Volicon Maintains Global Growth as It Enters Its Sixth Year of Business
Boston-Based Volicon Reaches Milestone of 5,000 TV Channels Deployed Worldwide Using Company’s Video Monitoring Solution
BURLINGTON, Mass. — Oct. 13, 2010 — Boston-area technology company Volicon today announced that it has reached a significant milestone: 5,000 television channels around the world are now being monitored by the Volicon Observer® Enterprise digital logging and monitoring system. The Observer is an award-winning digital media monitoring and compliance logging system, sold to broadcasting and cable companies, that continuously records and creates a searchable, archived video database of all broadcasts as they air — an important capability for ensuring regulatory compliance and meeting other business needs.
“We are very proud of Volicon’s accomplishments in only six years of business. Our solutions are now used by more than 400 customers in more than 40 countries, and they range from the biggest names in broadcasting to hundreds of local television stations across the United States and around the world,” said Eli Warsawski, president and CEO of Volicon. “The core concept and founding team started here six years ago in our Burlington HQ, and the company has since expanded to a global operation with development and sales offices throughout the world. While our international approach to business has helped us expand in new markets, we continue to assemble our turnkey systems in Massachusetts, and we use local vendors for systems integration and testing.”
Like broadcasting regulators in many other countries, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires broadcasters to keep a recorded log of all transmissions as they appear on air. For many years, TV stations have accomplished this using videotape recorders, a solution that is less than ideal due to the cost of videotape stock and storage and the inefficiencies of searching manually through videotapes to find specific clips and media mentions from the closed caption text. As stations have made the conversion to fully digital operations, they have looked for ways to eliminate videotape — which is why the Volicon Observer has been so successful.
The patented Volicon Video Monitoring Architecture (VMA) technology automatically records outgoing transmissions continuously and saves them as media files on a server, without requiring that personnel constantly monitor the process. From any desktop in the organization, users can access the Observer video log via a Web browser such as Microsoft® Internet Explorer®. Once logged in, operators can easily search for specific clips using Boolean search queries, and they can instantly download the clips and attach them to emails for sharing with colleagues. In addition to demonstrating compliance with regulations such as closed captions, the Observer is useful in many other ways. The sales and billing departments, for instance, can access clips to verify that advertising ran as scheduled and contracted. The engineering department can use the system to improve quality of service by rapidly identifying and troubleshooting transmission errors, and the station’s marketing department can perform valuable competitive viewer ratings analysis simply by setting the Observer to record competitors’ broadcasts and the station’s own, side by side.
The Observer is now the digital monitoring and logging solution of choice for large media enterprises and organizations such as the Discovery Channel, CBS, Fox News, Time Warner, and the U.S. Armed Forces. Increasingly, the system is being adopted by governments and municipalities in many countries for media monitoring and to capture outgoing broadcasts for public information and regulatory purposes. One key example is the government of Mexico, which recently closed Volicon’s largest deal to date, installing the Observer to monitor more than 2,300 radio and television stations around the country to ensure that political advertising is in compliance with federal election laws.
“It is significant that Volicon has continued to average a decent growth for the past three years despite the recent global economic downturn,” Warsawski added. “This is because the Observer offers broadcasters a powerful multipurpose solution for reducing costs and working more efficiently — both keys for survival during difficult financial times.”
More information about Volicon and its product family is available at http://www.volicon.com.
About Volicon
Volicon provides the broadcast and cable industries with the most efficient, reliable, and cost-effective automated multichannel video content logging and monitoring system for compliance, media analysis, content repurposing, and quality of service. Its Observer® real-time digital video monitoring and logging solutions are based on Volicon's patented Video Monitoring Architecture (VMA). VMA is comprised of a multichannel video streaming engine, interactive search, content analytics, and service monitoring and alarming capabilities. Volicon products and services meet the demanding requirements of broadcasters, cable and IPTV service providers, and enterprise and government organizations looking to improve broadcast product quality, enhance video management, and lower costs. More information is available at http://www.volicon.com.
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