Sundance Digital Unveils Digital Delivery Management Engine

New Application Provides Cost-Effective Solution that Streamlines Workflow Transfer from Cache Servers to Broadcast Video Servers
Irving, TX, May 2008 — Sundance Digital, a part of Avid Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: AVID) and an award-winning provider of high-performance television automation solutions, today announced that it has unveiled the new Sundance Digital® Delivery Management Engine (DDME) – a cost-effective application that provides broadcasters, local stations, cable channels and cable origination operations with a streamlined solution for file-based ingest of third party material. DDME provides broadcasters with a significantly improved workflow by automatically enabling file-based media to be discovered and transferred under automation control. Now, even manual transfers can be executed with a simple “drag and drop.”

“Increasingly, media content is being delivered to broadcasters in file format, instead of video feeds or tape,” said Rick Stora, Product Manager at Sundance Digital. “Previously, operators had to either decode and dub the media or use a more expensive transcoding scheme to ingest into their video server – a costly process in terms of hardware, software and man-hours. The DDME solution can automate that routine, attaching the broadcast metadata to the media in the process, allowing broadcasters to create low-resolution proxies that can be monitored and used throughout their organization in a very cost-effective way. This is the type of New Thinking Avid has been talking about – it’s all about making life for our customers a bit easier.”

The DDME is a hardware extension of Sundance Digital’s widely accepted Digital Delivery Management System (DDMS), an easy-to-use tool that manages digital file transfers and metadata between cache and on-air video servers. The DDME presents a windowed view of the available cache material alongside the server database and provides a “drag and drop” method of executing the file transfer to the video server. Users can easily identify delivered content, tag it with traffic metadata, transcode and copy it to their playback server. Low-resolution proxy generation allows that media to be viewed by users outside of master control. Those low-resolution proxies can be generated in the same operation or separately by monitoring the video server. The clips can be accessed via Sundance Digital’s SalesView®, Program View or Web Inventory modules.

The DDME works in conjunction with Sundance Digital’s Titan™, FastBreak NXT Automation™ and FastBreak® NXT Entry Level Edition automation suites and incorporates Harmonic Inc.’s Rhozet® Carbon Coder™ as its video transcoding solution. Rhozet Carbon Coder is a universal transcoding application that facilitates the transfer of media between a variety of platforms, including acquisition, editing, playout, archive, the Internet and mobile devices.
© 2008 Avid Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Product features, specifications, systems requirements and availability are all subject to change without notice. Avid, Digidesign, Film Composer, M-Audio, Pinnacle Systems, Sibelius, Softimage, Sundance Digital, Fastbreak, FastBreak NXT Automation, SalesView and Titan are trademarks or registered trademarks of Avid Technology, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. Emmy is a registered trademark of ATAS/NATAS. Oscar is a trademark and service mark of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Grammy is a trademark of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.