IBM Philippines Bolsters ABS-CBN's Digital Content Management: Financial News

IBM Philippines Bolsters ABS-CBN's Digital Content Management
Friday April 11, 9:00 am ET

ARMONK, NY--(MARKET WIRE)--Apr 11, 2008 -- ABS-CBN, a leading broadcasting company in the Philippines, marked yet another industry milestone, collaborating with IBM (NYSE:IBM - News) as it embarks on a platform that will digitize all of its content, resulting in enhanced media content creation and management that is bound to benefit Filipino media consumers worldwide.

The Media Asset Management System (MAMS) will enable business transformation as it empowers ABS-CBN to create new and innovative services such as additional channels, Web portals and mobile downloads, while reducing substantial costs in archiving and storage and attaining a more efficient post-production process.

"Technology brings drivers of change that call for significant challenge and change in the global media industry. New entrants such as YouTube, iPod and Mobile TV, among others, now compete with traditional media companies. Today's vast technology consists of multiple forms of digitized content, increasing volume of user generated content and thus, enabling both supplier and buyer power to shift to new forms whether in the Internet, mobile or social networks. That is why we have embarked on this Media Asset Management System (MAMS) project with partners like IBM," said Raul Bulaong, ABS-CBN Head for Technical Operations Division.

The MAMS is tasked to aid ABS-CBN in its multimedia lifecycle management and workflow productivity enhancements. IBM will provide powerful hardware infrastructure support, including massive storage capacity that is expected to grow at about 36 percent over the coming years in support of this MAMS project.

Globally, IBM is continuously investing in the media and entertainment industries as proven by the various relationships that IBM has forged along the way with a number of media vendors including Dalet, Masstech and Exanet, who are all partners of ABS-CBN for MAMS.

IBM has the world's largest media and entertainment consulting and services practice with more than 2,500 consultants working on projects. Last year, IBM engaged with ABS-CBN for consultancy services to develop a comprehensive Media Asset Management business requirements and roadmap.

"We are glad to be part of their transformation -- accelerating the migration from analogue to digital production environments. We support this bold and pioneering step that ABS-CBN is taking to take advantage of the full benefits of an IT approach based on open standards, supported by industrial strength scalability," said James Velasquez, Country General Manager, IBM Philippines.

The agreement was signed in the fourth quarter of 2007.

IBM has a strong global focus on the media and entertainment industry across all of its services and products, serving all the major industry segments -- entertainment, publishing, information providers, media networks and advertising. For more information on IBM, please visit www.ibm.com/media.