Projects we’ve undertaken for clients and in-house developments

We have a development team and so have made specific solutions for our clients. This means we have both IP and highly technical IT and broadcast development capabilities which we can bring to bare on any requirements you may  have.

Transcoder

We call our Transcoder Chameleon. It has the capability to transform any assets to new ones for any target device. Designed, built and tested at BCi from the ground up, it benefits from years of BCi broadcast experience. This means it meets the needs, ease of use and scalability of any demanding customer.

Built on our own internal Asset Management System, AMSware, it benefits from a fully managed and easy to use workflow solution.

We offer two versions. A stand alone solution installed on a single server machine, and a Gold Enterprise version running over multiple machines and built to client requirements. Both solutions are easily managed and operated via a management portal and a user / job submission portal.

Realms

Chameleon understands realms. A realm is a transcoding resource that can be allocated to a specific user. For example, if a user has certain jobs he/or she must do on a regular basis this can guarantee that some other user doesn’t take up all the resource at a particular time. A realm can be allocated to a particular user, or can be set to automatic. In which case it is available to any user on a first come first served basis.

Nodes

A node is an instance of a transcoder. A realm can be allocated one or more nodes at system configuration.

ESB (Enterprise Service Bus)

Our workflow backbone is centred on a best of breed Enterprise Service Bus. This facilitates the integration of meta data, asset management and transcoder essence input and output files. Input files are carefully checked to make sure they contain all required data formats prior to being put together (of multiple inputs) to produce the desired output.

Management

Not only are individual jobs carefully managed, but the complete system is also monitored for health and usage. As the system is operated, it can be seen if the usage trend is going up, and if so the client can take steps to upgrade and so avoid future resource issues at possible critical times.

Please contact us to arrange an informal meeting to see how we can help you with  your needs – contact us

AMS ware

AMSware is our broadcast data flow solution.  We adopt a plug and play building block approach

• Metadata based workflows
• Central Message bus (ESB)
• Functionally configurable
• Highly scalable

Message driven Architecture

Key is the message driven architecture built around an industry standard bus. This means systems can very easily be built to suit exacting customer needs and yet remain flexible and scalable to meet just about any unforeseen future requirements.

Inherent in this design is the ability to interface to a host of third party tools and have excellent reporting and system management.

Unique Insights

As a leading systems integrator and consultancy service  for broadcast related systems we have unique insights into the operational requirements of real production asset management systems. Utilizing this knowledge we’ve built, from the ground up, our own AMSWare solution. The two most important points guiding our design have been the following:

1. We’ve seen the failings of other (often very expensive) asset management systems actually in production.
2. Our system takes into consideration the REAL needs of our broadcast clients

BCi AMSware is a flexible toolset and set of reference designs used for building workflow solutions in the Asset Management Systems space. The product is of particular use in the Broadcast and Content Delivery sectors where customers frequently have a need to process large amounts of content for a number of broadcast related purposes such as linear transmission, ingest into a CMS, QA, CA, DRM, transcode and distribution. AMSWare facilitates the building of workflow based solutions that support these types of operations and allows easy customization of these flows as needs change.

In a nutshell:

• Best of breed Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) implementation using the MuleSoft platform (as used in many large scale deployments around the world)
• The message-driven architecture is implemented on the well-established Apache ActiveMQ JMS implementation.
• This offers good performance and stability as well as interoperability with other systems.
• It is by virtue of its loosely-coupled message-driven nature, allows for good scalability and
• resilience through the use of clustered servers.
• It ships with many ready-made adapters to industry standard tools and subsystems such as transcoders, QC servers, encoders and decoders.
• This facilitates the easy exploitation of these tools’ services in AMSWare workflows.
• The AMSWare adapters provide a simple to use interface to these services in AMSWare flows.
• AMSWare ships with tools and schemata allowing the translation of many industry-standard (and other) metadata definitions into common formats for use in workflows.
• AMSWare ships with a number of reference implementations showcasing the use of this technology in typical broadcast content-processing scenarios.
• These examples can be used as the basis for building customized solutions for specific customer needs.
• AMSWare ships with a number of template components for dashboard functionality.
• This can be customized to provide focused relevant information on system health and throughput.
• BCi will work with the customer supplying consultation and support to build a customized solution based on this technology

further information

Please contact us to arrange an informal meeting to see how we can help you with  your needs – contact us

Data Analytics (see our blogs on this subject  here)

We’ve been working for our clients on various projects and have our own IP in various areas. One of which is in data analytics. Data is input from the various sources such as:

• RSS feeds
• Twitter
• Broadcast TV

We can then craft reports based on customer needs. Due to our broadcast strength we ingest various UK TV channels data, via subtitles and store onto our servers.

We have capability to develop bespoke solutions based on this technology, or bolt on functionality to our clients’ other data analytics solutions.

Please contact us to arrange an informal meeting to see how we can help you with  your needs – contact us

Fingerprinting

We have in house technology that can accurately identify audio. We can identify if audio is music or other and can fingerprint video and audio content.

If your requirement is to identify content already out there, or to embed a fingerprint within content prior to broadcast we can certainly help.

Please contact us to arrange an informal meeting to see how we can help you with  your needs – contact us

On Demand Test Suite

A system to manage and test with thousands of simulated STBs prior to deployment.

Our ODTS allows the simulation of  as many set-top-boxes as you’d like. ODTS supports accurate logging and performance reporting. It consists of:

• User Interface (Interaction manager)
• Device Modeller (Models devices and protocols)
• Client Modeller (Models STB communications / STB performs as normal, trick modes and all..)
• Communications Modeller (Communications Protocol management)
• JIT Command Compiler (Compiles communications commands based on platform behavior)
• Protocol Engine (Protocol stack management)

This was a system developed for one of our clients. Please let us know if we can develop or tailor something similar for your needs.

Please contact us to arrange an informal meeting to see how we can help you with  your needs – contact us