Encompass Digital Media, Inc., a global managed services company that delivers end-to-end video solutions to television networks, broadcasters, sport leagues and OTT service providers, has selected and successfully deployed ‘Alice’, the new broadcast cloud integration platform from Ideal Systems, to support over 1,200 full-time channels globally.
The newly launched Alice platform, developed by Ideal Systems Cloud Division, Ideal Media Works, is a cloud native Business Process Management (BPM), operations orchestration and integration framework. It allows for the logical integration and management of disparate business and technical functions of today’s broadcast and media operators. As broadcast manufacturers around the world move their technology to cloud-based systems, operators are facing the task of integrating many of these different cloud-based products into their technical and business workflow, which is exactly the problem that Alice solves.
Encompass selected Alice to unify schedule and playlist orchestration workflows for both on-premise playout solutions as well as services from its newly launched Altitude Media Cloud. Alice centralizes schedule processing and enrichment from multiple traffic systems, enabling the replacement of hard-coded schedule translators. Alice also provides a self-service operations framework using Alice-Beehive BPMN orchestration module and Alice-Absolem’s module as a universal playlist editor, making it easy to manage.
“The flexibility of the Alice Cloud Platform has been a big win for us,” states Jim Ewaskiew CIO of Encompass. “It not only provides an elegant experience for our globally distributed playout and operations teams but also significantly reduces the time and complexity of onboarding new services.”
“Alice is the world’s first reactive cloud framework where we extended the BPM specification to offer decoupled event driven orchestration, allowing Alice to integrate and orchestrate any broadcast system and operations process,” explains James Taylor, head of Ideal’s Cloud Division. “Encompass’ Altitude Media Cloud is the perfect platform to bring Alice to market, enabling us to deploy a solution at scale for the most complex and demanding workflows the world has to offer.”
