Old Woking, Surrey-based Alphameric Plc’s satellite broadcast specialist, AlphaServ Ltd, has won Siemens Nixdorf Information Systems Ltd as a customer for ViewPoint, a satellite-bsaed system for delivering multimedia information. Siemens Nixdorf looks set to market ViewPoint to the retail sector as a way for shops to run in-store marketing campaigns. ViewPoint is an integrated package of hardware, software and communications technology that enables users to broacast sound and video images simultaneously from a central location, using satellite to as many end users as they like. By using a central site, Alphameric says any update made at that site is automatically propagated to end users, making it relatively cheap and easy to use. It is a personal computer-based system, running Windows, with propietary software and communication satellite links at the central site, where users can develop their own broadcasts, using authoring tools. A scheduler organises broadcast to the sites. At the branches, there is a receiving personal computer, with a satellite receiver and ViewPoint playback board, and from there the transmitted images and sound can be piped to televisions, computers, point of sale terminals or interactive terminals. AlphaServ says ViewPoint can also be used in staff training for organisations with staff spread across a number of locations.
