MINP Platform

MINP routers and management appliances allow communities to simultaneously transmit and receive audio/video on the radio, television, telephone, and Internet planes. This enables the development of unique multiplanar applications that can leverage available infrastructure to deliver an interactive media experience to end users. Refer to our Solutions page to know more about how the MINP platform can be used to build applications for community media, agricultural consultancy, rural marketplaces, and distance education.

MINP has been designed specifically in the context of rural areas of developing countries. Some distinguishing features of the platform are as follows:

• Plug-n-play: MINP comes bundled in ready made appliances that can simply be plugged into existing broadcast station setups.
• Low cost: MINP appliances do most stream processing in software which eliminates the need to buy expensive audio and video hardware.
• Self repair: If something goes wrong, the appliances try to repair themselves automatically. If human intervention is however required, the operator is prompted with enough details to resolve the problem locally, without requiring technical help from outside. This is crucial given that travel times to remote rural locations can be a couple of days.
• Scalable: Individual communities can deploy their own MINP appliances that automatically discover other MINP deployments to grow their networks organically. This distributed setup makes MINP scalable to evolve in an incremental manner, much like the Internet.
• Low power consumption: MINP runs on commodity single-board-computers that have a low power consumption. The boxes can hence run through solar panels even during power outages.
• Easy to use: All MINP management consoles have been designed keeping in mind that operators in rural areas may not be technically savvy to handle complicated instructions and tasks. The use of large icons instead of textual menus, and the incorporation of latest advances in user-interface such as faceted metadata search are all geared towards this end.