Pharos Reports Continuing Trend Towards Specialised TV Channels
Pharos Communications reports a successful 2004
Pharos Communications reports a successful 2004 with broadcasting continuing its trend towards highly-targeted channels looking to reach a small demographic. This development mirrors changes in the magazine publishing industry where new technology has enabled the production of titles based on tightly- defined themes for specific groups. Broad-spectrum channels are in turn increasingly using television as a means to offer a product or specialised service to the viewer.
The currrent focus at Pharos is on smarter media publishing for production facilities, broadcasters and playout networks. All Pharos software solutions are designed with inherent reliability and the ability to monitor and maintain large networked systems. Pharos has also concentrated development on easing the deployment of user interfaces to a large number of users and increasing the facilities for remote working.
Pharos' new Mediator RI is a remote ingest system that allows off-site creative staff to contribute finished material to the broadcast centre via FTP rather than putting a tape on a bike. It is a complete 1U encoding station which can be configured and monitored remotely; ideal for network service providers who need to locate these units with individual channels.
Pharos Audio Server is the company's highly successful networked audio file management system for radio and television. Pharos has integrated Adobe Audition into the system to allow seamless audio editing, metadata handling and transcoding, local or remote.
A new development, Pilot Ria allows a facilities intranet to be used for real-time networked system control. Deployment is easy as the only software needed on the client machines is a web browser. Auto configure enables facilities with non-technical creative staff to create and modify basic panels and destination groupings, button icons can be assigned, based on the names. Customisation of the panels produced is then possible using the browser-based configuration editor.
A major advance in broadcast playout technology was introduced by Pharos at IBC 2004. Playtime iA (interActive) enables broadcasters to deliver dynamic presentation such as viewer- controlled games and vote-enabled content. Complex interactive audience-participation effects can be achieved reliably and efficiently under automated control. Playtime iA adds rules-based operation to Playtime' unique package principle. Broadcaster- definable rules-based tracks allow interactive non-linear presentation, offering tremendous creative opportunity to programme designers. Playtime iA combines dynamic viewer-responsive presentation with reduced overall production costs. Next event to air can be based on aggregated audience feedback or other data.
The move towards distributed systems with remote access is creating exciting opportunities to rationalise operations and grow output. Pharos is creating systems to help customers realise these aspirations.
Major Pharos projects during 2004 have included a Playtime automation system to control end-credit playout of all UKTV's channels. This enables BBC Broadcast's Playout and Media Services staff to initiate end-credit digital video effects and audio transition sequences cross-promoting programming across the entire UKTV network. We supplied a Playtime presentation control system to price-drop.tv; and Digital Interactive TV Group ordered its second Playtime.
In addition to supplying a new automated scheduling system for BBC World Service, Pharos enabled major savings to be achieved in the time taken to produce between-programme announcements. Pharos ingest equipment converts incoming content from CD at 14x real time into 48 kHz BWAV format. Pharos has integrated Adobe Audition into the system to allow seamless audio editing, metadata handling and transcoding, local or remote. The edited BWAV file is then exported into a Pharos Audio Server. A Pharos Audio Server system was also chosen as the central audio storage resource for the Playout facilities at the Broadcast Centre in White City, home of BBC Broadcast.
ITV ordered an expanded Pharos Audio Server system as the core of new voiceover recording facilities at the Southern Transmission Centre on London's South Bank. This new resource enables voiceover presenters to create audio interstitials for the ITV1 network and regions, as well as for ITV2 and the new ITV3, all played out under the control of the transmission automation system.
Published on 13 Dec 2004