Almedia Satellite Enablement

  • Status
    Ongoing
  • Status date
    2009-05-15
Objectives

The main objective of this project is to port, verify and develop Aliope's product, Almedia, through the medium of Satellite.


Almedia is a multi-media content management system that allows broadcast quality video content to be stored, browsed and retrieved for a central multimedia server. This is proven technology over a local area network.


However, the basis of the project is in addressing the issue where a user of the system is not local to the central server, yet still requires the same access to that of his/her equivalent LAN system user.


The system is being built specifically for Irish government representatives (members of the Oireachtas) who, by their very nature, are occasional LAN users and also distributed users. The challenge of the project is, through satellite, to afford the remote user the same functionality available to him/her as a LAN user.


The project will focus on building functionality and researching methods that exploit satellite and its particular distribution methods. For instance, methods to predict user preferences in order to anticipate their content requests will be developed.

Challenges

The key issues to the success of this project are :



  • Cost effectiveness of the solution

  • Quality of service (with respect to response time and to the quality of the content resolution)
Benefits

The expected benefits will be to allow the distributed system users to access the content remotely, while still maintaining the quality of service. The system will also optimise the distribution of content to the system users. From a user's point of view, the main benefit will be the remote access to critical content that is required and that previously would prohibit working remotely.

Features

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The Almedia Satellite System will be based on existing technology developed by Aliope. Aliope's Content Management Solution enables content right-to-use owners to publish their content assets in both Real-Time or On-Demand over multiple bearer networks.


This is achieved through the integration of several components including Aliope's suite of in-house applications, and industry standard 3rd party applications required for encoding and streaming functionality.


The basis of the Oireachtas solution currently being deployed is this Content Management System, Almedia.


This is a web-based system that digitally records video content into the MPEG format. It then analyses the visual aspects of the content and then structures it into shots and chooses a representative frame for each. Using one of several interfaces, a user can select a recorded program and rapidly browse through its content, zooming in to the sections of interest, and then playing the video directly to the desktop.

Plan

The project will run from January 2003 through to January 2004. The project initiation phases will run through to March, during which the market will be further researched and the initial system design work will be produced, which will allow the full design to be progressed.


The design phase will run from April through to June, during which the detailed design will be completed. The development phase will run through to September, with the system verification and testing phases following through October and November. The implementation and release phases are planned for December and January 2004.

Current status

The Final Review of the project was completed in ESRIN, Frascati on the 23rd of January 2004.

The Final Draft of the User Acceptance Testing document, the User Manual, and the Satellite Multicasting costing document have been completed. Further to this, the system deployment to ESRIN in Italy has been completed. User Acceptance Testing was completed successfully. A short video presentation of the end product has been submitted.

Achievements of the project:


The product Almedia-Sat has been developed for the consumption of multimedia content over satellite.



  • Users are afforded access to audio/visual content through a secure connection and interface.



  • A central server, with multicasting and automated delivery capabilities, stores, maintains and determines user preferences and automatically delivery content to subscribers.

Aliope has gained an understanding of its targeted market, and route to market.


Knowledge Transfer and Acquisition



  • Aliope's engineering team gained extensive experience and understanding of SATCOM development, the issues involved and ways of overcoming them.


Building relationships and know-how with the SATCOM industry



  • Aliope have developed a good relationship with industry experts in SATCOM delivery.