BeamON – Product Intelligence Platform for the Broadcast Industry

Software News

by Jakub HanOctober 19^th, 2021

BeamON is a cloud-based product intelligence platform for the broadcast industry with a single interface to manage equipment across the whole organization. It can monitor the lifecycle of equipment and take care of ordering the replacement unit to avoid failure during a shoot causing expensive downtime.

The US-based company BEAM Dynamics claims to have a solution to the problem of downtime on set caused by faulty equipment. According to the company, the downtime is estimated to cost the broadcast industry around $6 Billion per year. The solution is a product intelligence platform called BeamON. Let’s take a short look at what it can do.

BeamON Product Intelligence Platform

BeamON is a cloud-based product intelligence platform that offers a single interface to manage production technology assets across an entire organization. According to BEAM Dynamics, the platform should bridge the communication barrier between broadcasters and manufacturers to help productions stay on air, time, and budget. The company actually received the NAB 2021 PILOT innovation award for the software.

The BeamON platform allows broadcasters to see a comprehensive overview of the technology used across studios, control rooms, ENG, and IT infrastructure. Currently, this agenda is mostly done in various spreadsheets (Excel or similar) and is therefore not very intuitive, plus every change needs to be entered manually. BeamON should help engineering teams manage thousands of pieces of production equipment in a single user interface in terms of product logistics, software/firmware updates, or maintenance.

According to BEAM Dynamics, the BeamON users will receive product update notifications, failure warnings and can visualize important product lifetime events in a single user interface. They will also benefit from one unified service process for all product vendors represented in their production workflow.

As an example, the system will tell you that in one of the studios one of the lamps is already old and it is reaching the estimated end of a lifecycle. You can then easily find it and order a replacement (or this can happen automatically) before it fails a month later in the middle of a shoot causing expensive downtime.

Because the platform is cloud-based, it only requires an internet browser to access and operate. On the other hand, in case there is no internet connection, the service will most likely be unavailable.

Price and availability

The BeamON software is currently in the early access stage. For information on pricing, you can reach David Kaszycki, the CEO and co-founder of BEAM Dynamics, directly at his e-mail address. The company claims to offer attractive early bird discounts to interested TV corporations until the end of 2021. To get early access to the platform, head over to the BEAM Dynamics website.

Do you manage the inventory of a large production house or a broadcast studio? How do you keep track of your equipment? What do you think about the BeamON software? Let us know in the comments section underneath the article.