PROVYS Technologies, the software company specialized in broadcasting, is celebrating considerable 30th anniversary this year. In 1995, it was born at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University, and was awarded an order to develop a broadcast management software solution for Czech Television, the Czech public broadcaster. The project name “PROVYS” was actually adopted as the name of the software solution and later as the name of the company itself. Today, PROVYS Technologies’ portfolio includes not only PROVYS software used by hundreds of television channels around the world, but also other products such as STREAM CIRCLE, TWEENLY or SPHERE.
The history of PROVYS Technologies has shaped electronic media
Let’s now look back at PROVYS, which over thirty years of technological development and cooperation with major media players, has become a synonym for effective management, stability and long-term reliability in the television and radio world.
In the 1990s, the television industry experienced a tremendous prosperity and the number of broadcast television channels increased. The need for effective broadcast planning and management began to grow rapidly. Each television station managed the processes and workflows their own way using many different applications, because there was no system on the market that could satisfy the demands of larger organizations. Technically, there was a need for a sophisticated solution package with a common large relational database capable to manage “big data”. Those days, even large software houses did not dare to start such development project. But for the fresh graduates from the mathematical university, this difficult task became a challenge and to some extent a passion. With great devotion, they set to work and two years later, in 1997, they launched the first major implementation of the system. Among the young mathematicians who participated in the development and the system launch were, Josef Vasica and Michal Stehlik, both members of the PROVYS Technologies management today.
PROVYS was put into production in 1997, and is still used by Czech Television as a centralized information system not only for the complete playout planning, but also for the description and search of archived content, the management of metadata, video and audio material and rights to use content. The system was also gradually modernized to have a rather human face and to provide the highest level of user comfort and integration with other technologies, such as playout servers or accounting systems.
Internatinal recognition
The success of the project in Czech Television was presented at the international convention IBC 1998 in Amsterdam, and the first order from the U.K. arrived soon. The solution was implemented in BFBS television network (British Forces Broadcasting Services), whose requirements led to further significant improvements to the architecture, configurability and flexibility of the product.
The advantages of deploying PROVYS in television organizations soon became widely known in the media industry, and with the advent of the 21st century, markets throughout Europe opened up for PROVYS Technologies. The system underwent many other modifications and improvements. In addition to the original functions of archive management, planning and rights management, it was expanded to include tools for planning and controlling television production, financial budgeting, advertisement sales, digital materials processing, MAM (Media Asset Management), planning of VOD (Video on Demand) Internet services, and many others.
Ongoing innovations
Major milestones in the history of PROVYS Technologies were the years 2010, 2015 and 2020. In 2010, cloud solutions began to gain ground in the world of information technology, and though the television industry is relatively conservative, PROVYS began to prepare for cloud implementations, which primarily allow for flexible deployment, good scalability and easier updates. The Internet with its constantly increasing data transfer rates not only allowed cloud services, but soon became a mass medium for content distribution. In response to this fundamental change for the television industry, the company launched the STREAM CIRCLE solution in 2015, which enabled streaming services to distribute content to viewers in a professionally planned linear format, which the majority of the population is still used to watch. In the same year, STREAM CIRCLE won the first prize in the prestigious Game Changer Award competition at NABSHOW in Las Vegas.
In 2020, the first practical innovations in the field of artificial intelligence were introduced, and PROVYS was not left behind integrating AI elements into its systems to provide users with functions such as predictive program planning or viewer behaviour analysis. PROVYS will soon be deployed with an AI Assistant making it easier for users to obtain information and data the system is naturally very rich in. At the same time, the system allows for the development and building other specialized applications upon PROVYS through an open API (Application Programming Interface).
Today, the PROVYS system is used as a preferred broadcast management tool in hundreds of television channels with millions of programs distributed to billions of viewers around the world. It is used by public and commercial stations, production companies and broadcast centres.
