News and Events
DAM for SharePoint? There's Equilibrium
By | May 27, 2009
Equilibrium is a company pushing for a slice of the rich media ecosystem developing around SharePoint. They are just one of many companies finding both innovative and obvious ways to leverage SharePoint as a platform. Let's have a gander at their approach.
SharePoint and Share Alike
As companies find evermore ways to manipulate and develop on SharePoint, and make use of video online, both for internal and customer consumption, Equilibrium stands out when it comes to managing rich media; movies, audio, PDF files and so on.
Its MediaRich Server supports almost all file formats and helps deliver them anywhere, to any other device.
For any company with a digital asset management
requirement, MediaRich's video templating enables them to automatically
and dynamically (based on the end user's needs) generate large numbers
of videos for immediate download. Doing this processing automatically
significantly reduces the time and costs associated with managing these
assets. Other parts of the Equilibrium family include MediaRich for
SharePoint and the free MediaRich Visualizer for SharePoint.
EQ Network Converts Videos To Mobile-Friendly Formats While Inserting Ads
The web is filled with video content, but there are different formats that don't always play nicely with all players. The most obvious example of this is the hugely popular Flash format, which does not work on the hugely popular iPhone. EQ Network has an answer for that and other format issues, and wants to offers content owners a way to serve up ads in those video post-conversion.
The company's Media Delivery Bar can be embedded on a page below any video player. This gives viewers an easy-to-understand option for converting and sending a video to a specific type of device they may want to watch the video on -- like an iPhone. You simply enter an email address or cellphone number that you want to send the video to, fill out some quick demographic information, and within a few minutes, the video will arrive in a format tailored to your needs.
The demographic information part is key. That's how EQ Network hopes to serve up ads to you that are embedded within those videos. Because it knows your sex and age range, these are highly tailored ads that in theory will lead to better returns. But the ads themselves are kind of annoying. Rather than being overlay ads at the bottom of a video, they stop the entire video and make you watch them, similar to what you have to sit through on Hulu videos. Of course, for most of the content that this Media Delivery Bar will be used for, it probably won't be hit Hollywood content like Hulu has, that people seem to be okay with sitting through some ads to see for free.
But to smaller content providers, EQ Network's solution could be an intriguing one. "Virtually all companies that we met with confirmed our model and can't wait to use the bar to instantly deploy their videos without having to ad additional infrastructure or up-front costs," Equilibrium (the company behind EQ Networks) CEO Sean Barger tells me. That sounds suspiciously optimistic, but testing the solution out, it does work well. I took a web video that wouldn't play on my iPhone, hit the iPhone button on the Media Delivery Bar, and it formatted it so that it will play on my device.
Read the complete articleMediaRich Bolsters MOSS Digital Asset Productivity
By | Apr 22, 2009
Equilibrium is making big waves in the DAM segment with its MediaRich for SharePoint solution. The product allows enterprise users to manage massive amounts of video, images and other rich media. Adding a thumbnail view and metadata search to SharePoint, with batch processing and web connectivity, creates a productive system for managing a company's digital assets.
Rolling Video Now Gathers MOSS
Equilibrium is pushing further into the mainstream with its MediaRich product line entering the SharePoint market. When deployed, a vast quantity of media in many formats can be managed, sorted and altered by SharePoint users in the quest for efficient Digital Asset Management.
At its simplest, MediaRich for SharePoint improves Microsoft's product by adding thumbnail views of images, documents and videos in the libraries. This allows users to better see what content is stored. Files can then be viewed through the MediaRich Browser for a closer look. This feature also works with Office documents and PDF files as well. With large libraries of video or images, searching in MediaRich produces faster results using the metadata information.Read the complete article
Equilibrium MediaRich Fills the App Gap for Digital Asset Management
The web is moving beyond text with an increasing use of visualizations in many media. I recently spoke with Sean Barger, CEO of Equilibrium, a firm that supports this transition. Sean said that the web and television are moving towards convergence and I would agree. He has been working in the automated media processing space for the past 15 years.
Equilibrium recently released MediaRich® Visualizer for SharePoint. This enterprise-class freeware server software provides instant visual enhancements to any SharePoint deployment, as well as high-volume media processing and distribution. It is a subset of their MediaRich Core product. It automatically creates thumbnails for all Microsoft Office, PDF, , images and videos in SharePoint. It supports more than 300 common file formats and includes a Zoom and Pan function to examine the the details of the file without having to download it first.
MediaRich Visualizer also helps integrate the use of Macintosh computers in a SharePoint environment. It provides batch uploading of assets, including the ability to upload complete folders while preserving their directory structure from both Windows and Macintosh.
Sean showed me how MediaRich Visualizer permits advanced searching on all media asset metadata throughout the enterprise. It upgrades Microsoft Advanced Search with IPTC, XMP and EXIF capability. When you upload media, all metadata is extracted and added to the Microsoft SQL Server database for search. This allows you to extend the search capability for media and have on-demand visualization of the results.Read the complete article
Interview with Sean Barger - Digital Dealmakers
March 1, 2009
The player: Sean Barger, CEO of San Francisco-based software company Equilibrium
The play: Equilibrium works with major media and television companies such as AOL, Disney and Discovery to help them manage thousands of images and video assets that are often repurposed for Web sites and mobile devices, Mr. Barger said. The company makes money by licensing its software to media companies and will also add a revenue-sharing component when it rolls out at the National Association of Broadcaster's conference in April a tool that will let content owners insert targeted ads in real-time into mobile and Internet video.
The pitch: Creating content quickly for new mediums is essential in this tight economy, Mr. Barger said. "By being able to quickly repurpose, reconfigure, recode and dispatch content to Web sites and mobile devices, content owners can keep Web and mobile viewers coming back for more fresh entertaining content," he said.
In the mix: Equilibrium competes with companies as
diverse as Harris and Image Folio. Equilibrium's latest product will
compete with services like Freewheel that insert dynamic video ads into
content. Equilibrium's customers include AOL, Disney, Discovery
Communications, Omnicom, Sony, Universal and others. Ad agencies use
the software to manage ad campaigns for their clients running on TV and
in print. TV networks use the software to help promote new shows with
local station partners.
Read the complete article
Digital Asset Management
February 18, 2008
SharePoint can store files of virtually any type, ranging from simple ASCII files to complex engineering diagrams. It can even store parts of files, such as individual slides from PowerPoint presentations. Out of the box, though, SharePoint doesn't offer the sophisticated tools needed to manage and manipulate digital media. You can't use MOSS, for example, to resize images or transcode videos.
Fortunately, Microsoft's partners can help: Equilibrium is a gold-certified partner that adds Digital-asset Management (DAM) and Media-asset Management (MAM) capabilities to SharePoint.
Equilibrium's product, MediaRich, allows a company to keep a single, high-quality version of an image or video that can be converted to other formats on demand. As an example, a company can store just one version of a product logo, which can be converted to other formats (.BMP, .JPG, .PNG, etc.) and other resolutions (print, Web, mobile devices) as needed.
