The sheer volume of audio and video content in today's typical broadcast facilities has made it extremely difficult to track the material, or assets, as they move from one digital storage system to another. Broadcast quality digital content has been cumbersome to access, view, and manipulate without high-cost editing, large bandwidth, and video server based systems.

Masstech Group has developed a core set of hardware and software products to make asset accessibility simple. The MassTrans-it transcode engine produces frame-accurate, low bitrate audio/video files from original high resolution MPEG2 files and makes them accessible across a network or the Internet onto your desktop with no special client software required.

One of the key problems with traditional asset management systems has been the limited access to the assets within the system. MassTrans-it overcomes that, offering a direct interface into MassStore™ or acting as a stand-alone proxy generation engine under control of other applications via its open XML API. With an integrated MassStore™/MassProxy II environment, the frame-accurate proxy content is directly linked to the original broadcast assets in the asset management system. A MassStore™ user, through the standard Web interface, can select an asset and actually browse the video/audio right at their desktop. And because the proxy asset is created directly from the original MPEG2 data stream, there is never any question as to the accuracy of the proxy content.

The tight integration between each of the modules within the MassStore™ system extends to the powerful MassTrans-it transcode engine as well. The system can be configured to automatically generate low-bitrate proxy versions of all ingested content with no user intervention required. With its focus on extensibility, additional MassTrans-it transcode engines can be added to a MassStore™ infrastructure to provide multiple simultaneous transcode streams.