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.