In Broadcast - March 2013 - 31

ISSUE 17 - MARCH 2013 | WWW.INBROADCAST.COM

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

N E W S

InREPLY

Volicon’s Goal Is To Fully Marry Up
A/V Content With Measurement
Volicon’s Vice President Global Sales Russell Wise ﬁelds our
questions on the fast-changing sphere of efﬁcient content
monitoring and logging…

InBroadcast: How is your company
changing to meet client demands?
Russell Wise: The company
is changing on several fronts. At
Volicon our motto is “to provide
the most scalable, reliable, and
cost-effective content monitoring
and logging systems.” To this end,
we continue to apply engineering
resources to our core product, in turn
assuring that we can provide such
systems to our customers, even as
their needs and demands evolve.
This year we expanded our
engineering operations by about
50%. We also continue to develop
our Observer product line, adding
the type of features that bring even
greater value to our customers.
Examples of these features include
our loudness monitoring module,
which supports monitoring of A/V
content including BS.1770-1/2/3
loudness and other correlations
of data and video, as well as
an iPad/iPhone interface that
enables executives who are onthe-go mobile access to Observercaptured content anywhere, anytime.
To date Observer monitoring and
logging systems have been deployed
by more than 700 customers around
the world. This broad user base
has required a greatly expanded
customer support organisation,
which we have developed. We
know that our customers look for

long-term support, not unlike a longterm relationship, and Volicon is
constantly adapting on many fronts
so that it can provide this support.
InB: What criteria does the market
use to make decisions for your
services?
RW: In choosing Volicon
Observer video monitoring and
logging technology, the market
has focused on its reliability and
versatility, as well as its ﬂexibility
in meeting users’ exact needs.
Our commitment to innovation
is proving to be a key factor in
customers’ purchase decisions, as
we continue to discover and bring
forward valuable new use cases
for our technology. Customers also
are attracted by our track record of
proactive development of monitoring/
measurement capabilities in
alignment with the world’s changing
broadcast standards and regulations.
With ongoing refinement of
our Observer technology, we’ve
positioned Volicon as a provider
of enterprise media intelligence
solutions that address a wide array
of critical needs. The value of this
proposition is not lost on the market,
and we’re seeing a growing number
of customers adopting our products
not just for monitoring, but for an
extended range of functions across
their facilities.

InB: Which territories are showing
particular activity?
RW: We founded Volicon as a
company with global sales and
support reach, and we’ve expanded
worldwide ever since. We have
seen high growth in all parts of
the world, but we’ve experienced
the strongest activity levels in the
United States. Today, virtually every
major network in the United States
is using a Volicon product, and
most of those continue to expand
both the channels supported by
their Observer systems and the
capabilities of those systems. U.S.
call-letter TV stations are also very
strong customers. Right now in the
broader geographic realm, we are
also seeing increased demand in
Asia/Paciﬁc, Europe, the Middle East,
and Africa.
InB: Any innovations ahead that
you can discuss?
RW: We will continue to merge
A/V content with measurement. The
addition of audio and visual content
to any piece of data yields a better,
more useful solution for a broader
range of users. When measurement
and content are leveraged together
in media operations, the end result is
a simpler and more readily available
picture of broadcast operations.
Going forward, we’re looking
at marrying all types of broadcast

measurements – and there are
many of them out there – with the
A/V content captured by Observer
systems. One example of this would
be the loudness measurements
that we provide on all content, and
others include monitoring of Nielsen
codes and of SCTE-35 and SCTE104 cueing messages for digital
ad insertion. We also continue to
add new user interfaces for the
various stakeholders in the media
enterprise. Today, many senior
executives use Volicon’s Observer
systems as a source of intelligence
about their media product, and
our iPhone/iPad interface provides
a very management-friendly
window into Volicon system,
any time and from anywhere.
We’re also making access easier
for users in all areas of operations –
and for the IT staff supporting them
– by offering a clientless GUI for the
Observer line.
InB: Give some examples of your
services in action?
R W : Vo l i c o n ’s O b s e r v e r
technology has been referred to
as a Swiss Army Knife – a single
piece of equipment packed with a
broad array of useful tools. These
tools support use cases ranging
from compliance and ad veriﬁcation,
quality assurance, competitive
analysis, program analysis
and talent coaching, loudness
monitoring, NAVE monitoring,
remote executive/partner review,
repurposing and sale of content.
In the past year, the Observer
system has been installed by the
Malawi Communications Regulatory
Authority for compliance monitoring.
In the United States, Observer user
Crown Media is taking advantage
of its ability to review live and aired
content remotely in order to perform
rapid troubleshooting for its Hallmark
and Hallmark Movie channels, and
the company also relies on the
Observer to simplify key tasks
including loudness and closedcaption compliance, NAVE ratings
assurance, traffic reconciliation,
and ad insertion monitoring.
Using this Volicon solution,
Crown Media also has given its
programming department valuable
competitive monitoring capabilities.
Visit the Volicon website for
case studies on these and other
applications.
InB: Thank you for taking timeout
to answer our questions.

Volicon Observer TS – monitoring and logging

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In Broadcast - March 2013

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