Apple buys Proximity, maker of media asset software
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Dec 4, 2006 at 4:40pm
Apple has bought Proximity Corp., a company that makes creative media asset management and production workflow software. Proximity was established in 1997 and has offices in New York, London and Sydney. The company’s artbox workgroup and artbox enterprise software are solutions for the management and storage of media content. The technologies won a Technology Emmy in October 2002.
A note on Proximity’s web site has this to say: “We are pleased to announce that all Proximity technology and intellectual property, including artbox workgroup and artbox enterprise, was recently acquired by Apple. Existing Proximity customers with current support contracts will be contacted by Apple with details regarding their specific agreements and support requirements.
“We remain a dedicated leading provider of creative media asset management and production workflow software. Our cutting edge production workflow solutions are widely considered the defacto standard for the ingestion, retrieval, browsing, editing, management, cataloging and storage of broadcast rich-media assets. Proximity solutions empower the customer to Protect, leverage and extend media with the best-of-breed equipment available in broadcasting today.”
artbox, Proximity’s flagship product, is an all-in-one asset management and workflow solution that manages clips, animations, stills and audio. It’s targeted at TV , news production and post-production workflows. artbox integrates format conversion, storage, workflow management, and search and retrieval of media into a single device. Its content management module stores media in its native format. Users can search, locate, transfer and transcode, edit clips, generate EDL’s media across multiple platforms and formats. artbox’s workflow management module introduces the concept of a “Project”, which gives producers and journalists the ability to associate multiple pieces of artwork that exist in different formats and across multiple devices with a single story.
videoripper is a video ingestion solution specially designed for post-production and dub-and-ship houses. Customers can rip frame accurate MPEGs and GXFs with or without program slate, generate metadata, and automatically publish clips to their artbox or ftp server.
Proximity’s xenotrack is designed to improvs productivity of media content workflow by utilizing several modules to track the flow of graphics, from the request creation through fulfillment all the way to placement on the play-out device. Not only does xenotrack integrate with artbox, it also integrates with Newsroom systems ENPS and iNEWS, allowing journalists or producers to order and receive media content through the newsroom system.
xenostore is a graphics content management solution that includes a single, searchable media catalog and an independent storage area for full resolution images that can be stored in their native format. The content management application programming interface (API) provides an Interface for third party asset management systems to access our media catalogue, information or content.
Leave a comment ⇒
Please post the article topic & comment in our forums. No registration required.
Article Information
Comment on this Article Print this Article Email this Article Digg This
Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
