Press releases

Kaiserslautern – 17 January 2008 - PLAZAMEDIA, Germany’s leading full-service provider of sports and media productions, has commissioned Blue Order, Europe’s top provider of Media Asset Management solutions, to set up and continuously further develop a multi-user platform for the digital archiving and distribution of productions.
To begin with, the availability and process efficiency of the productions is to be improved, by implementing the "Media Archive 3.2" from Blue Order as the interface between production islands which are currently used independently of each other. At the end of the project, PLAZAMEDIA should have a fully integrated, cross-departmental file workflow. In particular, the sports producer will integrate the highly flexible and fast processes of its live sports production into a universal machine-readable technology platform. PLAZAMEDIA is Europe’s leading production service provider for major live sporting events. As well as its multilateral Bundesliga production for PREMIERE, the company regularly host-broadcasts international sporting events, such as currently the European Hockey Championships, the Women’s Handball World Championships or, as a supporting service provider, the FIFA Football World Cup Germany 2006™.

"In conjunction with extensive digitisation and networking of media management, archiving, postproduction and broadcasting operations, we will further optimise our workflows and our flexibility of handling live material for sporting events. This will benefit our customers in particular, whom we can now offer even faster and more flexible availability of production material", explained Chris Wieland, Head of Technology at PLAZAMEDIA. The Munich-based firm chose Blue Order as its service provider because it was impressed with the functions the latter offered and the universal application of its systems.

PLAZAMEDIA will in future manage all its processes, the metadata management from recording through to delivery to the individual distribution channels, and both high- and low-resolution video files with Media Archive. Furthermore, Media Archive also serves as a core platform for the operation of various third-party systems in the video production chain. Thanks to its workflow-controlled and service-oriented architecture based on Microsoft’s .NET framework, Media Archive provides all functions as Web services via SOAP interfaces. This approach considerably simplifies the configuration of seamless, cross-system processes and makes the overall system inherently scalable and failsafe.
Ulf Genzel, Chief Sales Officer of Blue Order Solutions AG, says: "We are delighted about this installation at PLAZAMEDIA, and especially about the fact that PLAZAMEDIA sees this project as the start of a long-term strategic partnership."
The first phase of the joint project – introducing Media Archive as a central workflow management system – will be completed in spring 2008.
Further project phases, in which the functional scope of Media Archive is to be extended to include workflow and media-asset management as well as the assignment of the production-related workflows and business processes, are already planned.