University of Michigan Expands Partnership with ViewCast
University of Michigan Expands Partnership with ViewCast
PLANO, Texas — Nov. 17, 2009
—ViewCast Corporation (OTCBB: VCST), a developer of industry-leading solutions for the transformation, management and delivery of digital media over IP and mobile networks, today announced that the University of Michigan’s Digital Media Commons department has expanded its ViewCast Media Server (VMS) implementation to support the growing usage of the University’s BlueStream digital media infrastructure by faculty, students, and staff of the Ann Arbor campus. With VMS digital asset management (DAM) capabilities at the heart of the University’s BlueStream platform, users are enabled to manage and protect their digital media assets while fostering greater collaboration and productivity among program participants.
“The popularity and usefulness of BlueStream, a centralized utility designed to streamline media intensive work across the complete spectrum of research, teaching, learning, and community service, is increasing,” said Rob McIntyre Instructional Consultant, Digital Media Commons, Duderstadt Center. “This infrastructure is currently available to all 19 academic units on campus and more users are coming on board every day. By expanding our partnership with ViewCast, we can respond to the growing demand for media management project space, underpinned with advanced, VMS-enabled digital asset management capabilities.“
“The University of Michigan is a clear leader in media production, management and distribution capabilities for academic applications,” said Dave Stoner, President and CEO of ViewCast. “It would be hard to find a more innovative and practical example of how digital asset management can be utilized to support learning initiatives on campus. We applaud their dedication and ingenuity“
In 2003, the University of Michigan developed a comprehensive DAM framework that would enable users to ingest, manage, store, and publish digital media. This infrastructure, built upon IBM Enterprise Content Manager (ECM) and ViewCast Media Server, later became the backbone for the University’s BlueStream media management platform.
Today, BlueStream supports some of the most media-intensive projects underway at the University, and interoperates with other enterprise-level academic tools and environments to provide users with automated media management services and capabilities. Numerous academic projects involving digital audio and video, images and documents are produced and evaluated throughout the year. For example, BlueStream is currently being used by the University’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts to house thousands of digital images and video files; as well as by the School of Education to store videos of classroom work, which are used to analyze and maximize the effectiveness of teaching styles. BlueStream has also been utilized to provide a proof of concept for the delivery service of a dedicated lecture capture system.
VMS provides a single, end-to-end digital asset management solution to manage the entire media life cycle, enabling users to ingest, transcode, schedule, archive, manage, search, publish and deliver video and other digital assets anywhere over the network. VMS utilizes IBM ECM as its middleware and repository, facilitating seamless user management, security, data modeling, storage management, workflow and integration with other enterprise systems. As a result, users are enabled to model the most complex business processes from beginning to end, defining how content, tasks and communications will flow and how the process must interact with external systems.