Mediaware thinks global

A Canberra-based company has secured a global defence and commercial market by commercialising an Australian-developed video analysis technology.
Canberra-based Mediaware has shrugged off the disappointment of not being on the winning team for Joint Project 129, the Army's Tactical UAV program. The company, which develops digital video exploitation systems for both defence and commercial applications, has won a contract of undisclosed value from American UAV manufacturer General Atomics

Mediaware was part of the strong JP129 bid mounted by BAE Systems Australia and AAI Corp, offering the latter's Shadow 200 TUAV which is in service with the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since then it has signed a teaming agreement with BAE Systems' UAV Centre of Excellence in Melbourne to develop global applications for its technology; and Mediaware has been selected by General Atomics to provide enhanced digital video capture an exploitation capabilities for the American company's Predator UAV Ground Control Station (GCS).

As part of the contract Mediaware will help engineer, develop and integrate video and data dissemination enhancements for the GCS. These will provide improved video and metadata capture, exploitation and dissemination and will align the Predator GCS with current standards and interoperability requirements, according to CEO Chris Newell.

So what does Mediaware actually do? It provides software based tools and algorithms to compress, decompress and analyse live video imagery for broadcast and defence customers. The broadcast applications include MPEG file editing and narrow casting; the military applications focus on accurate geo-location of the target on the video screen.

To do this Mediaware's D-VEX, or Digital Video Exploitation System, analyses the metadata - the non-imagery elements - of a video stream: the audio feeds, sensor slew and elevation angles, angular panning rates and so on. It uses these to help in accurate geo-location of the target on the screen.

Under its agreement with General Atomics Mediaware will provide the D-VEX-derived software necessary to combine Predator aircraft positional information and sensor video into a single MPEG-2 digital video stream that can be export in real time from the GCS. After the initial development phase the potential exists for a fleetwide retrofit to the US Air Force's 100-strong fleet of Predators.

The military value of such a system is obvious - target coordinates obtained via a UAV or manned aircraft overflight can be fed into command support systems and intelligence data bases and fed as targeting information to artillery batteries, warships and strike aircraft.

Earlier this year the company signed a $2.3 million, two and a half year CTD contract with DSTO to develop the technology further and introduce features such as object tracking and identification.

Already, says Newell, Mediaware can do target mensuration in real time - that is, determine things like the length of a ship or the distance between two points captured in a video, but real-time targeting will need better accuracy than is available right now.

The value of D-VEX and its other technology tools is demonstrated by Mediaware's customer list: it generates 95 per cent of its revenue from exports, and 70 per cent from defence customers. It was a success story in Washington before it scored major successes in Australia. Military customers include the US Air Force, various intelligence agencies, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, SAIC and General Dynamics, while its global media customers include CNN, SBS, Bloomberg and Thomson Multimedia.

Set up in 1998 to exploit video imagery exploitation technologies spun off from CSIRO, the company has grown by 70-100 per cent annually over the past two years alone and now employs 40 people with offices in Canberra, Sydney and Washington DC.

Mediaware's products are used right across the Middle East area of operations, but the company has focused on the people exploiting airborne imagery rather than the manufacturers of the surveillance platforms themselves - the company's technology forms part of the Pentagon's Digital Common Ground System for UAV control; the deal with General Atomics is a first, says Newell.

A version of D-VEX will also be integrated with General Atomics' Predator-derived Mariner UAV demonstrator which is set to take part in the North West Shelf UAV trial in September this year. The company will provide a secure web portal for Defence and the Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation (DIGO) to exploit video coming in from the North West Shelf using D-Vex.

And the company is also talking with Lockheed Martin about potential applications in the data fusion engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter avionics and sensor suite.

Naturally, much of the company's North American business is transacted through its Washington DC office. Mediaware is only too familiar with the US government's ITARS defence export regulatory environment and for its contract with General Atomics has managed to negotiate a Technical Assistance Agreement (TAA) which enables both General Atomics and Mediaware's US operation to interact with the company's main centre in Canberra.

While it would be tempting to do more of its work in the USA, Chris Newell also recognises the potential constraints on Mediaware's growth imposed by the ITARS regime so balances very carefully the quality and quantity of work handled in Australia and the USA. This provides a workable combination of customer proximity and independence and, ironically, given that Israeli firm IAI Malat was part of the team which won the Australian Army's JP129 contract, this is one of the reasons the company is also being courted by a number of Israeli UAV manufacturers seeking leading edge imagery exploitation capabilities without the constraints of US government ITARS regulations.

In a business sector like this Mediaware's advantage is its innovative technology, which needs constant refreshment. The company spends a large percentage of its turnover on R&D - about 25 of its 40 staff work mainly on R&D, Newell told ADM. Their two main thrusts are compressed video processing, which remains the company's core business; and image processing, and especially motion tracking and object recognition.

Mediaware is an example of an Australian company which has grown by commercialising an Australian-developed technology and seeking applications and customers in both the commercial and military spheres, locally and overseas. Its success, and the strategy behind it, holds some important lessons for other Australian high-technology SMEs.

By Gregor Ferguson, Canberra