Las Vegas, April 11, 2010

IPV, a global leader and largest independent supplier of low bitrate, frame-accurate video technology to the broadcast and professional video sectors, is installing its Curator tapeless workflow solution at Infront Italy to provide greater flexibility for its entire sports production workflow — from ingest to transmission. A division of Infront Sports & Media AG, the international full service sports marketing company based in Switzerland, Infront Italy handles the rights for the Italian football league (Lega Calcio), Italy’s football governing body that permits the transmission of digital archive football materials to Italian broadcasters.

Part of an integrated workflow based on Harris® Invenio® digital asset management, NEXIO® servers, Velocity ESX™ editing, and ADC™ playout automation, Infront Italy is commissioning the IPV Curator system during the current Italian football league season. The system is being installed by Italian systems integrator, Media Design and is expected to go on air in late August 2010 at the start of the new football season.

At Infront Italy live material will be ingested onto Harris NEXIO servers and logged using the Invenio digital asset management system. This rich metadata can then be searched by users across the operation to find a particular scene or information they require to produce the programme package. The IPV Process Engine detects the presence of a file on the NEXIO SAN and simultaneously creates a live Curator production proxy, complete with the associated metadata about the file attached to each clip. These live clips are made available to the regional bureaus via a dedicated Internet streaming facility provided by Telecomm Italia. Using Curator operators at these regional bureaus can edit the material and create EDLs. The localised package can then be conformed using the NEXIO InstantOnline III™ (IOL) automatic conforming engine while Curator's XCode engine transcodes the finished piece for localised distribution or transmission using the Harris ADC playout automation system. Metadata for the completed item is then imported back into the Invenio system.

"In tests IPV’s Curator system has proved ideal for our fast-paced sports environment, as it allows users to log, access and review low-resolution material, in real-time, right at the desktop, and edit highlights packages quickly and easily," said a spokesperson from Infront Italy. "The Curator’s ability to attach metadata to the clips as they are being logged allows our operators to easily search and retrieve material at their desktop — ensuring faster throughput across the entire production workflow."

An affordable, proxy-based tapeless workflow environment running on both PC and Apple® Mac platforms, the Curator system is designed to allow communities of media professionals to add value to their content and efficiently fulfil tasks such as desktop editing media annotation, review and approve and general media browsing. It is a complete solution that can efficiently ingest, encode or transcode, at low bitrate, proxy SDI or file-based media, which can then be used concurrently by multiple users. Whatever the source of the material, the Curator version is guaranteed to be frame accurate at all times giving an unprecedented desktop experience.

"Curator is ideally suited to live applications such as news and sports — and the solution at Infront Italy is a prime example of how this system can provide the immediacy and flexibility required in a mission-critical live production environment," said Nigel Booth, Executive Vice President for Sales and Marketing at IPV. "Users like the simplicity of the system and the fact that they can access files, with the associated metadata, and easily manipulate these files right on the desktop — this is key to the wide acceptance of the system."

Infront enjoys successful partnerships with around 130 rights holders and hundreds of commercial partners worldwide. It now has more than 500 employees across 24 offices in 10 countries including Austria, China, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden and Switzerland.

About IPV

For further press information please contact: