Volicon has announced the availability of Volicon Observer Professional, an affordable system for budget-conscious broadcasters and companies seeking to streamline their workflows for broadcast compliance logging and media monitoring.
“Volicon has become synonymous with the state of the art in digital video logging and monitoring solutions — and now, with our newly expanded Observer product family, we offer our latest-generation technology in versions targeted to operations of every size and complexity,” said Michael Asebrook, senior marketing product manager for Volicon. “With the Observer Professional, smaller broadcasters and companies that may not need the full feature set of our Observer Enterprise product now have an easy-to-use solution for scheduled recording, searching for media mentions, and clipping video for quick export.”
One key feature of the Observer Professional is Volicon’s new streamlined user interface, built on Microsoft Silverlight.
“The Observer Professional is a great example of the type of system Silverlight was designed for, because it takes advantage of Silverlight’s cross-browser, cross-platform technology to bring new degrees of interactivity and rich media to the process of searching for, working with, and sharing logged video,” said Brian Goldfarb, director of the developer platform group at Microsoft Corp. “Microsoft is pleased that companies such as Volicon are building with Silverlight to help make their products compelling and easy to use.”
The Observer Professional also features the latest enhancements to the Observer’s search capabilities, including options for simple and advanced search queries, along with a new auto-complete search feature that searches recorded closed-captioned text embedded in the video stream for easier identification and refinement. The system’s closed-caption display includes an option to display video thumbnails and time codes, along with an integrated copy-and-paste function for export.
Observer Professional supports one to four channel inputs and up to five concurrent users, and offers up to 90 days of storage for archived video. In addition, the Observer Professional includes a revamped electronic programming guide (EPG)-based Scheduled Recording Module for scheduled, selective recording of specific broadcast channels within designated time periods. The system supports the Windows and Mac operating systems as well as Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox, web browsers along with integrated capabilities for quick export of recorded Observer content to H.264, Flash, MPEG-2, or MPEG-4 formats.
