Imagen Ltd

Horticultural database

Anthony Blake came to computer imaging technology through gardening. In 1982, he worked with a gardening information system on laser disk kiosks, for use in garden centers. It represented an early commercial use of an illustrated, interactive electronic database. The project took off as a joint venture with Mercurius Horticultural Printers, Aura Books, and the Colour Picture Agency (CPA). The Auravision Gardening Disc and the Gardeners Questions Answered Discs won horticultural awards in 1982 and 1984.

In 1984 Anthony Blake took the firm over in its entirety and changed its name to Intersearch Systems Ltd. As the new technologies of CD-Rom, CD-TV and CD-I emerged, content was ported to these formats.

Early interactive video training

In the late 80's and early 90's, the firm entered into a joint venture with Video Arts, a video production company founded by John Cleese and others to produce humorous videos for corporate training. Called Video Answers, it used laser disk technology to produce interactive course material based on the Video Arts training films. Over the same period, the firm ran a number of interactive video courses at Cambridge colleges, through the Universities Extension Centre (UEC), later called Cambridge Interactive. In 1991, Intersearch Systems Ltd merged with Cambridge Interactive to become the Cambridge Multimedia Group plc.

Ministry of Defence and interactive surveillance

At the start of the first Gulf war, the company won a contract with the Ministry of Defence to put surveillance imagery onto Sony CRV discs that could be searched via a Unix database. Through the 90’s the Cambridge Multimedia Group was involved with migrating a number of Ministry of Defence projects to new digital video formats, including Fractal compression and MPEG 1.

Other milestones included being the first company to sell CD writers and DVD authoring systems in the UK, and one of the first to buy an MPEG 1 encoder and offer encoding services.

Film archives online

In February 1996, Anthony Blake set up a new subsidiary company, Cambridge Imaging Systems, with Paul McConkey, the programmer for the Ministry of Defence at Cambridge Multimedia Group. From focussing exclusively on the defence sector, Cambridge Imaging Systems now branched out into Corporate and Media & Entertainment.

In 2001, CIS developed a system to capture and distribute off-air television recordings for the BBC Monitoring service. This evolved into BoB, an off-air recording system that now serves the UK university sector.

2002-3 marked another landmark project for the firm, digitizing and making publicly accessible the newsreel archives of British Pathé. This project ensured the digital preservation of 3,500 hours of filmed history, 90,000 individual items and 12 million stills.

Imagen Ltd Rebrand

In August 2015, Cambridge Imaging Systems announced it would rebrand, becoming Imagen Ltd. This showed the focus the company had on their flagship product Imagen Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) for the future. Alongside the rebrand came a new website - www.imagenevp.com.

Current management, directions and major customers

In June, 2011, Anthony Blake's son Thomas Nigel Blake took over as CEO of Cambridge Imaging Systems to lead the company from a project approach to one of developing clearly defined software products. The Imagen product was launched in February 2012 and has undergone continual development since. The product became available as an SaaS offering in March 2013 under the trademark ImagenCloud. Imagen is a Digital Media Asset Management software addressing multiple market sectors: enterprise DAM, media broadcasters and production studios, education, museums and libraries, defence and security.

Imagen is a MAM System built on 20 years of video management expertise. With a focus primarily on archiving and monetizing video files and legacy archives, it is designed to keep media safe for the long term, engage customer audiences and make the most of valuable content. Imagen's MAM software helps companies of all sizes and industries to preserve, navigate, integrate and monetize their mushrooming media libraries, ensuring fast, easy, secure and controlled access to content through a highly-customizable site. Imagen’s flexibility is derived from its ability to make as many workflows as you need to suit your operational requirements – users can have multiple input and output workflows for different media types – each of which may have different parameters.

Notable current customers include:

Imagen EVP

Imagen is a client-server system for the management of audio-visual archives and assets, and for their publication on the Web. It consists of a suite of interacting modules designed to organize and automate the ingestion, transcoding and Web distribution of film, sound and video material.

Orbital

Orbital is a live video capture recorder. It captures transport streams from DVB-S and DVB-T and Encoder sources and saves them to disk. The raw stream (including all broadcast Electronic Programming Guides and subtitle data) is stored in a rolling buffer.

Users can play back video from the buffered transport streams, edit and export the raw content as broadcast. The exported files can be used for compliance recording, in third party editors, or stored in an archive.

Box of Broadcasts (BoB)

BoB is an off-air recording and media archive service, available to staff and students of member institutions of the British Universities Film & Video Council, holding an additional license. It is a partnership between Cambridge Imaging Systems, BUFVC, and The Centre for Excellence in Media Practice at Bournemouth University.

This TV scheduling service permits recording of TV and radio programs broadcast within the next seven days, and retrieval of programs from the last seven days, from a selected list of recorded channels.

A recorded program can be streamed in a Flash video in a web page. Programs can be searched by title or keyword, viewed, clipped and gathered into private or shared playlists.

BoB stores recorded TV and Radio programmes in an archive indefinitely. The archive currently contains some 200,000 TV and radio programmes in all genres.