OpenVision® Streaming Broadcast Manager

Interactive Program Guides (IPGs), also known as Electronic Program Guides (EPGs) have evolved as a digital home entertainment must-have. As millions of viewers use IPGs to access pay-per-view, broadcast and subscription-based entertainment options, it’s not surprising that service providers are under increased pressure to provide accurate and more advanced information in real-time.

With so much riding on IPGs, service providers are turning to the IMAKE OpenVision Streaming Broadcast Manager to gain control and ensure accuracy in their IPG feeds. OpenVision Streaming Broadcast Manager enhances the customer experience and lowers support costs by ensuring that updated, local and national IPG information is available 24/7.

OpenVision Streaming Broadcast Manager includes intelligent features that reduce the need to manually manage and maintain IPG feeds by ingesting feeds from multiple providers, examining the data and checking them for accuracy. The software then automatically makes changes to program guide events, according to your business rules.

OpenVision Streaming Broadcast Manager supports Network Personal Video Recorder (NPVR) capabilities. Based on business rules, OpenVision Streaming Broadcast Manager communicates the programs or broadcast channels that should be recorded to the video server for playback at a later date.

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Boxes shaded in light blue indicate other OpenVision® products, though the Streaming Broadcast Manager can be integrated to similar products from other vendors.

As part of IMAKE’s OpenVision product suite, Streaming Broadcast Manager is based on open standards, so it seamlessly integrates into next-generation entitlement servers, navigation servers, encoders and set-top boxes. Open standards enable a solution with best-of-breed components from multiple vendors. The highly scalable OpenVision suite is designed to grow with your needs, making it possible to cost effectively add applications to your existing infrastructure as service offerings expand.

Benefit Highlights

• Reduces the need to manually examine and edit IPG data feeds by automatically processing, examining and verifying the data prior to loading event information.
• Corrects and reduces errors in the feeds, such as overlapping events on the same channel or large gaps between events.
• Alerts service providers to possible scheduling conflicts during extended or shortened events.
• Displays real-time information in a grid format for viewing, editing and setup purposes prior to sending.
• Tracks channels to channel lineups to provide service offers.
• Ensures accuracy in IPG feeds by sorting and feeding relevant regional data.
• Exports to multiple navigation servers or spoolers via open standards XML formats.

Feature Highlights

• Supports Network Personal Video Recorders (NPVRs)
• Ingests, analyzes and applies business rules to IPG feeds
• Manages broadcast IP multicast addresses
• Stores feeds in a database for manipulation and mapping to IPG channel feeds for multiple channels
• Outputs files to the appropriate navigation and entitlement systems
• Compatible with feeds from third-party listing providers such as Starsight®, Gemstar® and Tribune Media®
• Provides the proper IP multicast address for a given channel for the set-top box to tune to
• Manages broadcast and pay-per-view offerings to customers
• Automatically creates and distributes individual channel line-ups as specified to local markets
• Creates XML-over-HTTP formatted IPG metadata for the appropriate server type, including navigation server, entitlement server and spooler
• Manages channels, channel lineups and mappings such as IP multicast to channel to encoder