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Snell Wilcox and Omneon Partner to Deliver SD/HD Mastering and Server Solution (26/1/2006)

Collaborative partnership enables integration of MEMPHIS encoder and Omneon Spectrum server system in a powerful, efficient system for SD and HD playout

Snell Wilcox today announced that it has entered a collaborative partnership with Omneon Video Networks in a move to bring the best possible HD playout solutions to market. To facilitate delivery of cost-saving, streamlined mastering and server solutions, the two companies have signed a non-exclusive reseller agreement whereby Omneon will resell the Snell Wilcox MEMPHIS HD encoder. The two companies will collaborate during the sales process through lead sharing, combined bids, and joint project proposals.

"The deployment of our MEMPHIS HD encoder alongside Omneon’s flexible server solutions offers users a unique degree of control over media assets during ingest, with the benefits of exceptional MPEG-2 encoding quality and both SD and HD compatibility," said Snell Wilcox CEO Simon Derry. "We’re very excited about the opportunities this agreement provides for our companies, as well as our shared customers within the broadcast market."

"The architecture of the Omneon server is designed to offer versatility not only in terms of server configuration, but also with respect to operation with other best-of-breed broadcast solutions within a variety of broadcast environments," said Omneon CEO Joe Kennedy. "By entering into this collaborative effort with Snell Wilcox, we’re able to leverage the compression efficiency and improved picture quality provided by the MEMPHIS encoder in a powerful plug-and-play solution that streamlines ingest and playout of high-quality SD and HD content."

In addition to collaborating during the sales process, Snell Wilcox and Omneon will cooperate on joint marketing initiatives and training to help guide clients through the entire integration and training process.

MEMPHIS HD

Based on the same Emmy(R) Award-winning Ph.C motion estimation technology as Alchemist and Archangel, MEMPHIS HD generates the most accurate motion vectors of the industry and always translating in better picture quality at a given bitrate or smaller files at a given quality for optimized usage of storage.

Unfiltered noise can rapidly destroy compression performance by stealing away precious bandwidth from the real video content. The integrated Emmy(R) Award-winning Prefix adaptive and recursive spatial and linear filters allow MEMPHIS HD to always focus on video content and guarantee optimal picture quality and lower storage requirements. The Prefix technology behind MEMPHIS HD has already been deployed in hundreds of transmission channels across the world.

Randomly placed I-Frames significantly degrade quality when scene transitions take place and also create incomplete GOPs at the beginning and end of clips. Thanks to the integrated Prefix CleanCut GOP control technology, MEMPHIS HD automatically closes GOPs at scene changes and allows GOP control during the ingest process. This removes the requirement for trimming of heads and tails after clips have been ingested, making it the optimal encoder for playout server ingest.

The Snell Wilcox MEMPHIS HD encoder accepts both SD and HD (1080/720) formats, as well as PCM, MP1L2, Dolby E, and AC-3 audio. Its MPEG-2 transport stream output is captured, stored, and automatically routed at playout by the Omneon Spectrum server system.

Omneon Spectrum Server System

The Omneon Spectrum server system is a flexible and highly scalable media server designed for the professional television industry. In addition to providing a reliable and scalable infrastructure for broadcast playout and storage applications, the server system features an open architecture that allows it to support a broad variety of third-party applications for control and transmission, media management, archiving, and collaborative production. As a result, stored media can be shared among many users and applications. The modular system is available in a broad range of configurations including simultaneous HD and SD playout that meet the specific needs of each installation.

www.snellwilcox.com

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