Client Background
iQ Media provides unique media monitoring services to clients that makes media more accessible for marketing, public relations, advertising, and corporate administration professionals. iQ Media goes beyond traditional search engines, allowing clients to search through recently broadcast media content and cost-effectively control their corporate and competitive intelligence platforms and empower their staff and clients to find and create media objects that can easily be shared.
Challenges
iQ Media needed a more effective way to manage massive volumes of audio and visual content and information on a regular basis. With 200 channels being recorded, every hour accumulated 200 hours of news & video captures that needed to be archived for six months. iQ Media and their clients search this archive data in order to provide better service to their clients. iQMedia needed a solution that would allow users to manage, store, and search this large amount of data more efficiently.
Solutions
iQ Media asked AllianceTek to study its business operations and develop a solution that would add the functionality they required. After understanding iQ Media’s environment, requirements, and objectives, AllianceTek developed a solution that would search through Closed Caption (CC) documents for a large number of captured videos. The solution would provide a fast data search by using an external source. The search criteria included search terms, program titles, description, time zone, timeframe, DMA rank and name, affiliate network, category and subcategory, and saved these search results to access later. Users could save clips, update clip information, email the clips, or download them. The solution contains other features that enable iQ Media, its customers and clients to easily access, manage, and search recently broadcasted media. Users can upload their own media and search within or edit information.
Implementation
Using Asp.net with C#, AllianceTek designed both a website for users and administrators that would allow them to manage media. AllianceTek created services and console applications to manage audio/video information on a regular basis that also communicated with different parts of the system. AllianceTek implemented an advanced full text search solution to search through Closed Caption (CC) documents for a large number of captured videos. The solution was implemented by indexing all the CC documents via the open source full text search engine, Solr/Lucene. A Flash/as3 solution for iQ Media’s audio/video player was also implemented. The solution was developed using AllianceTek’s hybrid development model which uses onshore and offshore teams to effectively handle different requirements of the project while keeping the costs low.
Result
iQ Media now has a solution that allows users to easily search and view specific audio/video criteria. Users can manage their own audio/videos via the new website. iQ Media was able to balance cost, time, and quality while providing a better service for its customers.
