Situated in the pretty Hampshire village of Bramley, DVA may be out of town, but it is certainly not out of touch. The well-equipped facility provides a wide range of technical and creative services for the broadcast television, corporate video, marketing, advertising and design communities.
In the summer of 2006, DVA visited the Broadcast Live show in London and spotted ContentAgent-XR which it saw immediately could fill a gap in an expanding area of the facility’s business.
Facilities Manager Steve Longman takes up the story. “Our encoding business was growing substantially and we could see immediately where ContentAgent would fit in to our workflow. Our existing technology meant that we were using a rather circuitous route with a variety of different kit. ContentAgent is a single-box solution which saves a lot of time and consequently is more economic for our clients.
“It’s easy to use. You set up templates for repeatable encoding jobs, and then just hand over to the operators to get on with it. They love it, and the user interface is particularly well thought through. Completed jobs can be emailed, uploaded to our ftp site or burned to DVD using the automated workflow.
“We now have a very simple rate card, charging for format setup, then for encoding by the minute. We get increased throughput, and our customers get great quality and better value.”
As an additional service to customers and their clients, DVA has established MediaBank – a Digital Asset Management system. International clients, such as leading golfing equipment manufacturer TaylorMade, use MediaBank for archiving and distributing media to its distributor network. It is envisaged that the role of ContentAgent will be developed at DVA for encoding video clips and automatically uploading to the Asset Management System.
The versatility of ContentAgent also saves time for editing clients of DVA as, when they arrive at the edit with AVI or QuickTime files, for example, ContentAgent can be used to play them out immediately.
“The system seems very robust,” concludes Longman. “We normally encode to MPEG, WMV and Flash but ContentAgent can cope with the most unusual formats and odd sizes. We confidently expect it to pay for itself within a year.”