Envivio Intros Muse On-Demand 3.50, Collaborates with Interra Systems

Envivio introduced version 3.50 of its on-demand transcoding software, Envivio Muse On-Demand. This latest revision offers significant improvements in file-to-file transcoding speed — up to 35% in internal testing against platforms that require hardware acceleration.

These efficiency and quality gains decrease capital and operating expenses for content creators and service providers. Operators can reduce the amount of time required for encoding jobs, or alternatively, process more high quality content in the same amount of time. Muse On-Demand offers integrated content protection, including support for PlayReady, facilitating faster time-to-market.

“Video quality and efficiency are two of the most important criteria for content and service providers in on-demand applications,” said Julien Signès, Envivio president and CEO. “The new Muse On-Demand product has been fine-tuned to optimize both of these parameters, and provides best-in-class picture quality while achieving offline transcoding speeds up to 12x faster than real-time. Our architecture also offers a fully converged, power-efficient and extremely flexible design ideal for traditional TV and multi-screen output formats.”

Envivio 4Balancer combined with Muse On-Demand enables simultaneous processing of assets across a pool of up to 50 encoders, improving system utilization. Muse On-Demand and 4Balancer are integrated with leading digital rights management (DRM) platforms, workflow systems, content management systems (CMS) and quality control (QC) platforms.

Envivio’s software-based product architecture and years of video processing expertise allow operators to flexibly manage the full lineup of live and on-demand services in a converged headend architecture, using the Intel-based Envivio 4Caster appliance or HP BladeSystems in an IT-centric datacenter environment.

In addition, Interra Systems and Envivio recently integrated the Interra Baton file-based quality check (QC) solution with the Muse On-Demand 3.50 and 4Balancer software. This collaboration helps to ensure high quality VOD asset creation in the right formats for various playout devices in today’s multi-screen environment, facilitating service expansion and the monetization of VOD on any screen.

“Today’s consumers increasingly expect content anytime, anywhere, and prefer entertainment to fit in their schedule. Service providers need to ensure the best possible quality for their VOD assets in order to gain a competitive edge. Baton not only offers broad format support and quality checks; its content verification is also very reliable and accurate. This integration provides our content and service provider customers with an outstanding solution for transcoding and QC,” said Boris Felts, vice president of product marketing at Envivio.

Content ingested into the VOD environment needs to meet quality and regulatory specifications. In addition, content transcoded for different devices — including TVs, PCs, tablets, gaming systems, and smartphones — needs to meet the playout specification for the various output formats. The combination of Envivio’s Muse On-Demand encoding and the Interra Baton file-based QC solution ensure content quality, formats and standards compliance for the ever-changing video ecosystem.

“Envivio is a market leader in video compression, and we are very pleased to be associated with the Muse On-Demand solutions. Baton has helped more that 20+ technologies in the ecosystem leverage file-based QC in their solutions – asset management systems, archive solutions, transcoders, and more. We look forward to collaborating with Envivio in deploying solutions that provide outstanding quality for VOD services,” said Ashish Basu, VP global sales and business development at Interra Systems.

Interra’s Baton is an enterprise-class file-based QC for SD, HD, and mixed workflows. More than 350 Broadcasters, Post-Production houses, IPTV, Satellite, and Archiving companies trust Baton QC in production. Baton delivers better formats support, more comprehensive quality checks, more efficient verification, and enterprise scalability than any other QC offering available today.