Silex Media Vision

Silex Media's vision is being able to bridge the gap between broadcast and IT by building digital workflows based on an open middleware approach that integrate best-of-breed broadcast and IT components. With this approach, Silex Media can service broadcasters and professional media companies and enables them to face today's broadcast paradigm shift.

Bridging the gap between broadcast and IT

Silex Media's core value-add lies in the combined know-how and experience of both, High Performance Computing Technology as well as traditional Radio and Television Broadcast Technology. Silex Media staff are familiar with and to a great part coming from both worlds as users and are very much used to the workflows and the constraints that the Media Industry is challenged with.

Paradigm shift for broadcasting

We have witnessed multiple phases of change in the Media and Broadcast industry but are convinced the biggest one is right in front of us.
With the democratisation of both production tools as well as broadcasting tools, we have reached a point where potentially everyone can broadcast to anyone - and this not only technically but also commercially viable. This is a challenge to the established content producers, the "traditional content owners", aggregators, the distributors and the broadcasters themselves.

The Media Industry is being transformed by the internet, commodity graphics, audio andediting software and consumer price video and audio recording technology that matches professional standards. In this new world everything will be available to everyone - the business models will change for the ones who will survive. The Media and Broadcast Industry is probably most affected by the "long Tail" phenomenon that Chris Anderson described in an article in the "Wired" magazine that became such an influential business essay.

Silex Media is best positioned to help its existing Broadcast customers prepare for thesenew challenges as well as "new players" to be competitive in this field.

Product strategy

Silex Media's middleware approach for developing products is used to integrate 3 areas: broadcast, IT and the enterprise.

Broadcast

On the broadcast side Silex Media will not compete with "low-end" or consumer technology but embrace and integrate it and add features where they are adding significant competitive advantage. Examples are: Adobe Photoshop, Apple Final Cut Pro or Windows Media. These new technologies enable media professionals to lower their costs and they enable the consumers to tap in to capabilities that were never possible before.

The challenge becomes: how to build efficient and effective workflow solutions with these standalone technologies.

With its Hydrogen product family, Silex Media adds features that are relevant to theprofessional market but too low in the priority for the mass market manufacturers of these tools. We are also offering integration modules that enable the integration of many of these "commodity" software tools in a large scale "professional media factory".

IT

On the IT side, Silex Media is developing technology that allows highly specialised Media Applications to use and interact with "standard IT infrastructure technology". This way the broadcaster can use the same vendors, support environment and sometimes even existing infrastructure that it uses for the rest of the business.
One of the areas is Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM), where Silex Media eliminates the need to acquire + maintain broadcast specific archives. Examples are: IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, SGI Data Migration Facility or Quantum StorNext FS.

Here again, Silex Media adds features that are relevant to the professional market but toolow in the priority for these large IT vendors. These vendors however develop their tools for a much bigger audience than just the Media Industry and are therefore putting much bigger R&D efforts behind these products. This again results in better and more reliable products than any technology that is exclusively funded by the Media Industry.

Enterprise

By integrating digital islands inside the traditional eco system, broadcasters understand the benefits of reusing and repurposing content. The next step is to expand this scope and to benefit from making available assets and meta-data outside the traditional broadcast environment.

Silex Media's Hydrogen Lifecycle Management (HLM) middleware application will therefore utilize as much functionality as possible of industry enterprise computing standards such as Oracle and SAP. The Media Industry however, and the Film- and Video part in particular have very challenging technical requirements. It is these very demanding and unique requirements that Silex Media is focusing on.

Middleware standard

Silex Media's products form tomorrows "Middleware Standard" for the Media Industry. Connecting industry standard IT infrastructure and existing "conventional" broadcast technology to both commodity as well as specialised media production tools.

Service focus

Besides focusing on software products, Silex Media will expand in two services areas:

• Consulting and Training Services in the areas of Workflow Optimizations and Transformation as well as change management. Architecture and Systems Design as well as Systems Integration for Production, Archive and Transmission.
• Solution Support and Managed Services. Managed Services in a way that the associated cost of the operation of large production infrastructure components (for example a Media Asset Management System and it's connected storage and Network elements) can be reliably forecasted by the "content owner" without having to outsource core departments of his enterprise.

Company roadmap

The company plans to grow both areas (product development and solutions and services business). The first step in this direction was the acquisition of DAVID Systems and it's US operation. DAVID Systems is being used to lead the product development portion of our global strategy while Silex Media will be used to build a powerful Solutions and Services business.