Who is MicroFirst Engineering?

MicroFirst Engineering is an award winning international solutions company focusing on the media content management needs of the broadcast, hospitality and gaming industries.

Founded in 1992, MicroFirst Engineering is a privately owned company with a corporate headquarters in Oakland, New Jersey.

From a technology perspective, MicroFirst Engineering is the market leader in the design and delivery of Media Content Management and Workflow solutions. This was recognized in 2003, 2004 and again in 2005 when MicroFirst Engineering won the Broadcast Engineering Excellence Award for best-in-class Automation.

From a business perspective, MicroFirst Engineering has achieved consistent growth, year on year. Most recently, MicroFirst has been awarded several Master Control, Graphics and Router automation projects, including CBS Network in New York, NBC in New York; WHRO in Norfolk, VA; WOUB in Athens, Ohio; KTWU in Topeka, Kansas; KPTS in Wichita, Kansas; The Museum of Television in New York City, to add to its growing list of multi-channel successes.

Solutions

The MicroFirst Engineering - Digital Automation System

MicroFirst's history and core competencies are that we design and manufacture our own processing hardware and are also custom software developers for the Broadcast Networks, a variety of electronics manufacturers (including Sony & Leitch) and many non Broadcast; Multimedia / Hospitality / Display type applications ranging from Information Kiosks to Cruise Ships to Large Screen and Multi-Screen displays.

    • MicroFirst does not utilize PCs for our real time automation processing, machine control, or database management but rather handles all of these activities on a specially designed embedded hardware platform, running our real-time OS. This environment removes us from all the vagaries associated with Windows; or other commercially available OSs, and reduces the OS boot up time to a mere 10 sec. as compared to multiple minutes for Windows.
    • MicroFirst has manufactured and deployed over one hundred thousand (100,000) embedded controllers running the same real time OS in a variety of applications; including Broadcast, Multi-Screen, Large Screen, and Gaming applications; none of which has ever blue screened.
    • Building on MicroFirst's proven success in complex content management, and data management solutions, the Digital Automation System delivers highly-customizable and scaleable solutions to meet the diverse operational requirements of broadcasters around the world.

Modular Design: MicroFirst has taken a cost-effective, holistic approach to the end-to-end content process by ensuring efficient ingest, review, annotation, and storage management with automated on-demand delivery for accurate on-air transmission. Users may incrementally add devices, workstations or channels on a unit-by-unit basis. There is no need for purchasing upgrade blocks. The system scales easily from one to scores of channels. Therefore, Broadcasters can build the right solution for their operation, with products from our partner companies in an integrated system matched to their unique workflow, but without the cost normally associated with other systems.

Routing Control: MicroFirst Engineering also provides a suite of components that enable the creation of custom tailored user interfaces for the control of routing infrastructure over local and remote sites. Device driver support for popular matrices, the control of X-Y routing, creation of multi-level breakaways and salvos, previewing of actual sources and destinations with full tally back of router status.

Services: MicroFirst offers a wide range of hardware and software solutions for custom system requirements, some of which include:

  • Custom application design and development in C/C++/C#
  • Custom hardware design and manufacturing
  • Graphical User Interface (GUI) design
  • Large-scale production capabilities
  • Protocol conversion
  • Radio/Television broadcast engineering applications
  • Hardware prototyping
  • Technical Support
  • Real time control computer systems
  • Co-processor programming and implementation
  • Peer to peer real time LAN communications