Irish enterprise software company Cape Clear has scored its second major technology deal with a European broadcaster in the space of a week. The company was selected to enable Italian broadcaster RAI to process millions of TV votes for game shows, dance offs and talent shows.
RAI, which is one of Italy’s leading State broadcasters, has selected Cape Clear’s enterprise service bus (ESB) platform to serve as an enabling technology to support its new interactive television services.
Last week it emerged that Cape Clear’s ESB system was being used to spearhead UK broadcaster Channel 4’s new video-on-demand service.
It is understood that RAI chose Cape Clear because its technology was the only system that could be deployed within RAI’s complex infrastructure.
The meteoric rise in popularity of interactive television that allows viewers to vote for contestants in talent contests, dance-offs, game shows and the like has placed enormous demands on broadcasters to provide an infrastructure capable of accurately processing millions of votes submitted virtually simultaneously.
Other broadcasters, including BSkyB, have chosen Cape Clear’s ESB Platform to power a SOA (service-oriented architecture) that enables integration with third-party content.
“We needed a best-of-breed solution that would allow us to add new services quickly and would provide robust and proven performance,” said Massimo Duca, project manager in charge of digital television, RAI. “Enough to support the enormous peaks typical of interactive TV mass voting systems, where many millions of responses from viewers are received in a period of just a few minutes.
In the case of RAI, Cape Clear’s ESB Platform is embedded into an implementation model that uses a third-party service access gateway to integrate external suppliers of content and services for quiz and game shows.
This model, running on a SOA, allows rapid connection to programme voting, SMS, email, alerting, forums, and polling applications as part of the service delivery environment whilst ensuring secure access to external networks and enabling revenue collection for the services provided.
“The challenge for RAI was the complexity involved in adding new third-party content,” explained Jeffrey Read, president and chief operating officer, Cape Clear Software.
“Because the Cape Clear system is completely agnostic to whatever infrastructure is already in place we were able to quickly prove how our ESB platform can cost-effectively provide broadcasters such as RAI the freedom and agility to integrate new services with existing infrastructure without compromising performance or security,” Read said.
By John Kennedy
