Volicon Revamps Observer Monitoring

It’s a whole new Observer … and a whole New Observer.

Volicon introduced new developments for its Observer digital video monitoring and logging system, in addition to a new premium version of the system called New Observer.

Volicon’s Observer is now configured to tailor multichannel broadcast management and monitoring applications. It captures streams and stores content across a customers’ entire station group, and can provide remote access to live or recorded video through desktops as well as mobile devices like the iPad, iPhone and Android products.

The product can be used for different purposes, according to Volicon, whether its someone in sales performing an analysis of ad sales across stations, or a producer reviewing a competitors newscasts, or an operations executive ensuring compliance with FCC volume regulations.

The New Observer builds upon Observer with a more powerful processing platform as well as five inputs for additional logging capabilities and four inputs for more robust monitoring. The system also integrates into existing broadcast infrastructure through open system application programming interfaces.

“There’s monitoring out there, but when I combine monitoring and logging and being able to remotely access content, it becomes much more powerful,” said Andrew Sachs, VP of product management. “Our New Observer is more scalable [and] compact… [with] hundreds of systems monitoring thousands of channels, from very large scale deployments all the way down to a single channel and a single system.”

For its presentation, Volicon invited happy customers, including Dave Folsom, Raycom Media VP-CTO, to share their experiences.

Folsom also shared his latest intentions for Observer, to monitor Rentrak ratings during a newscast to observe granular metrics during newscasts.

“It’s one thing to look at the flat-field data and draw some conclusions, but it’s another thing if you can synch it up with the video material itself and to see if that individual or content provided or subject matter is appealing and compelling or its turning people off,” Folsom said.

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