New product features and 30th birthday for Cabletime
Cabletime unveils new features and benefits to its popular Evolution Media Manager software and an important enhancement to the Evolution LAN-Caster range, and celebrates its 30th birthday.
UK(14 Jan 2014)
At Integrated Systems Europe (4-6 February 2014, RAI, Amsterdam), Cabletime, developer of the powerful MediaStar Evolution range of IPTV and digital media distribution solutions will be celebrating 30 years in the industry as it unveils new features and benefits to its popular Evolution Media Manager software and an important enhancement to the EvolutionLAN-Caster range.
Happy Birthday Cabletime!
Cabletime was founded in 1984 and has undergone many changes over the last 30 years. The company will be celebrating its 30th birthday at ISE and the booth (1-P80) will reflect some of the product, corporate and industry developments that have marked significant milestones in its history. A special montage will also recognise many of the industry figures who have been involved in the company’s progress through the years, so partners and customers from acrossEurope may well find themselves featured!
Extended Media Manager Capability V5.1
Media Manager provides a powerful and fully integrated content management system from a single interface and is at the core of Cabletime’s MediaStar Evolution system, allowing the system administrator to schedule and control access to all media sources, monitor every part of an IPTV distribution network and provide central control for all screen and workstation users regardless of their physical location within the data LAN. This new release has been expanded to cover full management of the new HLS streaming server facilities for PC’s, tablets and smartphones, Media Portal management and creation, management of the Evolution VOD system and numerous small improvements such as centralised ticker/crawl distribution and alert management.
Cabletime will be showing the Evolution Media Manager on its booth 1-P80.
New HLS Streaming Server
All MediaStar encoders now support HLS streaming and when integrated with the new MediaStar HLS server product can deliver content to users of both android and Apple OS devices using HLS (HTTP live streaming protocol). Evolution Media Manager makes the implementation quick and easy so that users of tablets and smartphones can now enjoy access to all content on the IP network using the Evolution Media Portal.
Evolution Media Portal
A new Media Portal created and managed in Media Manager gives users simple click-through access to view content on their PCs, tablets and smartphones. Portal pages are created in Media Manager and the system administrator can quickly and easily determine what media content to make available and to whom. Many pages can exist for different constituencies. Viewers on PCs, tablets and smartphones can access the portal pages and by selecting content icons gain access to their desired media.
“This is a simple to use but increasingly vital feature, which fully supports the growing number of remote device users, who want access to the same content as members of staff on the corporate headquarters wiredLAN,” said Mike Cuckow. “Last year we updated Media Manager so that users could remotely control the system using an iPhone or iPad, so integrating HLS via the new MediaStar Media Portal was the next logical step.”
Video On Demand
iVOD is now available for integration into any MediaStar Evolution system. With comprehensive ‘trick-play’ functionality (play, pause, rewind, etc), users are able to select stored media content from a server and watch it directly on any of their Evolution system screens or devices. Media ingress and server housekeeping are easily handled by Evolution Media Manager with the system processing a wide variety of file formats, storing and tagging them so that they are instantly accessible to users either through the media portal or screens equipped with MediaStar 780 media players.
“This enhancement is about access to the widest range of in-house content,” continued Mike Cuckow. “Users have been able to play stored media previously, but the system administrator can now use Media Manager to transfer all relevant media onto the iVOD server so that it is ready to play as and when users need it.”
Screen Crawl & System Wide Alert
The popular system-wide scrolling ticker feature, which was introduced by Cabletime earlier in the year to display news, corporate announcements or internal messages through RSS feeds or custom text, now has an additional function: a new ‘Alert’ feature, which can instantly overlay an announcement in a text box in the centre of the screen on top of the current media where it can be easily noticed. Previously, alerts have been possible, only as part of the ticker itself. The new alert feature is available as part of Media Manager 5.1 and is upgradeable from previous versions.
LAN-Caster DVB-C
Cabletime is expanding its DVB-T2 (Terrestrial) and DVB-S2 (Satellite) LAN-Caster range to allow processing of signals from cable networks (DVB-C). Making its debut at ISE, the unit allows the live streaming of news, sport, entertainment and information from CATV networks directly onto the LAN. Based upon the successful DVB-T2 LAN-Caster unit, it has a PCMCIA CI CAM slot for multiple channel decryptions and is available in a blade format. Existing DVB-T units in the field can be upgraded to support the DVB-C standard.
“DVB-T users who upgrade, will have the option to switch between terrestrial or cable delivery, depending on which delivers the most comprehensive content and signal,” said Mike Cuckow.
Cabletime will be demonstrating all the new features on its products throughout ISE, illustrating the enhancements they bring to users both in terms of content delivery and content management across their network.
The MediaStar range provides TV/AV and multimedia distribution products primarily for medium to large enterprises, which require future-proof, stable and proven solutions for live TV, corporate communications, multicasts, music TV, training and digital signage.