Archimedia Releases Enterprise Player

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Thu, 07/24/2014 - 12:09 -- Nick Dager

Archimedia Technology today released the Archimedia Enterprise Player, which comes free with an active support agreement. The new product is designed for all stakeholders — expert or not — who must be able to view professional video reliably and precisely in order to do their jobs, especially those who need specialized technical support to deal with professional media. 

The Enterprise Player is appropriate not only for professional editors, colorists, and compressionists, but also for nontechnical supervisors, project managers, salespeople, lawyers, caption spellcheckers, customer support staff, event coordinators, conference room service technicians, set designers, writers, producers, videotape dubbers, data I/O technicians, and anyone else associated with that business — all of whom must work together to keep the video projects and the business on track.

"The Archimedia Master Player is the world's most sophisticated and precise professional media player, and it has become the reference standard in major movie studios, archives, and broadcast networks around the world. Now we're bringing the expertise and software tools that we developed for the studios to anyone needing quality and precision in everyday viewing," said Mark Gray, Archimedia president and CEO. "Archimedia's new Enterprise Player is intended to find its way into the office of every producer and executive — and the offices of their staff. In the past, people used VTRs when they needed to view video. Now that type of convenience and efficiency is available with the Archimedia Enterprise Player on any desktop or laptop."

The Enterprise Player serves a dual purpose. First, it replaces the VTR and videotapes that used to serve as the universal sharing device. Anyone who has installed the Archimedia Enterprise Player can simply double-click on a file to play it. At the same time, the Enterprise Player augments the robust Archimedia Master Player, giving expert users a fast, accurate, reliable media player with which to check their work or view media-specific data.

Perfectly suited for users who have limited experience working with the intricacies of professional media, the Archimedia Enterprise Player installs easily on any computer equipped with Windows 7 or 8 by simply downloading the software from Archimedia's website. Users can get media-specific email support from Archimedia, as well as Archimedia's live online or phone support when needed. In this way, the Archimedia Enterprise Player also replaces consumer-oriented open-source downloads and free media players that come with PCs, none of which offer any meaningful technical support for people dealing with professional media. Having access to Archimedia's experts eliminates the need to call on the in-house IT department, which likely doesn't have the expertise to deal with the ever more complex world of media formats.

The main difference between the Archimedia Master Player and the Archimedia Enterprise Player is in the formats they support. The Archimedia Enterprise Player plays all professional and consumer video and audio formats except for JPEG 2000, DPX, and 4K/UHD, which are found only in cinematic or production masters. Like the Master Player, the Enterprise Player can play captions and subtitles in more than 80 external formats and more than 50 embedded formats, and all video can play to a normal TV over HDMI so that what the user sees is real TV rather than a PC approximation. The player also delivers accurate audio in all modes — fast forward, rewind, slow, and scrub. 

The Archimedia Enterprise Player is designed for operations budgets as opposed to capital budgets, which can save businesses $100,000 a year or more and helps preserve capital. At the same time, a business can better control the balance sheet by adjusting operations costs based on changes in headcount. This pricing model enables enterprises to provide a sophisticated media player and specialized technical support to a defined number of employees without worrying about auditing licenses or the cost of maintaining in-house technical expertise. Made to run on existing office computers, the player software is free for businesses with an active support account.

Information about the Archimedia Enterprise Player, including an online demo and a free trial, is available at www.archimediatech.com.