Darmstadt, Germany / Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 13, 2002 – Software AG will showcase a new content management solution for managing audio-visual content, such as video and audio clips, at the IBC 2002 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. ViA2 Platform (Video Analysis & Annotation platform) was developed by Barcelona-based Visual Century and uses Software AG’s Tamino XML Server to store video and audio files on the basis of XML descriptions.
This application addresses target groups such as television production studios, regional and international television stations, libraries and museums that employ video archives, schools, universities and security companies that work with video surveillance systems. Software AG and Visual Century will be presenting their new solution at Software AG’s stand (129) in Hall 9, in the Media Asset Management Village. IBC (www.ibc.org) is the most important European broadcasting convention and will take place in Amsterdam on September 13-17, 2002.
"Our ViA2 Platform caters perfectly to the demands of the media industry. Enterprises involved in this industry today need to have access to enormous amounts of video and audio files. Our technology supports companies and organizations in efficiently producing and publishing target-group-oriented video material," explains Marc Puig, General Manager of Visual Century.
Thomas Zanzinger, Director of ISV and OEM channels at Software AG, adds, "XML technology and our Tamino XML Server are ideal complements to the Visual Century solution. XML lays the groundwork for leveraging existing content within a company for further areas of application, thereby creating additional revenue potential."
Innovation with XML
In today’s media world, sound and video can no longer be ignored as means of communication. Managing these multimedia files requires ever more efficient and powerful software applications. Rich media asset management solutions such as ViA2 Platform help to manage and publish these numerous video and audio files. The XML standard is used to store meta data that is needed to describe video sequences. Meta data can include information such as time codes, author, owner, or even complete descriptions of a sequence’s content. Only since the advent of XML has it been possible to store this data across enterprises in a standard way that can be understood by other software solutions and can make the data available for further processing.
ViA2 Platform for rich media asset management
The ViA2 Platform software package developed by Visual Century consists of three components. TvIngest is used for the first part of a typical workflow, in which the application automatically digitizes video material and furnishes it with meta data for indexing purposes. This process is executed largely independently. TvIngest can, for example, recognize text and subtitles in moving images automatically, recognize key words in spoken text and identify individual people through integrated face or speech recognition. TvIngest also automatically recognizes music used in films as well as product and television station logos.
The Visual Annotation Tool supports users in indexing existing video material, using predefined forms. Finally, Visual Context Line allows the user to conduct time-saving searches based on key words to find video material. Software AG’s Tamino XML Server is vital to these processes. A native XML server, it efficiently stores all information as XML data and prepares it for further processing in these and other applications.
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