Content management and automation solutions provider Aveco, based in Prague (with offices in the United States), has joined forces with Prime Image, a specialist in time reduction systems, to offer broadcasters a way to dramatically increase ad revenue without impacting the viewer experience. The new capability is now being offered as part of Aveco’s ASTRA suite of signal processing tools.
Aveco has integrated Prime Image’s Time Tailor into a real-time playout workflow in which operators can dynamically add new, unplanned commercial time during program playout, without any viewer effect on the planned program airtime.
Jim Maury, CTO for Prime Image, said the implementation with Aveco allows users to take advantage of its time reduction technology at the very last minute rather than preplanning it ahead of time in production.
Using Aveco’s ASTRA MCR automation system, an operator highlights the area of the playlist for new commercials and inserts the new spots into the playlist. At playtime ASTRA will program Time Tailor to frame-accurately time reduce the program segment for the exact time needed for the new commercials. No commercial durations are impacted, and the time-reduced program segment is transparent to the viewer. Built-in safeguards prohibit reducing time from a program segment that would result in viewer artifacts.
The ASTRA automation system scales from single-channel to high-channel systems that are built on a real-time operating system and give users the ability to hot swap software modules without rebooting.
