IMAKE Software, Inc., has unveiled OpenVision 4.0, its newest generation of products for VOD and IPTV. From content creation to asset management, entitlement/subscriber management to session management, from broadcast TV to Targeted Ad Insertion, OpenVision 4.0 provides the intelligence behind On Demand product and service delivery for telecommunication, cable, and content providers.

IMAKE's newest release of OpenVision builds on twelve years of innovation and experience in the VOD marketplace, hardened by real headend operators. The OpenVision solution is deployed coast-to-coast in the U.S., where it has enabled the distribution of more than one billion On Demand assets in 2005, including movies, sports highlights, long-form advertisements, programs and music videos. Using OpenVision, service providers can roll out new revenue-generating On Demand services and streamline the management of their assets.

OpenVision 4.0 strategic advantages:

• Open Systems - Most vendors talk about 'open systems,' IMAKE guarantees it.
• Scalability - Unrivaled in the industry, the OpenVision Asset Manager scales to 30,000 assets ingested/month, while the OpenVision Entitlement server can support 20+ million customers.
• Superior Usability - Easy-to-use dashboard views and monitors are hardened by years of deployment with real headend operators.
• 4th Generation - Continuously benefit from IMAKE development, investment and innovation.
• Future Proofing - OpenVision performance exceeds the future growth and need metrics of the world's largest on demand providers.
• Deployable Today - OpenVision 4.0 is deployed today across multiple customer sites.

OpenVision 4.0 includes the following key features and highlights:

• Total BackOffice Suite provides; 1) Asset Management, 2) Session Resource Management, 3) Streaming Broadcast Management, 4) Ad Exchange, 5) Content Creation, 6) Pitcher/Catcher Solutions and 7) Entitlement / Subscriber Management
• Automation capabilities monitor the distribution of assets, ensure the delivery of authorized services, and enable the upsell of new and premium services.
• Reporting capabilities provide immediate at-a-glance access to account profile information, content usage trends, and statistics.
• Performance monitoring provides real-time system status information for details that include throughput, overall distribution, asset ingestion and distribution, while automated error linking makes it possible to drill down to determine the source of errors quickly.
• Streamlined business dashboards and workflows provide an overview of the network to enable the daily management of thousands of assets, including movies, programs, ads, music and pitch lists.
• True targeted ad insertion capability based on proven technology that delivers 200 million ads per day in an IP environment

Industry veterans know best: At a recent On Demand content provider conference, the OpenVision 4.0 GUI and usability was stated by veteran operators as being far superior than the competition.

Regarding OpenVision, IMAKE's Chairman and CEO Mark Schaszberger said, "In the world of driving revenue, from content providers to service providers, the business model has opened up to take advantage of our capabilities such as targeted ad insertion, large scale media format management, and On Demand asset distribution across multiple delivery networks and platforms. Coupled with IMAKE's Always On 24x7 Operations Support, businesses can deploy On Demand products and services easily, readily, and reliably."

Because the OpenVision platform is based on open standards and not on proprietary architecture, it readily integrates with a wide variety of leading technology providers. These include encoders, navigation servers, billing systems, conditional access solutions, middleware, set-top boxes (STBs), video servers and navigation solutions from Motorola, Sun Microsystems, NDS, Verimatrix, Widevine, Harmonic, Optibase, DigiSoft.tv, Alticast, Amino, and Microsoft.

At this time, service providers have a critical decision to make. They can either lock in to proprietary solutions or choose open-architecture solutions to drive sensible, best-of-breed purchasing decisions and to give them future flexibility in product and service offerings that the market demands.