[AV Media Matters] IBC

[Jim Lindner <jim@vidipax.com>]

It has been pretty quiet on the list lately - I thought I might inspire
a few postings by asking those of you who went to IBC what you thought
was particulary interesting or "surprising". There were several things
that I found very interesting, here are a couple:

1. My vote for the smallest booth with the smallest crowd stuck in a
corner with a neat product goes to Siemans. Yeah - Siemans - no
misprint. They have an extremely interesting voice to text product that
ties into a very interesting shot cataloging system that they have
developed which also ties to a digital asset management product that
they also developed. Of course you can never totally tell with demo's
but this is the FIRST speech to text that I have seen that does NOT have
training that has a level of accuracy that is high enough to be worth
anything. Their shot detection uses some different approaches that is
also extremely interesting and even accurate - and the digital asset
management package looks very interesting. A total surprise. For those
of you investigating Digital Asset Management software - add Siemans to
the list to look at.

2. Who ever thought that "archives" would be a buzz word? It seemed that
every booth either had something relating to streaming for archives or
something relating to archive or station management or had an "end to
end" solution. But suddenly archives are a market. I am afraid this is a
good news / bad news story. The good news is that people are interested
in the potential of the archives and using new technology - the bad news
is that most vendors really knew NOTHING about archives at all, all they
had was a tool built around the way they "thought" archives worked.
Nevertheless it is a very interesting turn of events. AND it was very
interesting to see how people used different technologies for archival
applications.

3. My vote for the biggest booth with the heaviest "iron" with the
coolest technology that I would have passed before and I am glad I
diddn't....is.....  EMC. Wow some really incredible technology. I
particularly like the way they are approaching fast serving multiple
streams, and their independance of applications and even operating
systems to a certain extent. I could have spent the whole show at their
booth. I saw a prototype set top box for video on demand with an mpeg2
stream - they had figured out a way to simulate fast forward, rewind,
and pause - of course mpeg2 "can't do that". They explained how they did
it - but it was very fast - I believe that they created derivative
streams for each "function" but it worked in real time and looked very
nice, and then they switched streams - but how ever they did it - wow.
This is the first time I have seen a video on demand application that I
believe could really work in the real world with the type of network
topology that exists in the real world where networks were made for
telco communication - not video on demand. Now I have seen MANY video on
demand "products" but most of them are really limited to hotel
applications or small networks - this demonstration turned my head - but
then again it was a trade show and it was a DEMO, so we will have to see
what it would really do with 50,000 people also hitting fast forward at
once. But video on demand was only one of around 10 different
applications they were running in the booth. I can't wait to see what
they have at NAB. BTW for those of you who know him - another surprise
at the booth was that Paul Glasgow has left Sony and joined EMC. We all
wish him the best.

Jim Lindner - President
VidiPax - The Magnetic Media and Information Migration Full Services
Company
Telephone 212-563-1999
www.vidipax.com
Moderator of A/V Media Matters@topica.com