September 25, 2001 01:02pm
Playboy Entertainment Group Closes Agreement with Directrix Construction to Commence Studio Facility
Source: Directrix
by: Company Press Release
(BEVERLY HILLS, CA) -- Playboy Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of Playboy Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE: PLA), announced that it has completed a deal with Directrix, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: DRCX) that will expand their business relationship and will make Playboy an anchor tenant in Directrix's West Coast Digital Operations and Studio Center. As per terms of the agreement, Directrix will build, outfit and operate a 105,000 square foot teleport, master control, and soundstage complex in Los Angeles. When complete, Directrix will provide network origination and production services, digital archiving, studio facilities and personnel, production and post-production offices and commercial space to Playboy at the facility over a 15-year term.
"Playboy is pleased to continue its successful relationship with Directrix," Jim English, President, Playboy Entertainment Group, said. "This agreement gives us a cost effective way to provide live programming for Playboy TV, Playboy Online, Spice and SpiceTV.com and reduces our technical costs. It also greatly increases our capacity to produce original programming in our own, custom designed studio facility."
"We remain privileged to be able to provide technical services to Playboy," said J. Roger Faherty, Chairman and CEO, Directrix. "With the completion of our Los Angeles facility, new and established clients will enjoy turnkey integrated digital production, storage and distribution solutions previously unavailable under one roof."
From its East Coast operations center in Northvale, NJ, Directrix currently provides playback, uplink, satellite security management, and various post-production services for Playboy TV and the Spice networks owned by Playboy as well as the three networks recently acquired by Playboy from Califa Entertainment. Directrix also provides US domestic distribution for Playboy TV En Español.
Directrix' Los Angeles facility is being designed and built specifically to exploit the full capabilities of Digital Asset Management (DAM) rather than merely engrafting DAM technology to an existing infrastructure. The Los Angeles facility will be able to fully support digital video from content creation, to digital archiving, and ultimately to distribution through The Directrix Content Delivery Network. The Los Angeles Operations Center will sit upon a nexus of Southern California and Pacific Tech Corridor fiber optics and the Center's dish-field will have the capability of downlinking and uplinking to any satellite in the Western Arc. The facility will also feature the successful marriage of Directrix' ultra-reliable automated video file server based Master Control with a newly-outfitted 21,000 square foot SMPTE 259-compliant production sound stage.
The centerpiece of the facility will be its enhanced scaleable digital archive which will allow clients to edit and re-purpose their video content for virtually any distribution medium without the cost, hassle, and security issues associated with videotapes. Directrix will be able to take video content from virtually any source - tape, satellite downlink, fiber optic connection, or its own sound stages - and have it encoded, stored on a server, and be ready for a multitude of broadcast, Internet and Video-On-Demand distribution, and post-production applications.
Directrix is also extending its metacontent processing services at the Los Angeles facility to include a full suite of DAM services - such as Digital Rights Management (DRM), metadata cataloguing, interactive TV applications, and closed-captioning - ensuring that a client's content will be both secure yet readily accessible and searchable by the client's own personnel and customers. This enhanced searchable archive will also allow clients to screen their content over a LAN/WAN during any point in the creation process, streamlining the editing and quality assurance processes. With the power and flexibility of Directrix' enhanced archive system, a client can save money in operational costs while simultaneously mining new veins of revenue.
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