Imagen Ltd

Imagen Ltd
Privately held
Industry Web development
Founded 1996 (1996)
Founder Anthony John Blake, Paul McConkey
Headquarters Willingham, Cambridgeshire, UK
Area served
 Worldwide
Key people
  • Charlie Horrell, CEO
  • Tom Blake, Commercial Director
  • David Wilkinson, CFO
  • Tim Jobling, CTO
  • Helen Aboagye, CMO
  • Nathan Birtle, VP Sales
Products Imagen
Services Management, monetization, distribution and archiving of digital A/V content
Number of employees
 40
Subsidiaries Screenocean
Website http://www.imagenevp.com

Imagen Ltd, formerly Cambridge Imaging Systems founded in 1996, is a software company based near Cambridge, UK that specialises in enterprise video platforms.

It has one subsidiary company, Screenocean, based in London, UK, an online digital library containing program material and related metadata from the Channel 4 archive.

History

Early interactive video training

In the late 80's and early 90's, the firm entered into a joint venture with Video Arts, a video production company founded by John Cleese and others to produce humorous videos for corporate training. Called Video Answers, it used laser disk technology to produce interactive course material based on the Video Arts training films. Over the same period, the firm ran a number of interactive video courses at Cambridge colleges, through the Universities Extension Centre (UEC), later called Cambridge Interactive. In 1991, Intersearch Systems Ltd merged with Cambridge Interactive to become the Cambridge Multimedia Group plc.[1]

Film archives online

In February 1996, Anthony Blake set up a new subsidiary company, Cambridge Imaging Systems, with Paul McConkey, the programmer for the Ministry of Defence at Cambridge Multimedia Group.[2] From focussing exclusively on the defence sector, Cambridge Imaging Systems now branched out into Corporate and Media & Entertainment.

Current management, directions and major customers

In June, 2011, Anthony Blake's son Thomas Nigel Blake took over as CEO of Cambridge Imaging Systems[3][4] to lead the company from a project approach to one of developing clearly defined software products. The Imagen product was launched in February 2012 and has undergone continual development since. The product became available as an SaaS offering in March 2013 under the trademark ImagenCloud.[5] Imagen is a Digital Media Asset Management software addressing multiple market sectors: enterprise DAM, media broadcasters and production studios, education, museums and libraries, defence and security.

Notable current customers include:

  • The British Library, using CIS products to provide the digital video management technology needed to host digital video files from its archives and offer access within the Library to television and radio news programmes.[6][7]
  • BBC Monitoring, part of the BBC World Service, a directorate of the British Broadcasting Corporation. They operate around the clock to monitor more than 3,000 radio, TV, press, Internet and news agency sources, translating from up to 100 languages.[8]
  • IMG Media, an independent producer and distributor of sports programming, which has created its IMG Sport Video Archive using CIS technology.[9]
  • Imperial War Museums, providing an online service for commercial users, to access the film archive of over 23,000 hours of footage dating from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day.[10]
  • Over 50 Universities and Higher Education facilities subscribing to the Box of Broadcast service.[11]
  • ATP Media, using two unique Imagen systems to store and present their Tennis Archives.
  • Premier League Archive

Products

Imagen EVP

Imagen is a client-server system for the management of audio-visual archives and assets, and for their publication on the Web.[12] It consists of a suite of interacting modules designed to organize and automate the ingestion, transcoding and Web distribution of film, sound and video material.

  • Back-end modules include a database, a service manager and a storage manager, the latter two with REST and SOAP interfaces permitting integration into other applications.
  • A client interface for ingest of files, and addition of metadata, subtitles and shot-frame annotations.
  • A workflow editor for automation of process workflows (transcoding, scheduling etc.)
  • A ready-made web-template, with a user-facing side for the discovery and play-out of content, and an administrative side for management and customization of the web-site.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Duedil Limited "CAMBRIDGE MULTIMEDIA GROUP LIMITED".
  2. ↑ Duedil Limited "CAMBRIDGE IMAGING SYSTEMS LIMITED".
  3. ↑ Business Weekly "BLAKE’S HEAVEN FOR CAMBRIDGE IMAGING SYSTEMS", 27 June 2011.
  4. ↑ Screenocean Latest "New CEO for Cambridge Imaging Systems and Screenocean", 1 June 2011.
  5. ↑ Motion Magazine "Cambridge Imaging Systems Announces US Launch of ImagenCloud at NAB 2013", Cambridge, UK, 28 March 2013.
  6. ↑ Research Information "British Library picks Cambridge Imaging", 19 January 2010.
  7. ↑ Resource Shelf by Freepint "Cambridge Imaging Systems to Help Build British Library Moving Image Archive", 15 January 2010.
  8. ↑ Netia Globecast Group "Testimonials: Archive: BBC Monitoring".
  9. ↑ TVBEurope "Cambridge Imaging Systems powers new IMG archive", 14 May 2013.
  10. ↑ IWM Film
  11. ↑ BoB Box of Broadcasts "What is BoB?".
  12. ↑ CreativeCOW.net Creative Communities of the World "Cambridge Imaging Systems Announces US Launch of ImagenCloud at NAB 2013", April 1, 2013.

Further reading

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