Volicon Observer Delivers Workflow Efficiency and Real Time Public Information for City of Dallas
“We are extremely pleased with the efficiency of the Volicon Observer. It used to take our public information officers half their days to search, edit together, and deliver important news stories to the city manager. Now this process takes about an hour.”
The City of Dallas is using Volicon’s Observer multi-channel media monitoring system to keep public officials informed about key news stories pertaining to city services. Volicon, a provider of advanced solutions for efficient recording, archiving, and streaming of digital video, has greatly reduced the time spent by city staffers to research a news story.
“We are extremely pleased with the efficiency of the Volicon Observer. It used to take our public information officers half their days to search, edit together, and deliver important news stories to the city manager,” said Bennie Wilcox Jr., manager of the City of Dallas’ cable television systems. “Now this process takes about an hour.”
The City of Dallas had been recording and editing nine major channel feeds onto VHS. Its public information officers were assigned to monitor approximately two channels each. Every morning, they would spend hours jogging through the tape for stories on the city. Then, they would manually edit together the clips and deliver them to the city manager for viewing.
Wilcox decided the system could be improved and, on the advice of another engineer, chose the Volicon Observer. The Observer has been up and running in the city’s cable channel control room since early January.
Now, those same public information officers simply type in a search term on their desktops and receive relevant news clips through the Observer, which automatically records all audio, video and closed caption text from multiple broadcast feeds 24/7. The officers then edit the clips together on the desktop and deliver the packages digitally to the city manager.
“The City of Dallas installation is the perfect example of how government can use the Volicon Observer to streamline operations, and provide instantaneous information to public officials” said Julius Perl, vice president of marketing at Volicon. “The ability to quickly capture and edit video makes a big difference in the efficiency of their workflow and their ability to make information available instantly.”
The Observer uses Volicon’s unique video processing technology to allow a large number of users simultaneous access to multiple channels of live and archived content from their desktop using a Microsoft Internet Explorer-compatible interface®. Users can log their own and competitors’ broadcasts, as well as retrieve and analyze video clips with metadata, locally or remotely.
Volicon will introduce version 2.0 of the Observer software as well as Observer Uno, a version for single-channel environments, at NAB2006.
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