Dublin software firm Cape Clear has been selected by Channel 4 to power the station’s PC-based video-on-demand service.
According to research from analyst house Informa Telecoms and Media, by 2010 one third of the world’s TV viewing households will be using video-on-demand services.
Channel 4 has deployed Cape Clear’s enterprise service bus (ESB) platform that will scale to manage over 250,000 digital assets.
In the years ahead video on demand will be central to Channel 4’s commercial strategy.
The new service, to be made available via PCs and TVs, will include all commissioned programming as well as available acquired programming.
Viewers will be able to download films, previews and catch-up episodes and archive programmes.
“There is a revolution taking place in broadcasting. More and more, people expect to be able watch what they want, when they want,” said Annrai O’Toole, CEO of Cape Clear Software.
“This means that it is imperative that media companies rely on an IT infrastructure that can be quickly and easily deployed, yet is reliable, highly scalable and can deliver proven performance,” O’Toole added.
Cape Clear was selected to manage the lifecycle of video assets within the PC video-on-demand platform, each sized up to 1GB, from internal Channel 4 storage through to distribution.
“We selected Cape Clear’s ESB platform for our PC video-on-demand services because it met our technical criteria and supported the tight project deadlines required if we wish to stay ahead of our competitors during this industry shift,” explained Bob Harris, responsible for IT strategy and architecture at Channel 4.
“Working closely with Cape Clear, we were able to implement new processes in BPEL (business process execution language) to manage the publication of content to our PC video-on-demand platform,” said Harris.
By John Kennedy
