Content Conductor™ Portal

The core building block of the Cast4All Rich Media distribution solution is the Content Conductor™portal.

The purpose of the Content Conductor is to conduct or orchestrate the various content distribution processes. It consists of several software processes running on a single or multiple machines in the ground station, and coordinating the interaction with and between the different actors:

• Storage servers: These servers contain rich or multimedia content. They are optimised for reliable storage of high volume data, but may also perform a number of tasks in the content distribution processes, for instance encoding and transmission. The content conductor may retrieve content from those servers, but may also initiate encoding or transmission activities.

• DVB Gateways: These are gateways encapsulating IP (Internet Protocol) data traffic into DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) streams at specified transmission speeds, through an ASI (Asynchronous Serial Interface) output. The Content Conductor may program and control this device to perform the required operations.

• Receiver Stations: These stations or gateways at the receiver sites collect the transmitted content, store it, and pass it onto a LAN (Local Area Network). The Content Conductor decides which content is sent to them, controls their configuration, and monitors them.

• Content Servers: Any server on the Internet can serve as a content server to store and export rich content. The Content Conductor is able to retrieve the content - possibly secure - first from such a server before performing the actual content distribution.

• Portal Users: Any user on the Internet is able to connect to the Content Conductor portal and perform all the account management, network management, and content distribution tasks for which he has the necessary authorisation.