Pharos Integrates Mediator with Medway for Improved Workflow Efficiency

August 2008

Marquis Broadcast and Pharos Communications, a leading developer of content management and automation systems, have announced a technology integration agreement enabling Pharos to add support for Medway The Media Highway integration software to its Mediator server architecture.

The integration will enable Mediator users to achieve tighter, faster file transfers with Avid editing systems, further enhancing the efficiency of their broadcasting workflows.

"We are continually expanding Mediator's integration with 3rd party post production systems to improve efficiency in promotions and compliance editing," said Russell Grute, Director of Marketing, Pharos. "Marquis Medway provides a fully featured middleware layer to integrate a range of Avid editing systems and file formats. It deals seamlessly with various Avid formats, manages metadata and gives an easy upgrade path to HD for our customers. A Medway based Avid solution is directly integrated with Mediator's browse and workflow. This will improve file and project interchange for the Mediator platform, enabling a number of key benefits including the ability to directly browse and access Avid projects and files."

"Mediator workflow and architecture is popular throughout the broadcasting industry," said Granby Patrick, Partner Director, Marquis Broadcast Ltd. "Medway enables leading solutions providers such as Pharos to offer integration with 'best of breed' broadcasting applications, ensuring customers' workflows will be free of file incompatibility problems from acquisition through to playout and delivery."

Medway provides open interoperability for broadcasters who require fast, efficient digital workflows, without incurring bottlenecks that frequently occur when media moves between systems from different manufacturers. By rewrapping files, Medway allows media to be transferred quickly and easily between processes. The system also extracts and manages the metadata attached to media, therefore enabling easy repurposing of content, and for tracking backoffice functions, such as rights management and usage tasks. The whole process is carried out seamlessly and efficiently.

Medway's ergonomic user interface and simple drag and drop control make it easy to use by all operators. Designed specifically to meet the demands of the most challenging broadcasting and television production environments, Medway is also suitable for newsrooms, ingest, encoding, transcoding, asset management, editing, and finishing systems, and playout servers.

About Pharos Communications

Pharos delivers better workflow management to broadcasters and service providers in television, radio, IPTV and telecommunications. For 10 years Pharos has continually developed the unique mediator, playtime and pilot desktop broadcast management solutions. Pharos workflow offers greater efficiency for library management, ingest, quality control, storage management, archival, transcoding, post production and playout.