Digital Rapids Announces Extensive Industry Support and New Partnerships for Kayak Workflow Platform

Over 20 new third-party partners and alliances, ranging from technology and solutions providers to systems integration specialists, have joined the Kayak ecosystem.

Markham(07 Sep 2012)

Digital Rapids -- the trusted provider of innovative media transformation and workflow solutions for bringing content to wider audiences -- today announced accelerating industry support for the company's ground-breaking new Kayak dynamic workflow platform, with the addition of over 20 new companies to the Kayak ecosystem since the platform's public debut earlier this year.

The new alliances range from technology and solutions providers to systems integration specialists. Third-party companies with offerings spanning all critical workflow functions -- from codec technologies to tools for quality control, audio loudness management, digital rights management and more -- are integrating their technologies directly into the Kayak platform. Meanwhile, systems integration partners stand ready to work with media organizations to deploy Kayak-powered workflows within their operations, including the development of custom Kayak components for proprietary functionality.

The most recent participants in the Kayak partner ecosystem include Automatic Sync Technologies; BuyDRM; Corpus Media Labs; Digimetrics; DSB Consulting; Empress Media Asset Management, LLC; EZDRM; Hitachi Solutions; Ignite Technologies, Inc.; Interra Systems; Irdeto; Manzanita Systems; Minnetonka Audio Software; National TeleConsultants; PixelTools; R Systems Inc.; Screen Subtitling Systems; Signiant; Solekai Systems; Tata Elxsi; Venera Technologies and VidCheck. These companies join over 35 additional industry leaders in Digital Rapids' partner and alliance programs.

A number of these partners are showcasing or announcing Kayak-based components and solutions at the IBC exhibition in Amsterdam, including:

• Digimetrics' Eos Audio Normalizer corrects, in a single pass, audio to ATSC A/85, EBU R128 and ARIB TR-B32 specifications for regulatory compliance. Digimetrics is also developing a Kayak component based on their Aurora quality control solution. 
• Interra Systems' Baton enterprise-class quality control solution verifies file-based content passing through various steps of Kayak workflows for conformance to format standards, regulatory compliance and a wide variety of video and audio quality checks.
• Multiple MPEG-related solutions from Manzanita Systems, including an array of multiplexers -- for HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), the recently released MPEG-DASH specification, MPEG transport streams and program streams -- and the CrossCheck(tm) automated transport stream analyzer.
• PixelTools MPEG Encoder, providing high-quality MPEG-2 encoding for broadcast and IP applications of content up to 16K by 16K frame sizes with support for Closed Captions, AFD, CGMS, APS and Advisory Data insertion. 
• Tata Elxsi's AAC-LC audio codec, with additional audio and video pre/post-processing and codec components targeting broadcast workflows also planned. 
• Venera Technologies' PulsarBridge, providing an interface between Kayak-based media processing workflows and Venera's Pulsar quality control software for automatic media file verification. Venera is also planning further Kayak integrations.

These new developments join Kayak components demonstrated earlier this year, including audio and video encoding and management solutions from Dolby Laboratories, DTS and Rovi's MainConcept.

A significant departure from other workflow technology approaches, Kayak enables media organizations to design, deploy and manage customized workflows that empower their businesses with the operational efficiency, agility and insight they need to thrive in the expanding multi-screen media landscape. Kayak's component-based architecture and rich, open ecosystem provide customers with unparalleled ease in integrating new technologies in response to market trends or new opportunities, while its intelligent automation and dynamic deployment model maximize processing efficiency, optimize resource utilization, minimize management effort and reduce costs.

Kayak is available as a comprehensive workflow design and development platform for systems integrators, software developers and customers, and 'under-the hood' of Digital Rapids' newest solutions for end-user applications, including version 2.0 of the Digital Rapids Transcode Manager high-volume media processing software and the StreamZ Live Broadcast integrated broadcast/multi-screen live encoder.

"We're thrilled with the tremendous response from our solution partners and their excitement about leveraging Kayak to integrate their technologies into leading-edge workflows and to extend their market reach," said Onkar Parmar, Senior Partnership Manager for Kayak at Digital Rapids. "The richness of the Kayak partner ecosystem is one of the platform's key strengths, combining with its unique architecture to let our mutual customers quickly integrate new technologies into their operations while 'mixing and matching' partner solutions to create the optimal workflows for their needs."

"Kayak enables a wide range of applications, and providing a component that enables audio loudness correction within the Kayak framework allows us to integrate seamlessly into a broad variety of workflows and use cases without any additional effort from either the user or vendor side," said Eric Carson, Business Unit Manager of Digimetrics. "In one word, this makes Kayak 'revolutionary'".

"Digital Rapids' Kayak platform allows our mutual customers to quickly and flexibly integrate Dolby Digital Plus premium multi-channel audio encoding and Dolby's loudness correction technology into powerful workflows to efficiently realize and differentiate their multi-screen offerings," said Jean-Christophe Morizur, Senior Director, Professional Solutions - E-Media at Dolby Laboratories. "We share our customers' excitement about the Kayak platform, and look forward to further deepening our involvement in the Kayak ecosystem."

"We're excited to be working closely with Digital Rapids to integrate our advanced audio technologies into the Kayak platform," said Ronny Katz, Sr. Director, Digital Media at DTS. "The customer response to the joint UltraViolet and MPEG-DASH demonstrations we've conducted has been phenomenal. The combination of Kayak and our audio solutions provides a powerful, future-proof platform for our mutual customers as their needs continue to evolve to encompass new standards, devices and market trends."

"Manzanita Systems is enthusiastic to bring our family of MPEG software solutions to the Kayak platform," said Greg Vines, President of Manzanita Systems. "We look forward to the benefits the flexible ecosystem will bring to customers' media processing workflows and are eager to expand our contributions to the component library in the future."

"We're pleased that we can now make PixelTools' high-quality MPEG tools available to Digital Rapids customers for use in their advanced media processing workflows through the flexible and easily customizable Kayak platform," commented Mark Conover, CTO at PixelTools.

"The innovative Kayak platform provides a perfect opportunity for Venera to bring our QC technologies to Digital Rapids customers, enabling them to enhance their media production and delivery operations with content verification at various stages of their workflows. The ease with which Kayak users can integrate our QC components into powerful workflows is simply amazing," said Fereidoon Khosravi, SVP of Business Development , Americas at Venera Technologies. "The Kayak partner ecosystem provides us with an attractive venue for showcasing our advanced QC tools and expanding our market, and we're very excited to be part of it."

The complete range of Digital Rapids media transformation and workflow solutions is being showcased in booth number 7.F33 at the IBC 2012 exhibition in Amsterdam. For more information about Digital Rapids, please visit www.digitalrapids.com.

About Digital Rapids Corporation -- Digital Rapids provides market-leading content transformation and workflow solutions that empower the world's leading media organizations to reach wider audiences more efficiently, more effectively and more profitably. Recipients of more than two dozen prestigious awards for company and product excellence, Digital Rapids combines innovative technology with proven expertise and visionary insight to help our customers expand their audiences, increase their revenues, and reduce their costs. Digital Rapids Corporation (www.digitalrapids.com) is headquartered in Ontario, Canada with offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Australia and Argentina.