The joint solution creates a hybrid SDI-IP environment that allows media companies to preserve baseband investments and maintain operational transparency while benefitting from the performance and cost efficiencies of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) switching equipment.
“Imagine Communications is a champion of industry standards and the role they play in moving the industry toward next-gen technologies, including IP, software-defined networking and cloud, to deliver the agility and performance that media and entertainment companies require to compete today and in the future,” says Charlie Vogt, Imagine Communications CEO. “The partnership between our two companies is a meaningful first step toward realizing that goal. We look forward to working with EVS to supply our customers with the broadest range of standard-compliant products for signal distribution in the media industry.”
Imagine Communications and EVS will demonstrate the market-ready joint solution at IBC2015. The live demonstration, one of the first-ever of IP interoperability in a multivendor environment, will be conducted in Imagine Communications’ and EVS’ booths. The two companies will demonstrate live sports and slow-motion applications that utilize compressed and uncompressed SDI over IP video signals routed from remote venues to a centralized production center. The demonstration features the Imagine Communications Selenio MCP with SMPTE 2022 Uncompressed-Over-IP (UCIP) and J2K interfaces. The Imagine Communications Magellan SDN Orchestrator will simultaneously manage the routing and control of all IP and SDI signals. EVS’ XT3 media production server uses the new EVS XiP gateway to manage in/out SMPTE 2022 IP video signals with HD multicamera live feeds and highlights.