Several groups have undertaken large-scale digitization efforts to tackle the problem, with some exploring new AI and ML (machine learning) tools to more efficiently tag and index video. Regardless of the method, generating accurate metadata is key to any archive efforts, both for old content and fresh material being created today, said broadcasters last week at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum in New York City.

Metadata’s Critical Role

“Before we can actually monetize the archives in a reasonable way, we have to have metadata on it,” said Mike Palmer, AVP, advanced technology/media management for Sinclair. “And in many cases, most cases, we have not been putting good metadata on it.”

Palmer, speaking on the panel “Harvesting the Archive for New Content and Opportunities” moderated by this reporter, said archive metadata must not only include enough information to find content using a media asset management (MAM) system. It also needs to have information about the rights attached to the content, since most call-letter stations have a mix of content they shot themselves, and fully own the rights to, and derivative content originally sourced from a network news service.

There isn’t any technical means today to tell whether a station owns a piece of content or not, Palmer said. That question can usually be answered only by calling and (hopefully) finding an employee who was there when it first aired.

“How long have we been talking about archives and metadata, but we’re not bringing back basic information about ownership, what camera it was shot on, the date, the geolocation, all this metadata that is in the cameras that we should be carrying forward,” Palmer said. “And we’re recreating the same problem that we’re trying to solve today with AI and ML because we’re simply not putting the right metadata on that content as it moves into the archive.”

Palmer said the culprit for lost camera metadata is often nonlinear editing systems that strip it out during the production process. To combat the problem going forward he sees a solution in the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard, as promoted by the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). C2PA specifies provenance metadata that survives all the way from camera to distribution. C2PA not only addresses content ownership, but also content authenticity, an issue of growing importance in the age of AI-generated fake images.

‘A Wildly Human Process’

To improve accessibility of content for its journalists and producers, Hearst Television began digitizing the archives across its stations in 2021. To date it has digitized about 20%-25% of its archive material, representing roughly 45,000 hours of video.

“We parachute into a couple of stations at a time and help them digitize their archives in a systematic way,” said Devon Armijo, director, digital news integration for Hearst Television. “We bring in archival staff that handles not only the physical media but also the paper data that associates with it. Not only do we focus on digitization, but they also are not only tagging. They are looking at it in a discovery way. making sure they’re telling about the editorial opportunities, the promotional opportunities and sometimes the sales opportunities that are there in the archives — things that are sealed in the tapes that folks may know or not know that they have.”

While Hearst makes some use of automation, Armijo said that digitization remains “a wildly human process,” particularly when dealing with physical media that is beyond its end of life, such as 40-50 year-old tapes. That is where Hearst’s archivists serve as “the first line of defense.”

“They’re putting tapes through on a daily basis and making so many human decisions, up front at the beginning of digitization, that helps you with any sort of automation that rolls through afterwards,” Armijo said. “We had some automation processes throughout, like black [frame] detection. But that stuff is all secondary to the human decisions, the conversations, and understanding the history of not only the station but the content that’s there in your archive.”

Hearst licenses archive content to third parties, Armijo said, but the group itself remains “our first customer.” So far this year, Hearst has used its archive to produce over 370 pieces of digital original content along with a handful of linear specials and some local streaming content, including the popular true crime series Hometown Tragedy.

Fox is digitizing the archives across its station group as well as Fox News and Fox Business and bringing them into cloud storage. It has taken a different approach than Hearst by outsourcing the work, which encompasses tens of thousands of U-matic, one-inch and two-inch tapes, 16mm and 35mm film and various digital tape formats.

“We have tractor trailers come and pick up the entire library and it goes off to one of our five digitizing vendors, and then it works through their process,” said Ben Ramos, VP, Fox Archive, field and emerging tech, Fox News. “They have around 35 metadata enhancers who watch every frame of it, and kind of tag it as they’re going through it. It’s very manual, we haven’t gotten to too many AI/ML tools yet.”

Fox’s first goal was to preserve “at-risk” content like one-inch, two-inch and U-matic libraries, with the second objective being to generate ROI by licensing content to third-party documentary filmmakers. The initial effort was aimed at 5,000 U-matic tapes.

“What do we have in there, what’s the failure rate, and can we find ROI?” Ramos said. “We found ROI within six months, so that kind of supercharged the process, and then we got to do the rest of the 70,000 U-matic, two-inch and one-inch, and then we started dipping into the more expensive 16mm.”

Fox has experienced a failure rate of 3%-5% on that older content, and those impaired assets are now sitting on two pallets “awaiting further remediation,” Ramos said. That could involve baking them for several weeks to remove moisture, or even cracking tapes open to clean them and rehouse them.

Overall, it is a slow process, and so far, Fox has only digitized about 8% or 9% of its total physical media assets. One of the surprising findings is that newer formats like Beta, DV and DVCPRO tapes are also experiencing similar 3%-5% failure rates during the digitization process, and some of the older one-inch and U-matic tapes are actually playing better depending on how and where they were stored.

“Now everything feels a little bit at risk,” Ramos said.

Finding Answers With AI, ML

Sinclair was early in archiving some of its content in the public cloud, and last year struck a deal with producer Anthony Zuiker to mine its news archives to create original content that can be licensed to third parties. The group has around 23 million assets that were “born digital,” Palmer said, which means they been archived from a newsroom computer system with a script attached to it. Those assets have accurate metadata, allowing one to search that content across the entire enterprise and access it. Sinclair also has another roughly 10 million assets sitting on shelves on varied physical media.

“The question at this point is what do we want to invest in to bring this back?” Palmer said. “We look at news content, and it’s a fact that most news content has no value in the archive. It is the rare jewel that justifies the expense of all the rest of the work that you put into that. So, we’re focused right now in trying to determine, to the best of our knowledge, which portions of the archive have the highest probability for containing those jewels, and then go mining in that direction. And we may not — I say may, because there are no hard decisions at this point — but we may not want to go back to those 10 million assets and actually digitize them all. It depends on what we find.”

Sinclair has worked with archiving vendor Memnon to digitize cutsheets and tape labels on stored media at a few stations. It plans to use AI tools like optical character recognition (OCR) to analyze them and hopefully generate good descriptions that it can then use to determine what is worth digitizing.

Fox Sports has spent several years on its own complex archive project with Google to create a system that allows producers to quickly call up old footage, such as to enhance a halftime package. Ramos said he has been given access to it and “playing with it for about six months.” The system uses two kinds of metadata: metadata created by human loggers, as well as metadata created by the same ML algorithms that form the basis of YouTube search. A user has a choice of searching by either type.

“It’s definitely working,” Ramos said. “It’s a massive, massive archive, it’s huge. They’ve got a lot of content in there, so it would be really hard to search otherwise.”

Ramos’ own budget for AI/ML tools is more modest, so his team has focused on the least expensive AI tools, speech-to-text and OCR, and runs content through the AI tools themselves.

“Usually when there’s an anchor or a reporter talking about something, it relates to the video that’s covering that,” Ramos said. “So that’s been a really good way for us to inexpensively find most of what we need. But it’s not 100% of the way there.”

Finding Affordability

French company Newsbridge wants to make indexing archive content and searching through it more affordable. The company has developed a cloud-based AI engine called MXT-1 that can quickly sift through archive video and generate human-like descriptions, and do it more affordably than conventional AI systems, said Newsbridge CEO Phillippe Petitpont. Its indexing technology can also be applied to ingesting live content.

“With 1,000 hours of archive, there might be three hours that are hidden gems that have a lot of value,” Petitpont said. “So, you need to analyze 1,000 hours but there are maybe only three or four that are relevant. The problem is that current AI, monomodal indexing technology is very expensive. You don’t want to spend $10 million to index something that might be valuable for just two or three hours. So, we took this problem and have been working on it for a few years. We need AI with video understanding that is able to be very efficient, so that it can meet business realities in terms of pricing.”

Petitpont said a key differentiator for Newsbridge’s AI that it is multimodal, which means that it doesn’t just analyze speech or recognize text but considers multiple types of data within video as a human would. And instead of analyzing each individual frame of video, MXT-1 employs “smart subsampling” and only looks at a few key relevant frames. This cuts down on the use of expensive graphics processing units (GPUs) on public cloud compute and avoids wasting money by “overindexing” content.

“We only process a frame that will really best illustrate the content,” Petitpont said. “So then we’ve reduced by an order of magnitude a lot of traditional sampling.”

Sinclair is not currently a customer of Newsbridge, but Palmer said when he spoke with them he was impressed by their smart subsampling approach. The company obviously had arrived earlier at the same conclusion that his team at Sinclair had reached.

“That was, that you don’t need to look at every frame of video,” Palmer said. “You don’t need to do some of these massive tagging things for every frame of video. Some of these AI models will create pages and pages of metadata for each frame of video, and that is not appropriate for news. Less in some cases, and probably this case, is better.”

Read more coverage of NewsTECHForum 2023 here. Watch this session and all the NewsTECHForum 2023 videos here.

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TV Monaco’s new facilities include a broadcasting studio with associated control room and a newsroom for the station’s journalists. It was crucial for the Qvest team to create a scalable, collaborative, and particularly agile working environment. With this setup, the broadcaster’s staff prepares and publishes daily television program for international as well as local distribution in the Principality of Monaco.

Qvest’s area of responsibility included the conception and orchestration of all broadcasting workflows, the playout infrastructure as well as the media asset management (MAM) and newsroom control system (NRCS). For the latter, Qvest realized an innovative concept: With the implementation of NXTedition, a particularly efficient solution for end-to-end workflows regarding MAM and NRCS was established. In terms of the amount of data to be processed, Qvest has implemented one of the world’s largest NXTedition installation for TV Monaco.

For the playout of the local and international programs, TV Monaco chose the Qvest product Makalu, an all-in-one playout automation for broadcasters, publishers, and content owners. Makalu enables a full-featured end-to-end signal workflow from ingest to distribution and covers further media tasks such as storage, transcoding, graphics, and playout. This makes the station ideally prepared for the demands of a competitive media landscape with changing audience preferences.

In addition, Qvest was responsible for setting up the TV station’s IT network. This includes the needs analysis, conception, and installation of the entire IT environment in all departments and functional areas of TV Monaco.

The Qvest team worked in close collaboration with the French systems integrator CVS Engineering and finalized the project within a tight timeframe. CVS Engineering was responsible for the installation of the audio-video infrastructure, the design and construction of the studio and gallery set-up as well as the complete wiring in the facilities. TV Monaco is the first public broadcaster in the city-state and is part of the French network TV5 Monde.

The station’s program features fields of interest such as news, sports, environment and local culture and lifestyle. The new TV studio and the associated office space for the journalists were realized within only seven months and are in full operation since Sept. 1.

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For live production, Evertz is featuring its Emmy-winning DreamCatcher suite of production tools.  With DreamCatcher, Evertz says it “provides a solution that provides a number of services including ingest, playback, live editing, and slow-motion replay. DreamCatcher enables productions to never miss a moment in any live game or live event. With Google Cloud, Evertz can provide scalable tools to allow production teams from anywhere to create highlight clips, playlists, and replays from multiple angles to enhance the storytelling from the event. DreamCatcher has been designed to scale to any size of production and operators, and has been used for the largest sporting events in the world.”

Nima Malekmanesh, Evertz director of business development, live media solutions, said:

“We are excited to be working with Google Cloud to offer our customers a flexible and scalable solution that allows them to create more content, cost effectively. Customers are starting to rapidly adopt managed cloud services, like Google Cloud, as part of their overall strategy for modernizing their production workflows and migrate to a pure cloud solution or a hybrid that meshes both on-premise equipment and the cloud.”

For media supply chain and channel origination, Evertz’ Mediator-X and OvertureRT-LIVE are available on Google Cloud to provide media companies enterprise-class and cloud-based playout and content management solutions. Mediator-X is an advanced media asset management (MAM) and workflow engine that optimizes the preparation and distribution of both linear and non-linear assets. Mediator-X supports automated and rules-driven workflows for all elements of the media processing chain including: content ingest, quality-control (QC), quality-assurance (QA), archiving, versioning, conformance, transcoding, regionalization and captioning/sub-titling.

Mediator-X is designed to deliver advanced media processing functions, complex elastic searches, and analytics by integrating the next generation of database technologies. OvertureRT-LIVE is a highly integrated channel playout solution. With OVRT-LIVE-VM, all elements of a traditional playout and emission chain can be virtualized and deployed both on premise and Google Cloud environments to enable hybrid deployment architectures.

“Media companies are looking for ways to generate more revenues from their content across multiple platforms. As such, our customers are seeking alternative implementation and deployment models for their content,” said Dan Turow, VP of File Based Solutions. “With Mediator-X and OvertureRT Live available on Google Cloud, we can offer a solution that can be quickly deployed to address these new opportunities while reducing their overall infrastructure costs.”

“We are excited to work with Evertz, an industry leader for production and playout markets,” says Kip Schauer, Google Cloud global head of media & entertainment, gaming partnerships. “With Evertz solutions for virtualized production and playout workflows now available on Google Cloud, customers will be able to create and deliver content to their audiences more effectively and offer the media and entertainment industry innovative and resilient solutions that are enterprise class and accessible from anywhere.”

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• ASTRA V, a new platform for news and sports production automation (ASTRA Studio)
• Master Control automation (ASTRA MCR)
• Second-generation media asset management (GEMINI MAM).

ASTRA Studio, Aveco’s award-winning news studio production automation system, “offers a great deal of flexibility in producing and broadcasting live news and sports. It does not restrict or dictate the workflow. Users can start with minimal features and grow into ASTRA Studio’s full capabilities or jump right in and take full advantage to reduce costs and improve quality. The ability to work in existing infrastructures with existing equipment and applications makes for a lower initial investment than competing solutions. Aveco has the industry’s largest library of interfaces and implemented APIs in production, graphics, playout and MAM. Aveco lets you decide your workflow and equipment,” according to the company.

ASTRA MCR is described by Aveco as “the industry’s most advanced master control system, provides for on-premises, in the cloud and hybrid operations. Aveco’s ASTRA MCR playout automation has a 30-plus year reputation for reliability, dependability, consistent innovation, 24/7/365 operation and support.”

Systems can expand from a single on-premises channel to encompass numerous on-site and cloud-based channels — all in the same unified Master Control Playout Automation user interface. There are special automation tools for news channels, sports channels, music channels, movie channels, government/legislative channels, pop-up channels.

Located across the aisle from Harmonic’s booth (W2801), Aveco and Harmonic will be demonstrating how their Aveco’s ASTRA Master Control Room (MCR) solution seamlessly integrates with Harmonic’s VOS360 dedicated end-to-end video cloud Solution platform. At the Aveco booth, attendees can operate several playlists. At the Harmonic booth, attendees can see the ASTRA-controlled VOS360 service, see how to make changes to the playlist and apply them to the VOS360 timeline interface, as well as view the streaming output.

GEMINI, the new generation of MAM, is engineered for on-premises, in the cloud and hybrid operations, using a range of devices:  iPad, Android tablet, notebook or desktop, and in your favorite web browser. GEMINI MAM is an open system for integration with third-party media processing devices, third-party systems and appliances.

Aveco says: “Media operations are quite complex and to build a real solution that addresses the needs of today and the future does not require nor should it rely on an isolated system. It means integrating with the outside world. The openness of GEMINI scores high. GEMINI also offers third-party AI-enriched metadata, timeline annotations, editing, scheduling and distribution, media processing, complex search algorithms and much, much more.”

The post NAB Show: Aveco To Show New On-Prem/Cloud/Hybrid Automation & MAM appeared first on TV News Check.

Known for their expertise and best practice methodology in designing contemporary media asset management workflows, IMT is “well-positioned to fully leverage the Dalet portfolio of cloud-native media production, management and distribution solutions to enable digital and business transformation for clients,” Dalet says. Early collaborations include the implementation of Dalet Flex media supply chain capabilities to facilitate content packaging and delivery workflows on Amazon Web Services infrastructure for the Gamestar+ streaming service.

Jason Kranitz, IMT president, systems integration, says: “Dalet brings to the IMT portfolio 30 years of media experience packed into modern cloud-native solutions that will accelerate our customers’ ambitions and business. Dalet cloud-native solutions offer the agility for real transformation backed by a company with a customer centric ethos that makes this an outstanding partnership.”

As part of its solutions portfolio, IMT will offer Dalet’s cloud-native solutions and SaaS offerings, which include the media logistics solution Dalet Flex. Dalet integrates with CloudSoda data migration solution, supporting high-speed data movement that is agnostic to the underlying storage technology.

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Used by many of the world’s biggest broadcasters and media organizations, Vizrt said “Viz One is a critical, and central piece in media workflows and infrastructure. To better serve its MAM customers, maximize value, and deliver tailored MAM solutions based on needs, Vizrt has formed the Enterprise MAM Business Unit.”

Daniel Nergård, Vizrt chief revenue officer, said: “In conversations with our customers, we’ve determined they want an open, reliable platform to operate and scale themselves. They also want an expert team on hand, that understand the business, the platform, the customers’ needs and act as trusted advisors to solve challenges. With the formation of this business unit, and the range of talent behind it, run by Jochen, I am excited to see how this investment will deliver an outstanding customer experience.”

Harnessing Vizrt’s MAM talent across the organization, the Enterprise MAM Business Unit combines R&D, professional services, support and commercial into one team to improve efficiency, drive collaboration and ignite innovation through increased collaboration.

The Enterprise Media Asset Management business unit will provide an end-to-end service, from sales through to end-user training. The team will be led by Jochen Bergdolt, who has 20 years of experience in the industry. In fact, half of Bergdolt’s career has been spent at Vizrt.

He began as a senior solutions architect successfully navigating MAM deliveries for important international customers. Bergdolt worked his way up to become the head of MAM sales operations SEMEA and ultimately the director of product management, Infrastructure at Vizrt before diversifying his experience in other ventures, including consulting for start-ups.

The post Vizrt Maximizes MAM Offering With New Business Unit appeared first on TV News Check.

The H4000 Essential provides highly available shared storage and automatic content indexing, discovery, and workflow collaboration for small creative teams. It does not require specialized IT skills to support, can be up and running in minutes, and offers unique features that integrate media management and storage so these teams can spend more time creating and less time searching for content.

Now for the first time, the company said, the same technologies used by the largest studios, broadcasters, and post-production houses are available to small creative teams everywhere, starting at an entry-level suggested retail price under $40,000.

Quantum will be demonstrating the H4000 Essential at the NAB Show in Las Vegas April 23-27 in Booths N4109 and N4106.

Dave Clack, Quantum vice president and general manager, cloud software and analytics, said: “What’s remarkable about the new H4000 Essential is that we’ve brought the most important capabilities of two powerful platforms — CatDV and StorNext — and taken away the complexity and time in configuring and managing them separately and setting up production workflows. The H4000 Essential is the fastest solution to stand up for a new project or a new team — whether working directly on the storage, collaborating remotely from the field, managing multiple projects simultaneously, or all the above. For the first time, these industry-leading technologies are in reach of small creative groups everywhere.”

The H4000 Essential features are purpose-built for the needs of small, independent creative teams and include:

• StorNext collaborative shared storage systems of starting at either 48TB or 96TB of raw storage in a compact 2U server, expandable up to 384TB with purchase of additional storage
• A highly-available dual-controller architecture
• An intuitive out of the box user experience designed for creative professionals to get up and running quickly
• 25GbE networking connection to customer networks
• Unified StorNext and CatDV account creation with StorNext-powered SMB storage volume sharing
• StorNext shared storage operations to trigger file ingesting, metadata extraction, proxy and filmstrip creation without needing ‘file tree polling’
• Automatic content ingest, metadata extraction, proxy, thumbnail, and filmstrip creation
• Automatic content cataloging and indexing based on folder structure, made immediately available to all users
• Highly efficient StorNext and CatDV integration to avoid file system polling that can impact performance
• Quantum CatDV pre-installed and pre-configured for use by up to 10 named users, including use of Adobe Premiere Pro CatDV Panel
• Integration with Quantum Cloud-Based Analytics (CBA) software for remote, proactive system monitoring
• Available archiving plugins for Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, or choice of S3-compatible storage

The available archive plugins are a powerful way to extend CatDV’s searchable catalog as projects are completed and moved to cloud storage, yet keep them available for fast recall as needed on the H4000 Essential.

The H4000 Essential is available to order immediately from Quantum Value Added Resellers worldwide.

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The most significant, it says, is the introduction of a new Metadata Rules Editor. As the lifeblood of an effective MAM (Media Asset Manager), metadata creation requires a balance between the theories of best-practice database management/structure and the specific data needs and demands of individual users. The new module provides users with the structures of best-practice metadata management without them needing any knowledge of how to structure metadata themselves, and at the same time allows them to fully customise their metadata arrangements.

The new rule editor incorporated within VSNExplorer grants users the ability to engage with an intuitive, straight-forward programming language that allows them to organize and query their metadata in the way that is most meaningful to them, all the time supporting them with intuitive processes and error detection.

The second major addition to the core VSN range occurs within VSNCrea — VSN’s Broadcast Management System, which has been designed with remote HTML5 access and full VSNExplorer integration at its heart. Here, the Ad pricing solutions have been expanded within the new Commercials Module to allow for the assignment of price blocks at different times of day, the selection of ad rate types (fixed, cost per mille, cost per rating), and the direct exchange of this information with the commercial contracts on which they are based. Through the integration of these automation and accuracy-enhancement tools, VSN yet further extends the monetization options available to users, maintaining a focus on delivering solutions that leverage the maximum possible value from an organization’s content and advertising.

As well as exhibiting these developments in person at NAB, VSN will also be hosting the online ‘VSN Spotlight’; a unique ‘pre-release’ broadcast on April 21 to allow those unable to journey to Las Vegas to gain first-hand insight into the developments which VSN will be announcing at NAB.

Speaking of their upcoming NAB attendance, Ricardo Quintanilla, head of marketing at VSN, said: “Thank goodness for the opportunity to re-engage with our customers and industry peers in person. We’ve made significant — and often innovative — efforts to stay connected, especially with initiatives such as the VSN Spotlight. But nothing can really replicate the personal connection that tradeshows bring, and we’ll be looking forward to giving live demonstrations of both our Metadata Rules Editor and expanded Commercials Module”.

He continued: “And we’ve undergone some significant changes in the last two years that we’re enthusiastic to talk about; from our recent acquisition by Valsoft Corp., to our development of a new logo — both elements which we feel represent our movement into the future. When it comes to NAB, there’s lots we want to share with our stakeholders”.

The post NAB Show: VSN To Launch Its Metadata Rules Editor appeared first on TV News Check.

The high-availability FLOW platform also introduces a number of user-centric updates including new Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve panel capabilities and proxy support that further simplify working remotely. Complementing the enhanced creative experience are time-saving EFS administrative features that provide smart shortcuts, system transparency, and automation, bringing even more efficiencies to the workflow.

“This release builds on the road-tested success of the high-availability capabilities in EditShare’s award-winning EFS media file system and the company’s commitment to delivering open systems that optimize the integration of innovative 3rd-party solutions,” said Sunil Mudholkar, EditShare vice president of product management. “With a new enterprise-level high availability architecture in FLOW for both cloud and on-premises, we enable greater scale and resiliency and provide customers with an end-to-end workflow solution that maximizes uptime using the wide range of tools they already know and love.”

“Like many markets, the media industry embraces cloud platforms to enable better remote working and collaboration, trends that are here to stay,” said Frank Della Rosa, IDC research director SaaS, business platforms and ecosystems. “The EditShare platform is a key technology enabler that facilitates collaboration and secure content management from anywhere. The company’s continued push towards developing open solutions is a major benefit for customers who want to expand beyond the traditional media workflows.”

FLOW’s high availability is achieved by giving its central database multiple points of redundancy to mitigate against hardware or network failures that would affect MAM client accessibility during active productions. Consistent with this, FLOW’s services are scalable and presented as multi-instance, redundant elements within the overall system.

FLOW Panel Enhancements — Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve
EditShare’s NLE panel integrations bring the benefits of FLOW directly into Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolves user interfaces, enabling users to access FLOW’s features without leaving the familiar NLE environment.

Users can now exchange FLOW sequences directly with Adobe Premiere Pro and Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve thanks to the new FLOW Cuts List sequence import function.

Extended Metadata support lets team members add metadata information to sequences, including custom fields. This improves and enriches metadata associated with sequences.

AirFLOW now shows sequence metadata in its user interface.

Improved media relinking logic automatically imports and relinks Hi-Res source footage located within a project’s complex folder structure after completion of a proxy edit.

Support for Multiple Proxy Formats Per Clip — In addition to standard streaming proxies, FLOW can now generate additional high quality ProRes Proxy and H.264 files. This simplifies relinking to complex clips with multichannel audio track layout in remote workflow scenarios.

Storage DNA Archive Support — FLOW now fully supports the latest version of DNA Evolution by Storage DNA. Users can easily archive and restore FLOW assets from third-party LTO/LTFS and disk-based tiers.

In-App Messaging & Guides — EditShare is building on the momentum of bringing better web-based user experiences to customers through the use of in-app guides and feedback messaging capabilities. As the company brings more and more features to the browser-based experience it is their aim to guide these users to the new capabilities and solicit feedback directly within EFS Control and FLOW.

EditShare Telemetry — EditShare Telemetry makes it easy for administrators to share Audit and Monitor data with EditShare’s secure network operations center. Through Telemetry, EditShare can work with customers to ensure systems are running optimally through pro-active monitoring and event alerting. Please contact EditShare technical support or your account representative for more information and to participate in the trial program for this service.

EFS Control Maintenance Mode — New controls allow maintenance users to manage files in certain media spaces while restricting other users to read-only access.

Active Directory Single Sign On (ADSSO) enhancements — Multiple improvements to ADSSO to enhance enterprise-level user management.

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Emilio L. Zapata, Tedial founder, said Manuel Martínez has been promoted to Tedial’s business development manager from his position as regional sales director, Spain; and José Luis Montero has increased his sales management responsibilities from regional sales director of LATAM/Middle East to include Spain and Portugal as well. Both appointments are effective immediately.

Zapata said: “We are fortunate to have such talented and experienced professionals on our team as the industry transitions to a new era driven by Cloud, AI and SaaS, and the company moves toward a next generation Media Integration Platform. Manuel’s comprehensive insight of the challenges the M&E sector faces in this time of unprecedented change, along with his deep knowledge of customers’ expectations will be invaluable when we roll out our groundbreaking platform. And José Luis’s vast proficiency and deep understanding of the industry mixed with his proven track record will be key assets for Tedial customers in Spain and Portugal as they have been for those in LATAM and the Middle East.”

Martinez, who is based at company headquarters in Malaga, has assumed the responsibility of developing business and marketing strategies for Tedial’s next generation of services. He will work with Tedial’s senior management, sales and marketing to assess market reach, evaluate opportunities and put best practices in place to build new business channels.

Montero joined Tedial in 2017 as regional sales director, LATAM. His track record in strategic planning and customer development led to the expansion of his regional responsibilities to include the Middle East. Montero will now add Spain and Portugal to his current role as Manuel Martínez moves into the position of business development manager.

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Gemini manages media and AI-enriched metadata, plus timeline annotations describing any frame or segment of an asset, utilizing speech-to-text transcription, subtitles or markers (e.g., soccer goals) using secure HTML5. Assets are under control across all types of storage — in the cloud, NAS and SAN, video servers, as well as LTO and non-spinning disk archives.

“The introduction of the Gemini MAM brings powerful tools that are easy to use, so people can concentrate on the task at hand, anywhere in the world and on any browser,” said Pavel Potuzak, Aveco CEO.

The architecture of Gemini scales from thousands to millions of media assets, from tens to hundreds of users, from out-of-the-box workflows to the most complex operations involving third-party media appliances. An integrated frame-accurate proxy video editor works together with popular NLEs and online rendering services to optimize news and production workflows.

According to the company, “Together with Aveco’s playout and news automation, Gemini accomplishes the industry’s Create-Manage-Deliver paradigm reliably and efficiently.

“Gemini provides users with more creative power to assemble news stories and packages, without having to deal with separate and more complex systems. Gemini works with all internet browsers and all operating systems, as well as tablets running Android and iOS without the need for any plugins.”

For redundancy, Gemini MAM server components use a multi-node architecture. This means that if a node goes down, the remaining nodes continue to provide all services without interruption. Additionally, performance can be easily scaled up by simply adding more nodes.

The post Aveco Announces New-Generation MAM With Gemini appeared first on TV News Check.

The closing of the deal coincides with the initial public offering of Codemill onto Nasdaq First North Growth Market, planned for mid-June.

The acquisition means Cantemo Portal product development will accelerate, and also result in tight integration with Codemill’s highly complementary Accurate.Video product suite and Accurate Player SDK.

Cantemo Portal is a scalable and modular MAM solution that provides fast search and playback. It can be easily integrated with mainstream third-party tools, enabling users to continue to work with their files in the normal way while Portal takes care of metadata management in the background.
Accurate.Video is a web-based video platform created for broadcast, post-production and media professionals. It can be integrated with existing tools and storage to create a seamless media production workflow. Accurate Player SDK is a web-based framework that can be adapted and integrated into an existing workflow within minutes.

Rickard Lönneborg, CEO, Codemill, said: “I’m delighted that Cantemo is to become part of the Codemill family. We have worked closely with Parham and his team for many years, successfully developing and supporting Portal systems for leading media and entertainment companies all over the world. Together with our Accurate.Video software and Accurate Player SDK, we have highly complementary solutions, which together with Portal, offer even more building blocks to our clients, for custom Media Asset Management and Content Supply Chain workflows.”

Parham Azimi, Cantemo co-founder and outgoing CEO, and Iconik CEO, added: “When we launched Cantemo, we invested all our time and energy into creating a leading product and world-class team. Now it is time for us to step down and focus on the next chapter in the form of Iconik. With its deep knowledge of Portal software, combined with its world-leading expertise in custom software development for advanced media workflows, we cannot see a better owner of the company than our friends at Codemill.”

The acquisition sees the integration of Cantemo Portal and the product development team into Codemill. It does not include the existing Cantemo leadership team and shareholders, who will now focus exclusively on Iconik.

The post Codemill Buying Cantemo Portal Media Asset Management Software appeared first on TV News Check.

Emilio L. Zapata, Tedial CEO-founder said: “We’re proud to announce this significant achievement, which would not have been possible without our incredible team, past and present, as well as our loyal first-rate international client-base. From the beginning we’ve always outpaced the continuous roll-out of new technology and kept our clients ahead of the curve. The benefits of these advances have been multiple: driving product development, integrating exciting new projects, and always providing the highest level of support for solutions deployed. Our quick and efficient response to requests in an evolving industry has resulted in award-winning technologies, many of which have been acknowledged with numerous ‘IABM Game Changer’ and ‘Best of Show’ awards.”

Based in Malaga, Spain, Tedial was founded on principles that include furnishing clients with workflow optimization, business efficiency, higher productivity and increased profits. The pandemic showed the industry that to be successful in this new world, media companies need to work smarter and ensure that all their operational and business needs are addressed today so that they’re positioned to meet the challenges of tomorrow. Tedial said its hybrid cloud architecture and remote working technology “not only meet all these requirements, but give broadcasters, media companies and content owners control over their own processes, practices and destinies, with the flexibility needed to stay fluid in a changing world.

Since 2001, Tedial’s expert team have consistently and successfully delivered large, sophisticated MAM/Content Management systems. The company’s software enables end-to-end business media and entertainment orchestration, marrying media preparation and logistics to a complete supply-chain operation, providing enterprise clients with cloud-compliant and scalable tools that cost-effectively support increased business efficiency and profitability, with unprecedented deployment speed to keep pace with changing and expanding media consumption that increases year-on-year.”

Zapata added: “We know, as a technology-based company, that it’s essential to constantly innovate to stay in the M&E market. That innovation must be oriented towards the development of products, solutions and services that improve the business agility of M&E companies. This includes competitiveness, interoperability, adaptability and improvement of the customer experience. With this in mind, Tedial is shaping the next-generation media management platform that will underpin the future of broadcasting.”

The post Tedial Celebrates 20th Anniversary appeared first on TV News Check.

The latest version of Tedial’s Capture Manager includes two tools; the first is for the ingest list. This creates ingest placeholders before an event is recorded. It allows the production team to be more efficient by creating the scheduling information using the metadata in advance of the event, before the team knows which router will record the event. When the router input has been defined, the system automatically allocates the physical ingest channel. This highly efficient workflow reduces the time spent managing the ingest process and gives greater visibility to what’s coming next.

The second tool, orchestrates scheduling using a timeline view, per ingest channel and provides dynamic allocation of ingest channels. It’s agnostic to third-parties and more importantly, to video servers. Servers from different manufacturers can be managed together from the same tool, at the same time allowing customers to leverage their investments. It also enables connection to traffic systems like Provys or Mediagenix. Thanks to Tedial’s API, operators can manage an end-to-end ingest workflow.

Program scheduling is created in the traffic system, which allocates a placeholder on the ingest list. Tedial’s Capture Manager tools then automatically control the router and dynamically switch the input at the time of the recording. The combination of the ingest list and ingest scheduling features provides increased production efficiency.

Further key features are integration and interoperability. Tedial Capture Manager seamlessly integrates with most of the video servers and routers in the market, and in combination with the rest of the Tedial tools can also integrate with external scheduling/traffic systems.

Emilio L. Zapata, CEO, Tedial says: “The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the move to remote working across the world. It’s our aim to ensure that broadcasters and content owners have efficient automated, end-to-end workflows that provide a centralised UI for controling and monitoring devices, significantly improving ingest time management and scheduling visibility.”

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Topping the list are new features and enhancements to Clip Link and Curator for Adobe, the workflow extension panel that allows collaboration on video in real time.

James Varndell, product manager at IPV, said: “Our customers have made it clear that business continuity and uninterrupted video production workflows are critical to their operations; given the circumstances of the pandemic, the focus of this release was to ensure businesses could easily use Curator while working remotely, while also providing increased ROI for them. With the release of Curator Arrival, we’re making it easier to remotely edit and collaborate on video projects in addition to simplifying administrative functions in Curator, improving user onboarding, and reducing cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure costs.”

IPV highlighted the new features of IPV Curator Arrival:

Clip Link: An Enhanced Search Experience. IPV has significantly improved the search experience in Curator Clip Link, building on the AI-enabled search results introduced in v2.3 with search highlighting – one of users’ most requested features. This includes highlighting for direct matches where the result corresponds directly with the asset’s metadata, as well as indirect results where the search has matched with parent metadata for a subclip.

A powerful new feature, search highlighting makes it easy for users to find content they need quickly and more efficiently — ideal for remote work when collaborators must work more independently and often with less input and oversight from managers. Plus, when users have a better understanding of their search results, it becomes easier to locate, manage and monetize their existing media assets, particularly archives, which is vital given that very little new video content has been produced since the pandemic started.

Curator Clip Link also now features List View, which gives users the ability to organize search results in a list view and customize the metadata columns for a totally personalized user interface.

Curator for Adobe Panel Powers Remote Workflows. IPV’s seamless integration for Adobe Premiere Pro, Curator for Adobe now has the same search highlighting functionality as Clip Link, greatly improving the user experience and creating consistency between Curator applications. The Panel also now features a new importer allowing cloud-hosted graphics files to be imported into Premiere Pro. This ensures editors can access the most up-to-date brand graphics assets stored in the cloud directly through Curator without needing access to other file storage devices — crucial for brand management when accessing on-prem storage is likely impossible.

“Swap to” and export functions, which were introduced in v2.3 with the ability to choose individual assets to swap, now includes the ability to choose which hi-res version to swap to if there are multiple renditions of the same file (4K, HD, etc.). And now, users can import subclips directly into the Panel by marking in and out points in clips to import only the section needed, rather than the entire clip.

Curator Connect Gets a Speed and Performance Boost, Plus Cost Savings for Users. Curator Connect is now even faster, increasing the already 3x faster file copies and bulk folder import introduced in the v2.3 release. Curator Connect’s new checksum architecture greatly reduces the strain on home Wi-Fi bandwidth as the amount of data transferred is significantly less — ideal in current work-from-home environments. The new approach has helped significantly cut down on infrastructure costs, contributing to overall cost savings up to as much as 80% for some customers. A visual indicator of the checksum and upload status improves the user experience by allowing users to see in an instant whether the upload and/or checksum has been successful.

Curator Gateway Provides Fine-Grained User Controls for Secure Remote Operations. Introduced as a new application in the previous 2.3 release, Curator Gateway is designed to give users fine-grained control over their Curator accounts, making it a self-service setup when possible and reducing strain on IT teams and system administrators. Version 3.0 features improved security with built-in user authentication plus integrations with various authentication providers, and ease of use with single-sign-on across Curator’s end user applications. System admins can also now deactivate and reactivate user accounts – perfect for managing freelance users — and monitor user analytics for a deeper understanding of system use. Remote access is now smoother and more secure thanks to Curator Gateway.

Tool-Tip Walkthroughs Every Step of the Way. In Curator Arrival, IPV has built tool-tip walkthroughs into the release to help new and upgrading users master the system and new product features on their own time and at their own pace. In a time where on-premise training is not possible and new staff and/or freelancers are hired without access to hands-on training, these walkthroughs help editors to become more productive and use the tools at their fingertips to their greatest extent. Collaborating remotely using Curator becomes an asset to video teams, improving user adoption of the system and ROI on the Curator investment.

The post IPV Announces The ‘Arrival’ Of Curator 3.0 appeared first on TV News Check.

“As the world and, more specifically, the media industry navigates these unprecedented times, it is more apparent than ever that a sophisticated and diverse digital archive infrastructure that supports disaster recovery along with complementing postproduction workflows is a mission-critical component to any broadcast solution,” said Josh Liemer, president, VISTA Worldlink. “The Primestream integration at VISTA Worldlink, along with the tremendous storage capability of Tata Communications’ Cloud, has positioned VISTA’s centralized broadcast facility to continue to repurpose historical content to VISTA’s diverse customer base, including most of the major sports leagues in the Americas. Since these clients typically contribute many hours of content every week, they will receive tremendous value from the ability to browse the cloud archive and get near-instant access to their critical media assets.”

Xchange is at the core of VISTA Worldlink’s strategy to move to a cloud-based archiving system from its legacy platform, an LTO-tape-based system. Working with Tata Media and Entertainment Services and Cloudfirst, Primestream developed an Xchange-based solution that could enable VISTA Worldlink to migrate all archived content at its Miami facility to the Tata cloud infrastructure. Eventually, Xchange will house more than 64,000 VISTA Worldlink assets.

“With Xchange in the cloud, VISTA Worldlink customers no longer have to request specific footage or wait for their desired content to be retrieved from the tape-based archive, which was a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Now, customers can browse their own content and download what they need in a matter of minutes,” said Namdev Lisman, co-founder and executive vice president of Primestream. “This solution is ideal for organizations looking to migrate from any tape-based archive system.”

Lisman added: “Since the new archive resides in the cloud, there is no equipment involved — offering the potential of significant capex savings over old ‘middleware’ solutions. Plus, hosting on the world-class Tata cloud network means virtually unlimited scalability for VISTA with no limits on the amount of assets, users, and storage — they can scale their services almost indefinitely into the future. VISTA Worldlink administrators are able to onboard new customers with little effort, since adding new users and granting them access to the Xchange platform is fast and easy.”

Since 2018, VISTA Worldlink has been a satisfied user of Primestream’s Workflow Suite to manage all live ingests, production, and postproduction for high-profile broadcasts, including coverage of CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central America, and Caribbean Association Football) league games.

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The absence of sports and other live programming offerings has left many broadcasters scrambling to fill the gaps, leading some to turn to their archives for content that can be repurposed into specials or other substitute programs. The problem is, many find those archives to be the equivalent of a massive and very messy closet, and the further a clip goes back, the less likely it is to have sufficient metadata to put it within retrievable reach.

“In the old days, you didn’t store metadata with your files because everything was on tape,” says Debra Slater, director, Three Media. “People back then didn’t realize how comprehensive metadata would be in the future, and without the metadata, you can’t go find your content.”

Enter AI’s first potential application facing an archive in disarray.

“Many of the archives are hard to search because people don’t even know what is in them,” says Eric Bassier, senior director of product marketing at Quantum Corp. “How companies are employing AI now is they are starting to use indexing algorithms that have been developed in the cloud to basically go and index their archives. Step number one is to index the archives, make them a little more online and more searchable.”

From older archives in which little to no metadata exists, AI can wend through and offer a couple of key organizational functions. The first is transcribing speech to text of the commentary within a given clip, creating a structured data set that can then be searched against.

The second focuses on video. “You take your feeds and put them through the video AI and [it] will … recognize places, objects, colors, logos, graphics,” says Jerome Wauthoz, Tedial VP products. Pivotally, it will also recognize faces.

One major upshot of this is a news organization, for example, can suddenly put its hands on loads of assets once buried anonymously in its archives and give them new life in documentary material. Michael Arthur, SVP of licensing at Veritone, has done this kind of work with CBS News and its archives.

CBS might deliver all of its content related to, say, the Son of Sam murders, “and then we will run it through transcription, object recognition and facial recognition,” Arthur says. “We did a segment on David Berkowitz and found a really nice little gem of his doorbell ringer in his apartment complex with the name Berkowitz on it.”

AI makes the retrieval process “a hell of a lot easier,” Arthur says. “The intention of AI is to enhance or accentuate the metadata you may have on a piece of content.”

That’s the plus side AI can offer, accomplishing algorithmically what would otherwise take a Herculean effort in human labor and hours the farther back a poorly tagged archive stretches.

But of course, there are caveats. One of them is that AI can’t perform instantaneous magic on a media asset management system. It has to learn in order to maximize its efficacy and efficiency.

“A computer is only as good as its operator, and artificial intelligence is only as good as its trainer,” says Ben Davenport, portfolio manager for Arvato Systems. “You have got to be able to train the system appropriately with the content you want it to measure. And that is not something that can happen overnight.”

On the transcription front, for instance, accuracy varies based on the quality of the audio, whether the speaker is in a studio or field environment and whether other variables like multiple speakers, crosstalk or regional dialects factor in. Clearer single voices are easiest for AI to learn, but accuracy across the board improves with time and the volume of content that the AI is run against.

Veritone, Arthur says, will put two to three different transcription engines against a file. They will essentially correspond with each other and verify what the other has heard, resulting in ever cleaner speech to text. “The best I have ever seen is probably about 92% accurate, and I’m sure it has gotten better than that,” he says.

The same principle goes for facial or object recognition. “Companies need a big body of data to do that, and it just takes time to train and make the algorithms better and better,” Quantum’s Bassier says.

If training time is one caveat, the complexity and cost of applying AI to archives are the entwined others. This is especially the case for broadcasters coming to the process from a cold start.

“A lot depends on what their infrastructure looks like and what their starting point is,” Bassier says. “If they have an archive that was made on digital tape that is just harder to index.”

Veritone’s Arthur adds: “A lot of folks put [content] in a can, put it in an inexpensive piece of real estate and they shut the door and kind of forget about it. They really haven’t done a tremendous amount of what I would call putting the archive in the gym, getting it in shape and making it as healthy as possible.”

And just like many of the millions of people homebound during the coronavirus and carrying a few extra pounds of flab, getting back into shape is a question of priorities and increments.

“There are baby steps,” Arthur says to those broadcasters sitting on a terabyte or perhaps even a petabyte of content, the thought of managing it likely to send them diving back on the couch with a bag of potato chips.

“What we really want to do is prioritize the content,” he says. “Look at what you want to create, what is some of your most valuable content, the stuff we should get out in front right now. Let’s start there.”

Fair enough, but before most people sign up for a gym, they want to know the cost of membership, and for some companies it’s going to be steeper than for others.

“You are not going to go through all the archives suddenly and put everything through the AI,” Wauthoz says. “It’ll cost you a fortune. We need to be realistic. If you don’t have the data yet, going through the process to just reingest all your content through the AI to get the metadata is going to cost you a lot, but you can still do it on a case-by-case basis.”

Generally, the cost of deploying is by the hour and tends to have a volume discount. One vendor (who didn’t want to be identified because of pricing information sensitivity) says a cost sampling might be $0.05/minute for facial recognition and $0.10/minute for sentiment analysis using video AI. A broadcaster paying for 150 hours per month would be looking at around $3.99/hour, while committing to 3,500 hours a month finds the price dropping to $1.36/hour.

For a low-risk approach, IBM is offering a free 90-day trial of its IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog, says David Wohlford, senior product marketing manager. “Customers can plug in, scan all the data and then realistically start searching for things and creating their own metadata catalog,” he says of the software, which isn’t bespoke for media companies but can be easily adapted to their needs.

Craig Bury, partner and CTO at Three Media, acknowledges that for any broadcaster, now is certainly not an optimal time to think about incurring new technology expenses as ad revenues dwindle amid the pandemic.

“People are going to be reluctant to put any kind of serious capital behind what could be a flight of fancy, but if a provider comes in to offer them a service on an op-ex kind of basis, it becomes far more interesting because the pain is taken away,” he says.

That, coupled with AI’s ability to fill programming holes, may finally move it from the realm of buzzword into an everyday tool.

“We see this as a pretty significant opportunity,” Bury says. “The events that we are living through are forcing a lot of organizations to completely rethink the way they work, and AI will most certainly play a role there.”

The post TVN Tech | Pandemic Tees Up AI’s Role In Archives appeared first on TV News Check.

The integration allows users to search, view and download content stored in both Digital Media Hub and Getty Images through a single interface. In addition to Digital Media Hub’s advanced search capabilities, the new add-on feature lets customers “accelerate content discovery and simplify project workflows,” according to Veritone.

“We’re thrilled to further our partnership with Veritone and release this powerful integration,” said Peter Orlowsky, SVP of strategic partnerships at Getty Images. “The Digital Media Hub will now serve as a centralized location where mutual customers will now be able to access Getty Images’ award-winning visual content, in turn simplifying complex creative workflows and saving time.”

The new search and index service has been field-tested by several mutual Veritone and Getty customers. With content housed in multiple, disparate platforms, the companies say “users appreciate a simpler and more intuitive way to search, access and transact with assets in both the Digital Media Hub and Getty databases to accelerate asset discovery and maximize utilization.”

“With the new search and index capability in Digital Media Hub, this integration with Getty Images will provide a single access point for discovering and activating content from both locations through our proven Digital Media Hub portal,” said Ryan Steelberg, president of Veritone. “The tool is designed for future expansion to other content platforms as well. The goal is for Digital Media Hub to serve as a centralized gateway for users to leverage both proprietary and third-party content spread across any number of sources and help them access and utilize a larger universe of assets.”

Federated search of Digital Media Hub and Getty Images-based assets is available today for any Digital Media Hub customer. Those customers interested must also have a subscription to Getty Images or contact Getty Images to create an account.

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McDanell has extensive experience in the media and technology sector, having held senior board positions at MTV, Chrysalis Group, and most recently Peach, formerly Group IMD, where he helped devise and execute the company’s global business strategy.

McDanell said: “I am excited to be joining IPV at this interesting stage of its growth. IPV’s Curator platform is without doubt one of the best products that I have seen. I am particularly pleased that IPV has just launched CuratorNow to help the broadcast industry address the present market difficulties by enabling editors to work remotely on frame accurate proxy videos.”

Available immediately and deployable in days, CuratorNow fast-tracks the ability of creatives to work from any location, including their home, with just basic Wi-Fi for project collaboration using the core tools of Curator, IPV’s proven flagship video content management platform, allowing for simple scalability and an easy upgrade path.

IPV CEO Mark Fagan said: “Philip brings highly relevant experience to IPV, especially from his most recent position at Peach during which time the business expanded from a U.K.-centric business to operating in more than 40 countries after having transitioned from original legacy software to a world-beating cloud platform.

“We are currently in a similar position with the expansion of our Curator platform to include the remote operation benefits of CuratorNow and very much look forward to gaining from Philip’s expertise at a corporate level, as well as the demonstrable benefits that will naturally accrue to our customers, existing and new, worldwide.”

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Dalet StoreFront manages multi-user access to Dalet MAM stored content with advanced search tools to quickly locate assets, filtered to only show relevant materials to a qualified client.

Underpinned by Dalet MAM orchestration engine for content preparation and delivery, Dalet StoreFront creates an optimal content shopping experience that maximizes inventory exposure, repurposing and retail opportunities, bringing value to the overall media operation and business. This service will benefit just about every Dalet customer from news networks sharing assets across affiliates to sports leagues servicing licensees.

“As audiences grow at a global scale, so does the need for more content. Maximizing exposure and facilitating discoverability of our customers’ new or untapped materials is more important than ever before,” said Luc Comeau, market director for MAM and supply chain at Dalet. “However, with this opportunity for increased content ROI comes additional supply chain complexities. Dalet StoreFront enables clients to tap into a rich Dalet MAM inventory with greater efficiency and speed, resurfacing and monetizing otherwise dormant archives, all within the familiar shopping experience that today’s digital shoppers come to expect.”

Dalet says its “StoreFront shopping experience is easily actionable, discoverable through an intuitive browsing and online shopping model, and eliminates the need for back and forth email exchanges.”

Comeau says: “Today many media operations rely heavily on unconnected processes to fulfill partners’ and licensees’ requests. Requests for content via email and disparate file delivery services are manually intensive and leave far too many opportunities to repurpose and resell content on the table. Dalet StoreFront identifies the ‘shopper’ and presents all of the relevant content options they can choose from, ensuring maximum catalog exposure while keeping content rights intact.”

With Dalet StoreFront, content owners can identify and tag content rights for their community of licensees as well as establish rights to visitors and potential licensees. Dalet StoreFront secures content inventory by keeping all the source content under the control and management of Dalet MAM. Only after an order has passed through all checks, automated by Dalet Orchestration, can the fulfillment happen, thus creating a segregated browse/shopping experience from the source catalog.

The post Dalet Introduces StoreFront Content Showcase appeared first on TV News Check.

He is based at the company’s headquarters in Malaga and will be responsible for sales in the region and will manage customer accounts in Spain.

The company said his contributions have been instrumental in the deployment of leading projects in Spain including RTVE’s MAM, Mediapro’s new Corporate MAM, AMC Networks International Southern Europe’s MAM and Fox Networks Group Europe’s MAM.

Prior to joining Tedial in 2010 he held several positions in ICT companies as Systems Integration Consultant including Everis, the Andalusian Technology Network RETA and AERIAM Technologies. He holds a master’s degree in telecommunications engineering from the Malaga University, Spain.

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The client’s operation is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service that includes four distinct traditional and digital news entities dedicated to delivering breaking news to more than 90 million homes.

The digital transformation will use advanced cloud and AI technologies and move all production and distribution operations to Galaxy five, a unified media asset management (MAM), workflow orchestration and editorial environment.

Frederic Roux, Dalet’s VP of sales, Americas, said of on the multi-workflow advantages Galaxy five offers: “This particular news network is on air 24/7 and what they must deliver is far more diverse than straightforward news shows. They need to produce studio news programs and documentary-style shows, which are much closer to long-form programming workflows and often feature multi-camera productions. In addition, a new kind of storytelling is required when producing for OTT and digital, which adds complexity to the production chain.”

Roux continued: “Dalet Galaxy five is able to facilitate standard news, long-form programming and digital workflows simultaneously. The transition to the platform brings immense efficiency to the operation with limitless options to implement future workflows and iterate quickly with new, digital-first initiatives. The consolidation of systems required to drive these disparate workflows will also help optimize the total cost of ownership for the broadcaster.”

Based on a video over IP infrastructure that uses the SMPTE 2110 standard, Dalet says Galaxy five offers production capabilities that let the news network effectively scale remote bureaus, field resources and workflows at will. Cognitive services integrated with Galaxy five will “accelerate the metadata enrichment of content archives making news assets easier to discover and readily available for creating deeper news stories across all platforms. Thanks to the hybrid architecture leveraging AWS, Dalet Galaxy five will provide native disaster recovery capability by offloading on-premise capacity to the Cloud when needed and processing scalability.”

The platform’s orchestration capabilities will facilitate metadata-driven operations that automate complex media processes, distribute tasks and streamline workflows, simplifying the technical hurdles of media handling while simultaneously providing staff greater control over assets and monitoring capacities.

The post Dalet Building Multiplatform TV Newsroom appeared first on TV News Check.

• NEP End-to-End Workflow – From capturing content as the action unfolds to helping clients enrich, manage and distribute content on any platform to the end user, NEP has a solution. See an example of NEP’s end-to-end workflow right within the stand, featuring NEP’s Augmented Reality capabilities, the NEP Live ActionCam, Live Ingest, Virtualized Editing and Mediabank, NEP’s cloud-based media asset management tool – all connected to NEP’s centralized production hub through its new iOB. Demos will be offered throughout each day. (NEP Stand, Hall 14, H02)
• Mediabank Media Asset Management – Mediabank is NEP’s cloud-based platform and “tool kit” allowing clients to access their media files from anywhere, anytime. Featuring an intuitive interface and designed to handle broadcast-quality video files, Mediabank allows users to search, process and distribute any item in their media library using their favorite browser on a computer, tablet or phone. Mediabank also facilitates the review and approval workflow in post-production. (NEP Stand, Hall 14, H02)
• Creative Technology Venue VR “Tour” – Clients can get the inside view into the appearance of an event venue from a number of different broadcast viewpoints and scenarios, including studios, mixed zones, fields of play and more. The tool can also show various different stadium configurations including medal ceremonies, final build-up and general heats. VR is an incredibly useful tool for providing a full-scale view of a stadium, giving a real-life feel for the broadcaster’s and attendee’s experience. Stop by the stand to make an appointment. (NEP Stand, Hall 14, H02).

In addition to demonstrations in the stand, NEP will showcase their capabilities throughout the venue:

• NEP iOB – NEP’s latest innovation, the iOB, works within NEP Europe’s Centralized Production Platform and will be used for the first time during IBC. The NEP iOB developed by NEP The Netherlands technical team is a complete and comfortable mobile PCR for directors (and editors) that can be placed at almost every conceivable event location where there is connectivity. With a fiber-optic connection, the iOB is directly connected to one of NEP’s data centers where all technology is centralized; all technology can then be controlled from the iOB. It is a mobile production control room with only remote controls for switching and other operating positions while the shading and audio is taken care from one of NEP’s central control rooms. Check out the new iOB outside of the RAI Auditorium. (at the RAI, Behind Auditorium)
• NEP eSports AR Studio – Together with EVS, ESL and Lagardere in partnership with the IBC, NEP is supporting the IBC e-Sports Forum on Tuesday September 17th. The forum will include presentations and panel discussions on e-Sports in the auditorium from 9:30 AM to 12:45 PM, followed by a live e-Sports event from 14:00 onwards with the popular game “Counter-Strike”. Two professional teams from the Electronic Sports League (ESL) will compete against each other, supported by NEP’s eSports AR studio near the auditorium and the NEP iOB to broadcast the action. (at the RAI, Near Auditorium)
• NEP UK Ceres with GV – NEP UK’s Ceres OB truck will be on display at the Grass Valley stand in Hall 9. NEP UK Ceres is an all-IP truck providing the level of flexibility and technical infrastructure that broadcast clients have come to expect in an era of ever-changing requirements. The heart of this IP infrastructure solution is supplied by Grass Valley, built around a COTS switch and based on open standards such as SMPTE-2110, guaranteeing interoperability and flexibility to meet specific client needs. Grass Valley’s Kahuna production switcher and its multi-format capabilities offers unlimited creative power irrespective of production format — whether it’s HD or UHD, SDI or IP, HDR or SDR or hybrid environments. In combination, NEP UK’s Ceres with Grass Valley provides a proven IP solution that can support major events worldwide. See it in person at IBC! (Grass Valley Stand – Hall 9, A01)

NEP AR at Zero Density – NEP The Netherlands’ talented technical artist Roel Bartstra will give AR demonstrations at the Zero Density stand several times a day featuring the Cube, 4K HDR rendering and DMX integration. (Zero Density Stand – Hall 7, C49)

For more IBC 2019 coverage, click here.

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At IBC, visitors will see a dramatic increase in the number of highlights that can be produced in a multi-sports environment with Smartlive. Totally agnostic to all data feeds, Tedial’s metadata engine makes it simple to add new sport configurations to the system as and when required.

In addition, Smartlive and Tedial’s Evolution MAM now includes a new module that allows all types of content to be published to any social network in just one click. Enabled by the system’s capability to create social media campaigns directly inside the MAM, publishing to social platforms has become really easy, quick and efficient. This will be demonstrated on the stand throughout the show.

Tedial will also demonstrate its technology partnership with Speechmatics. By integrating Speechmatics’ Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) technology with Smartlive, operators can seamlessly search for comments made by the commentators during a sporting match or live event.

Providing operators with faster access to content, Tedial is showcasing its new Smartlive bundled solution that can be deployed on top of the customer’s existing production environment. This is key as it provides sports broadcasters with a highly efficient solution that can be up and running very quickly. As well as these new features, Tedial will highlight the financial and operational benefits of operating Smartlive both on premises and in the cloud.

Esther Mesas, CSO/CMO, Tedial says: “We are delighted to announce the new Smartlive Multi Sport feature that will continue to assist media companies with further enhancing their story-telling capabilities. As sports rights become ever more expensive and fans expect more insight and more analysis, Smartlive is the most comprehensive, most productive way to create additional content to satisfy consumers and increase revenue opportunities.”

Built on open standards, Smartlive is agnostic to the equipment around it. It can be added to any production infrastructure. Its virtualized software architecture can be implemented on premises, in the cloud, or as a hybrid. As well as generating its own metadata it connects to existing archive asset management systems, using examples from the past as a way to illustrate today’s news.

For more IBC 2019 coverage, click here.

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The recent Ooyala Flex Media Platform business acquisition combined with new product introductions spanning broadcast graphics, AI-powered content and production workflows and IP infrastructure add even greater breadth and depth to the Dalet media management capabilities

The expanded Dalet product offering answers the needs of existing news, sports, programs, radio and archive customers requiring solutions to enable enterprise orchestration, intensive production and multi-platform distribution workflows. For new customers and markets, including corporate brands, telcos, sports teams and leagues, Dalet now offers agile, subscription-based solutions to manage multi-platform packaging and digital media distribution workflows

Ooyala FlexMedia Platform — Now under the Dalet umbrella, the Ooyala Flex Media Platform is nested within a media ecosystem that will enable a steady growth path, with a number of new features being unveiled at IBC2019. The platform now includes the ability to publish to multiple online video platforms, such as Kaltura, JWPlayer and Brightcove, offering increased support for OTT workflows and multi-platform distribution. Integration with Dalet AmberFin for orchestrated, high-quality media processing, and Dalet Media Cortex for AI-augmented workflows will also be demonstrated at the show, developing the first synergies between the Ooyala Flex MediaPlatform and the wider Dalet product range.

Leveraging AI to Augment Content Workflows — The AI SaaS platform, Dalet Media Cortex, automatically enriches content and provides actionable insights, contextual recommendations, speech-to-text transcriptions and automated closed captioning, offering real value for both the users and the wider organization. An add-on to Dalet Galaxy five and Ooyala Flex Media Platform, the pay-as-you-go AI platform helps media organizations leverage cognitive services and machine learning across content operations and businesses. Providing the right insights, in the right toolset, with the right context, Dalet Media Cortex helps content producers, owners and publishers across news, sports, programs and radio operations make the most of their media assets and become more productive, automating mundane tasks so they can focus on the creative editorial process.

Dalet Cube — Fully integrated across the Dalet Unified News Operations solution powered by Dalet Galaxy five, the state-of-the-art, full-featured Dalet Cube graphics platform is a major upgrade and leverages the industry-leading Brainstorm real-time graphics engine to deliver superior 2D and3D branding and visuals. Suited for both on-air and file-based graphics creation, the Dalet Cube unified approach enables news broadcasters to easily create dynamic branding and up-level visual storytelling across traditional, digital and social channels.

Dalet Remote Editing — Media organizations in fast-paced production markets such as news, sports and reality TV have extensive in-the-field production needs. The Dalet Remote Editing highly scalable framework brings full-featured multimedia editing capabilities and speed to the editors working in the field or out of remote offices, as well as freelancers. Dalet Remote Editing securely connects journalists, producers, editors and other content creators to the central content hub, enabling remote users to edit, assemble, collaborate and quickly submit packages or download high-resolution media to finalize locally even in low-bandwidth situations, with no additional PAM or MAM required. The first release of the new Dalet Remote Editing framework supports Dalet OneCut natively with subsequent updates supporting Dalet Xtend-compatible third-party editing applications.

A Clear Path to IP — Dalet is providing media organizations a clear path and controlled transition to IP with support for SMPTE ST 2110 in the latest release of its Dalet Brio I/O platform. Supporting both SMPTE ST 2110 and SDI standard workflows, the high-density ingest and playout platform allows media facilities to invest in their future IP infrastructure without disrupting their current operation. The cornerstone of advanced, IP-ready media operations, Dalet Brio adapts to new production and distribution environments with advanced capabilities that manage ingest, transfers and playout to and from a wide range of systems and devices. Its extensive IP support enables users to process a wide range of parallel streams including SMPTE ST 2110, ST 2022-2 and NDI for linear channels, and RTMP for digital platforms like Facebook Live,YouTube and Twitter.

For more IBC 2019 coverage, click here.

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The core of these demonstrations will focus on data management and optimizing storage use. Tiger Bridge, Tiger Technology’s intelligent storage management system, extends the Windows NFTS file system to provide an effective interface to the cloud and supports network-attached or direct-attached (NAS/DAS) storage or tape archives. It was designed to ensure that data is stored in the right place at the right time at the right cost.

Tiger Bridge will be shown unlocking the value of archived data, moving it to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing system, for indexing by Overcast HQ MAM. The latest version of Tiger Bridge will display features such as short data retrieval times using recently added partial restore capabilities.

Tiger Bridge is certified by Microsoft, AWS, IBM, Wasabi and Backblaze, and includes native support for Spectra Logic and Qualstar archive and backup systems. Among the organizations and facilities using it are ESPN, Xbox and London post-production house ENVY.

Alongside Tiger Bridge on the Tiger Technology stand will be the company’s range of content management tools: Tiger Store for managing high-performance multi-user collaborative workflows; Tiger Spaces, designed for multi-user project management and Avid bin locking; and the virtual storage manager, Tiger Pool.

Joining Tiger Technology on Stand 7.B58 will be UK IT workflow systems provider ERA, and New York-based Media Translation Inc, which develops hassle-free transition methods from tape to the cloud using Tiger Technology products.

For more IBC 2019 coverage, click here.

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Focused on the needs of the broadcast industry, Portal’s latest version, 4.1, provides users with an improved search facility. The new interface automatically displays search filters, collections, saved searches and search history which allows users to find content quickly and intuitively. Additionally, Portal 4.1 supports free-text searches for administrators to find specific field data within asset metadata.

The Portal 4.1 update introduces a Final Cut Pro X workflow extension which allows editors to access media without leaving projects. It allows users to preview, add metadata and drag media into a timeline, creating a practical and convenient media management workflow. Portal 4.1 allows users to render subclips created by the Annotation tool as new assets from within the interface.

Additional features include an improved user interface, offering personalised notifications and health check reports, as well as granular control over users through the Portal API. User roles can now be categorised into UI and API roles, allowing system administrators to create API-only users.

Parham Azimi, Cantemo’s CEO, said: “We’re constantly focusing on developing Portal’s practicality through innovative features and improved designs. Our latest update enhances the user experience through strategically designed and placed features which have enriched the media workflow. I’m really looking forward to demonstrating Portal 4.1 at IBC – it will be great to see media editors interact with our latest developments.”

The new features will be showcased at Cantemo’s IBC booth (7.D67). Cantemo’s solutions integrate with a range of other areas of the workflow. On its booth this year, Backblaze, iXSystems, and OpenDrives, will be present to demonstrate their integrated solutions.

For more IBC 2019 coverage, click here.

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ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 is home to hits such as Austrian’s Next Top Model, UEFA Europa League and international sports coverage such as National Football League and popular thematic news, talk and show programs. The Dalet Galaxy five installation will equip the broadcaster with a state-of-the-art media production workflow that realigns production and delivery to optimize cross-functional team collaboration and multi-platform content output across its three channels PULS 4, ATV and ATV 2.

ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 Broadcast System engineers Christoph Stadlhofer and Dirk Raschig comment on the vision for the leap forward and partnering with Dalet to better manage the news, sports, archives and program preparation workflows. “We have a rapidly growing pool of content that needs to be centralized and enriched with metadata.  In addition, we need tools that enable our staff to easily search, prepare and distribute that content. Facilitating these needs combined with managing a much higher output of program and news content to our digital platforms is what we expect to accomplish with the move to Dalet Galaxy five.”

Tobias Stößel, project manager of this project at ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 adds: “The Dalet Galaxy five core media asset management and orchestration capabilities will free our users from many manual processes and technical duties that currently weigh them down.  It will enable them to reach a higher level of collaboration, giving them more time to focus on the project at hand.”
The full implementation of Dalet Galaxy five will allow ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 to build an end-to-end, cohesive digital content supply chain that unifies all operations and processes from the newsroom to program preparation to post-production to distribution and archives. Key components include: a centralized content catalogue (MAM) that houses enriched metadata for ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4’s three channels; Dalet Webspace for browse, search and media management; Dalet Workflow Engine for the orchestration of operations and processes; the Dalet Brio I/O platform for centralized ingest management; and Dalet AmberFin scalable transcoding. The Dalet installation will facilitate seamless collaboration between all users including editors on Adobe Premiere Pro through Dalet Xtend and Avid Pro Tools.

“Dalet Galaxy five will unify the infrastructure with an underlying component-based workflow that enables ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 to scale at will its content production and multi-platform delivery and thrive in an ever-changing media landscape,” said Johann Zemmour, general manager, EMEA and APAC, Dalet. “We look forward to working closely with ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 to revamp its infrastructure and deliver on the ambitious roadmap that will undoubtedly transform the way they produce and deliver their premium product to the delight of ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 audiences.”

Philipp Beuchert, head of broadcast and production systems at ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 concluded on partnering with Dalet: “We are also looking into future technology and here, we think Dalet is one of the key players on the market. ProSiebenSat.1 PULS 4 is happy to improve the in-house technology together.”

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In this new role, Fernandez-Campon will be responsible for overseeing R&D, operations and customer support, working closely with the chief sales and marketing officer, and CFO to ensure that the company’s strategy aligns with industry changes and market trends.

In addition to his increased responsibilities, Fernandez-Campon will remain focused on technical innovation.

“Julian has proven himself countless times and we are delighted to recognize his achievements by naming him chief technology officer,” Tedial CEO Emilio L. Zapata said.

Fernandez-Campon has been with Tedial since it was founded in 2001. He has a strong background in computer science, including a master’s degree in telecommunications and robotics.

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Central to the new playout capability is ICE SDC, which supports uncompressed 2022-6 video streams and enables the Russian media services provider to leverage new commercial and operational models as well as handle content from almost any source and distribute it quickly to any platform.

Pike Media Lab provides playout services to cable and OTT platforms in the Russian Federation along with access to Russian channels for Russian-speaking audiences in North America. Utilizing the business agility that software-defined solutions provide, the media services provider can now easily and quickly roll out new services, supporting the company’s plans to add more channels in Russia and North America in the coming years.

Grass Valley’s unique ability to deliver a comprehensive playout solution with integrated media asset management (MAM) and automation was a key factor for Pike Media Lab. Along with ICE SDC, which uses Morpheus automation technology, the media services provider has deployed Momentum media asset management, iQ Modular interfacing and processing solutions and Vega routing switchers.

“The types of services consumers demand is constantly changing, so we need a dynamic playout and media management system that can adapt to new service models and support innovative ways of working,” said Andrey Kovalenko, CEO of Pike Media Lab. “We have a long-standing relationship with Grass Valley and theirs was the only solution that allowed us to deploy the system in a way that we wanted. Grass Valley also gave us complete freedom to implement the commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware of our choice, supplying a software-only solution that delivers the capability we need within our budget. The Grass Valley team also worked in close collaboration with us to ensure we had a playout facility that was right for our business. We now have an operation that can enable our customers to respond very quickly to what consumers want — today and tomorrow.”

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James Stellpflug becomes product director to refine focus on the company’s AMECS business and to continue collaboration with customers for new products. He reports to Daniel Nergård, president of Vizrt Americas, and will be based out of the company’s New York office.

In his most recent role as global VP of product marketing at EVS, Stellpflug established a pipeline of product communication to accelerate sales enablement and channel partner efforts, and provided the EVS voice to the market.

Stellpflug brings significant experience from his previous roles, helping grow the EVS business from a small disrupter in the industry to a global powerhouse of live production in his role in technical production. In his time in project management he executed countless big event productions like Olympics, World Cups, Super Bowls, Tennis Opens and other global sports events.

“As a product director James will work with our customers and within our organization to define the requirements and needs in a constantly evolving industry. I am delighted that James has decided to join our exciting journey and team in Vizrt Americas. With James’ knowledge and experience in the industry he will be a key contributor to continued success,” says Daniel Nergård, president of Vizrt Americas.

Also, Steve Papadakis has been hired as the sales manager key accounts supporting the company’s large existing customers, improving their workflows and unleashing broadcast quality, automated storytelling tools for both broadcast and digital destinations.

Papadakis is managing key accounts located in the Northeastern U.S. and Canadian regions. He is in charge of key strategic accounts in one of the main strategic regions for Vizrt Americas and reporting to Eduardo Mancz, VP Sales Americas.

With more than 30 years working in broadcast graphics, his roles started with customer service and channel sales, and moved on to direct sales and strategic account management. His experience in both the technical side of broadcasting, as well as the business aspects, includes working at each key point of a graphics production workflow, from graphic artists to transition clients.

“We are very happy to strengthen our team with Steve Papadakis. Steve will bring long experience, proven track record and industry knowledge to Vizrt Americas,” says Daniel Nergård, president of Vizrt Americas. “We are growing our business and market share, and Steve is an important part of a continued successful growth plan.”

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With a global presence across 100 countries, Times Network houses upscale brands including Times NOW, ET NOW, Mirror NOW, Movies NOW and Movies NOW HD, MN+, Romedy NOW and Romedy NOW HD, MNX and MNX HD and Zoom.

“Times Network is the leading broadcast network in India,” said K Yegneshwara Iyer, SVP and head of technology, Times Network. “To sustain this momentum and always be the first to break news, we moved to adopt a platform that could digitalize the archives as well as integrate our media silos, ultimately managing the entire media supply chain for the Times Network. Dalet was the best partner for this mission. Their platform allows us to bring all our content into one place and create seamless access for our users, with tools and intelligence to manage multiple workflows across several locations and business units.”

By connecting siloed production and post-production teams and systems across Mumbai and Delhi, Dalet Galaxy enables a comprehensive workflow transformation that gives Times NOW a first-to-air breaking news workflow that encompasses the complete story.

Key to the transformation was the digitization and integration of Times Network archives. No longer do staff need to manually review archive logs, request media from the archivist, and wait for the content to complete the story — Dalet Webspace provides immediate access to all content with tools to assemble stories that contain a mix of freshly shot and archival content.

With archives fully integrated and digitized, the Times NOW archivists are freed from manual search and retrieval of taped media. They can focus their time on enriching the digital content with metadata, making it more easily searchable and accessible across the entire group. This creates a fluid content supply chain that optimizes content usage.

“More than creating a friction-free workflow for breaking news, Dalet Galaxy is enabling Times Network to move away from a pay-per-month archive digitization process to a fully owned and managed digital workflow that optimizes content utilization,” said Johann Zemmour, GM, Dalet APAC and EMEA. “This is a business benefit that enables them to be more systemic in the way they manage and distribute their content across the entire business operation.”

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That’s happening as AI’s business case begins to make itself clear and decisionmakers become satisfied with reliability levels, although some questions remain about the assumptions behind the algorithms.

And it’s emerging that AI technologies extend well beyond the ability to assign metadata tags to video assets in Media Asset Management (MAM) systems. Newer offerings can use AI to locate and monetize content, speed research, make content more findable for viewers, generate silent videos and highlight reels, confirm the quality of closed captioning and predict what will become news. One company even provides what is billed as the first operating system for the world of AI.

Producers at ABC News have used speech-to-text capabilities for quite some time, and there look to be opportunities to expand that by “making it a core part of how we organize incoming content,” says Fabian Westerwelle, executive director for media and technology.

Currently, ABC News is migrating off a home-built MAM with disparate solutions onto Dalet’s MAM, he says, so it will wait until the transition is complete to implement AI into more of its archival content. Once the transition is complete, any time video is generated or fed into the newsroom, it will be possible to “apply to it enriching technologies such as speech to text, facial recognition and create the additional metadata and attach it right away,” Westerwelle says.

Even though the processes will be carried out by AI engines, humans will still be involved at some level, he says. ABC News “won’t just hand over controls or overly trust AI feedback,” but will require human verification, Westerwelle says.

The question of reliability is one each organization will have to make on its own, notes Bruce MacCormack, head of business strategy/media technology and infrastructure services at CBC/Radio-Canada.

AI is “just a different way of analyzing data with a lot more power. It’s going to involve learning to make a decision based on probability,” MacCormack says. “Is it something we can live with, and how does it change the culture of precision in the newsroom?”

Geo location filtering for special events monitoring and team assignment. (Source: X.News)

Similarly, he notes, bias in the data can lead to bias in the ongoing use of the system. For example, if only videos of “men in white coats” appear during discussions about science, “it will teach the system that a woman in a white coat is probably not a scientist, and that will have an impact on the story you tell.”

Fred Fourcher, CEO of Bitcentral, says the algorithms behind AI can be troubling because they filter out what news is served to individuals and what news is censored. He cites a local news story about murder for hire that involved a porn star, which was removed repeatedly from Facebook feeds because of the porn star despite being a legitimate news story.

On the other hand, AI can offer a significant upside to newsrooms. The question, Fourcher says, is whether news stations, which tend to have tight budgets, will decide whether the costs of AI will outweigh the value or not.

Monetization Potential

The balance may tilt in favor of AI when it makes it easier to locate or monetize existing content.

Heather Palmer, the program manager for the MAM project at CBC, says the organization is using some basic AI, such as speech to text, and has interest in the potential of facial recognition and image and object detection for the archives as a means of “surfacing metadata” about its “massive collection” of images in an effective way.

“There are probably some gems in there we don’t know we have,” Palmer adds.

Relevant archived content can be used to flesh out a current story in progress, but it can also be monetized if an organization chooses to make it available to other groups, says Joe Newcombe, head of sales and marketing at Support Partners, which integrates cloud-based AI technologies into workflows.

Newcombe cites as an example President Trump, who has been in the news since the 1970s. Most of that content remains in deep archives, “not tagged or searchable because they didn’t know he’d be president.” An organization that has identified such Trump footage through the use of AI engines would be able to monetize it, he says.

AI can also be used to help journalists find content and conduct research.

TVU’s MediaMind appliance uses AI to eliminate the need to scan hours of raw footage so journalists can find content faster. Paul Shen, CEO of TVU, says the MediaMind appliance, available as SAAS, can deploy quickly without additional hardware.

“It enables them to make their raw video footage be discoverable and quickly identify precisely what they need without going through the old way of searching,” Shen says. “Our goal is to make production time one-tenth of what it used to be.”

Carrying out research is another time-consuming task when it comes to storytelling. X.news provides a browser-based collector of relevant information in one place, which X.news CEO Andreas Pongratz says can make users up to 90% more efficient and faster.

The system, built on machine learning, indicates whether information being presented is from a verified, or qualified and trusted, source.

“The big difference here is we are not working in one silo,” Pongratz says. “We are working with millions of assets brought together into our system.”

AI can also make content findable for viewers.

Arnaud Elnecave, VP of marketing at Dalet, says AI can be used to help acquire visitors and encourage them to stay with digital content longer to better monetize it.

“What you need to do is build a binge machine,” Elnecave says.

It requires not just a good understanding of the audience’s demographics and history but also solid tagging and a recommendation engine that will serve up stories on the same topic that are useful to the audience, he says. The Dalet Media Cortex aggregates several AI services and connects them to the customer to make it possible to tag content.

Silent Videos, Sports Highlights

Another factor in favor of AI is when it helps meet the demand of efficiently providing news, weather or sports content to multiple platforms.

Television meteorologists must produce content for multiple channels that meets the expectations set by viewers accustomed to the Netflix experience on mobile, notes Rodney Thompson, the digital strategy senior offerings manager for The Weather Co., an IBM company.

“Television meteorologists already had a full-time job getting an excellent story out on air, and now they have to do that for social and mobile audiences,” Thompson says.

He says “augmented intelligence” can be used to take a minute-long clip intended for mobile and turn it into a silent video by stripping out the most important words a meteorologist said and overlaying them on the screen. IBM’s Watson is learning distinctions, such as between “chance of rain” and “rain showers” to deliver accurate information on silent weather videos.

“We’re taking a process of making the video that was reliant on listening to what the meteorologist said, and doing something fairly hard for the meteorologist to do manually — silent video,” Thompson says. “We’re not looking at this to replace the people of science who tell the story, but augmented intelligence scaling them beyond what’s humanely possible.”

He says viewers have had positive feedback on silent videos.

“For the longest time, we’ve thought about what we do in television and how take that to mobile, and for the first time we’re starting to see what’s working well in mobile and bringing it back to television,” Thompson says, noting some viewers leave their large-screen television on with the audio down while in other rooms and look at it when they walk by. With AI’s help, they can see the overlay and gather the relevant information in a glance.

The text-based editing tool, using AI generated time-based metadata, in TVU’s MediaMind appliance. (Source: TVU)

An AI engine that has been taught how humans comprehend sports can be used to quickly piece together critical events in sports into a highlights reel and have the intelligence to prioritize content based on length, says Ramki Sankaranarayanan, managing director, Prime Focus.

To decipher what is happening in a game based on multiple cues requires “a fair level of sophistication,” he says.

CLEAR, a cloud-based SAAS solution from Prime Focus, has been used to highlight cricket matches by Cricket Australia and others.

AI can also be used to help broadcasters meet regulatory requirements for closed captioning. Digital Nirvana’s Closed Caption Quality Check is a cloud-based offering that automates the process of checking caption quality. The company’s Metadator generates automatic closed captioning, enhances metadata and has built-in media intelligence for object and scene recognition.

AI Tracking Social Trends

AI can also track what’s trending on social media with a local audience to predict what will be viral with that audience four to six hours in the future, says Daniel Anstandig, CEO of Futuri Media.

Content about to go viral in the Cleveland market. (Source: Futuri)

“An interesting challenge that assignment editors have is they have to operate with little information and gut-level instincts to make big decisions about what their newsroom is going to cover and where they’re going to allocate resources over the next several hours,” Anstandig says.

Topic Pulse analyzes millions of posts and uses AI to predict what will be important in that audience in the near future to help the assignment editors make such decisions.

A number of different AI engines exist, and no two perform the same way.

Responding to that problem, Veritone built an operating system for AI, or, as Mike Morper, VP of product marketing, puts it, “we’ve created a layer of AI that orchestrates AI.”

The aiWARE operating system controls 16 classes of cognitive engines.

“Artificial intelligence quickly identifies the things that are happening, so that the mere mortals like the rest of us can quickly find that information, then repackage it quickly,” Morper says. “Our customers aren’t talking about AI. What they’re talking about is a way to much more efficiently find the content that they want to use.”

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Remote editing with Dalet

Once met with skepticism by many broadcasters, media asset management (MAM) systems are fast evolving.

The systems, which allow broadcasters to quickly find, repurpose and distribute their content, have slimmed down and become more flexible. They’re interacting with the cloud and using artificial intelligence to personalize content, all of which has brought MAMs into a new era.

But that era isn’t without new complexities. The MAM space is becoming increasingly fragmented, Jenn Jarvis, Ross Marketing product manager for editorial and asset management, says, adding not all systems are the same.

Further complicating matters, says Jarvis, is the fact that MAM is “three letters that can mean a lot of different things to different people.” Video and graphics assets, having varying file sizes, formats and lifecycle roles tend to follow different workflows, Jarvis says.

Ben Davenport, portfolio manager at Arvato, considers MAM to be in its third wave of development now. The first was about 20 years ago when the industry started to move toward using files for video and audio rather than tapes.

The second was about a decade ago when full-quality media was being moved around as well. Those large, on-premises systems “got a rep for getting big and bulky and complex,” Davenport says.

This third wave, he says, is centered on scaled-down functionality, standardization and microservices.

“We definitely went through a phase last year where we start using commoditized hardware,” Davenport says. The industry is also starting to use standardized APIs and interfaces and moving away from proprietary protocols, he adds.

Other industry dynamics are also pushing MAMs forward. “The news and sports worlds have pushed boundaries of asset management” because it’s so important for them to be able to locate previously created content,” says Alex Keighley, senior director of strategic accounts at Avid Technology.

Arnaud Elnecave, VP of marketing at Dalet, says MAM can make it possible for journalists to better collaborate, curate and reuse content. Dalet client Euronews went from creating one story to up to a dozen stories with the same staffing levels by using MAM to transform the way they produced the content, he says.

Euronews developed its CMS with another partner but connected it to Dalet Galaxy to make publishing flow efficiently. By using the MAM to personalize content for the audience, Elnecave says the audience increased by 60%.

“The next game will be how to do that 12 million times if your audience is 12 million,” he says. The focus is how widely can you reach the audience, and how deeply you can narrow the model to personalize the experience, Elnecave says.

Bruce MacCormack, head of business strategy/media technology and infrastructure services at CBC/Radio-Canada, says harvesting past content makes it possible to deliver a more robust story. For example, he says, during elections, a station might cover a politician’s promises and find previous politicians promising the same thing and not delivering. Putting a current story in the context of the past, he says is “the sexy part” of what MAM offers broadcasters.

CBC is rolling out an enterprise MAM from Avid for its radio, TV and digital operations for both English and French content. CBC started the rollout with its English radio network and expects to move television to the Avid MAM next year, MacCormack says. One reason the organization has worked to consolidate its assets on a single MAM is to automate workflows and take advantage of certain artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that will help CBC move deeper into personalization.

“One of our strategies going forward is making a better experience for users by letting them get a more customized set of content present in a sequence that’s appropriate, and the way to do that will be with AI,” MacCormack says.

AI runs on metadata, MacCormack says, and “we have a lot of metadata.” This drives the question of how one story relates to other stories, he says, and CBC is working on a tender for interpreting media content through AI.

“AI is going to help us create an even more advanced record of what that content is,” MacCormack says. Because news items are information-rich, he says, it may be easier to mine that content for information such as subject, location and people, and for patterns to become more obvious.

Content moving through the Avid MAM to Azure can take advantage of Azure’s AI cognitive services, Keighley says. This automated metadata, such as transcription and face and voice recognition, is an additional layer of information that goes well beyond naming the story’s journalist, editor, geolocation, data and topic.

“If [President] Trump says specific words or words within a certain space of time, you can find that content quickly. You can use it, create it, distribute it,” Keighley says.

New this year, Keighley says, is a phonetic search, which makes it easier to find content in the MAM.

Storage needs vary from content that is being used frequently to near-archive storage that may be needed soon, to deep-archive storage, where content may take several hours to access.

An organization looking to replace an aging MAM will need to decide whether the content should live on-premises, in the cloud or a hybrid. Keighley believes the cloud will “fundamentally change how we store all our media and how we access it. It becomes easier and easier to have multiple remote workflows accessing the content.”

The cloud, he says, makes it possible for organizations to save money by reducing real estate needs related to storing content.

“A MAM used to be hugely complex, but at least you knew where it was going to be,” Keighley says.

Robert Gilkes, Sony’s product manager for content and workflow solutions, says one of the biggest benefits of AI capabilities tied to a MAM is the ability to automate tasks, such as transcription and metadata generation. AI can be used to carry out speech-to-text transcription and recognize faces, voices and optical characters, he says.

Broadcasters looking to digitize archives of content long stored in a basement or closet could take advantage of such AI services to enrich metadata for that content, Gilkes says.

For cost-efficiency, proxies of the content, rather than the high-res content itself, can be sent to AI engines in the cloud, Gilkes says.

Sony’s NavigatorX content management and workflow solution

Sony’s Media Backbone NavigatorX content management and workflow solution can integrate with Ci Media Cloud Platform for on-premises and cloud integration to streamline storage, reviews, approvals, distribution and delivery.

The way Media Backbone NavigatorX assets makes it possible to “forget about where your content is and how you’re going to get it back so you can focus on your content,” Gilkes says. The system integrates seamlessly with Sony cameras, which can push content from the field via wifi to the organization’s storage in the cloud or on-premises.

Tedial’s Jay Batista, general manager for US operations, says he’s seeing more movement into systems that use cloud-native tool sets. Most recently, Tedial highlighted its SmartLive product, an Avid plug-in that automatically clips highlights during sporting events and distributes them to social media. A sports truck with three people doing cuts and clips for programming might produce five to 15 highlight clips per game, he says.

“With our tool added, you can turn that into 75 or 100,” Batista says.

Ross’ Jarvis says broadcasters are increasingly coming to terms with the fact that MAM is key to efficiency.

“They’re realizing it’s a piece of technology that maybe they should have invested in years ago,” Jarvis says. “It’s not a requirement to get the work done, but in an era of file-based workflows and doing more with less on more platforms, simultaneously, it’s more important than ever to be efficient.”

At heart, MAMs are intended to make it easier for users to find content. But some systems focus on graphics while others are tailored for video. Ross’ Streamline is a “MAM that could serve two purposes,” Jarvis says.

When paired with the Expression motion graphics system, it’s possible to “put assets into the same MAM and give users different sets of permissions and levels of access,” she says. “The goal is, regardless of where I’m publishing to, or what device I’m interacting with, all my assets that I’m using can coexist in one space.”

Primestream COO David Schleifer says asset management is evolving in its role in workflows. “Asset management can no longer just stand alone,” he says, but rather must serve as a “tool and trigger” for other actions in the workflow. The company created a solution for a client who needed to move assets between locations, the cloud and local storage. The goal, Schleifer says, was central smart asset management.

Part of the efficiency in asset management comes from moving only clips that need to be moved, he says. For example, if a user wanted to move 200 video clips from London to New York, Primestream’s MAM checks to see if the video already exists in the New York location. “It stops them from moving volumes of stuff and ending up with duplicate files,” Schleifer says. “We’re looking to remove barriers and let creative people be creative.”

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Medcom said it expects to realize a two-thirds reduction in operating costs at Cable Onda Sports, which went on-air in mid-November of 2018.

“This new automation system from Aveco delivers everything we could ask for,” said Carlos Rodriguez, Medcom technology manager. “It’s was so easy for our staff to learn and the transition was extremely smooth. It’s as if our operators had been using it for 10 years. Now we have less on-air errors, a better-looking newscast and can focus our efforts on creating better content instead of worrying about operational tasks.”

This marked the first studio production automation system for Aveco in Central America, and is the first phase of a three-studio project. Telemetro and ECO TV are scheduled to be on-air by the end of March.

“These studio automation systems installed by Medcom are a clear sign for other Latin-American broadcasters that high-quality production automation be can be done at a reasonable price,” said Alejandro Paludi, Aveco chief sales officer. “Medcom selected Aveco not just because of the price, but our experience throughout the world and the trust that other broadcasters have placed in Aveco.”

The ASTRA MAM system is being used to integrate all systems onto one unifying platform. The ASTRA MAM database links to all other storage devices to provide a central point for media management. A rules-based transfer engine automates transfer and operations between multiple systems to simplify day-to-day operations.

As with all Aveco systems, Medcom’s operates using a real-time operating system, has the flexibility to integrate with third-party devices and can be scaled up for future expansion.

Aveco will have its entire range of news studio production automation, studio production recording automation, master control, MAM with workflow automation, ingest and playout solutions at the NAB Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center April 8-11 in booth SL2808.

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Showcased at IBC, the latest version of Flow has been completely re-engineered for non-EditShare storage environments including Avid NEXIS, StorageDNA and Amazon S3. Bringing its intelligent media management layer to existing storage pools, Flow opens up new possibilities for collaboration and production from remote locations.

EditShare Flow brings intelligent ingest, asset indexing, search and retrieve as well as tools to storyboard, annotate and collaborate on media projects. It also offers advanced automation and workflow design tools to automate complex processes such as transcoding and redundant media migrations including moving content from production to nearline to archive storage spaces. The new third-party system integration highlights include:

AVID ISIS/NEXIS — Workspaces can be used natively by Flow for all the usual operations such as scanning, folder watching, proxy creation, copy/move, and transcode to/from.

Amazon S3 — Archive and restore to and from S3 buckets of all storage classes including “General Purpose,” “Infrequent Access” and “Archive.” In addition, users can move or copy assets between these buckets and storage classes.

Amazon Glacier — Archive to and restore from Amazon Glacier vaults.

Generic S3 — Archive and restore to and from any generic S3 object storage, such as Object Matrix.

Storage DNA — Archive and restore to and from StorageDNA defined Tape archives. Flow proxies can also be shared with the StorageDNA media browser.

SGL FlashNet support.

SMB/CIFS — Support for any SMB/CIFS storage platform.

EditShare Flow is available in three packages: Basic, Advanced and Enterprise. Subscription pricing starts from 19 GB/25 EUR /29 USD per user, per month (based on a 12-month commitment). Volume pricing is available.

Attendees to IBC can book a private demo of the latest version of Flow and other EditShare innovations at www.editshare.com/ibc-2018.

Read all of TVNewsCheck’s IBC 2018 news here.

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Vizrt will present the latest version of its media asset management (MAM) system. Viz One 6.1 introduces a new smart transfer system, optimized search for millions of assets and extended media support.

Media companies have the flexibility to access their content anywhere with Viz One on Amazon Web Service. The new cloud infrastructure zones allow Viz One to manage compute, storage and transcode resources across multiple cloud and on-premise zones. This technology is also extremely useful for connecting multiple physical data centers or production facilities under a single Viz One system. Amazon Web Services support includes Amazon EC2, S3, Glacier, RDS/PostgreSQL, EFS and EBS. Support for these technologies enables both cloud and hybrid architectures.

“Viz One with multiple cloud infrastructure zones give media companies added flexibility by coherently managing both in-cloud and on-premise resources,” said Vizrt Product Manager for MAM Oscar Tengwall. “This allows pre-existing infrastructures to be connected and augmented with the most attractive cloud services. Users can securely access content on Viz One from any location using the improved two-factor authentication in-cloud or on-premise.”

The new smart transfer system adds optimized restore decision for tape libraries, saving up to 10x in restore time for common restore scenarios. It also introduces group-based storage quotas. This enables different production teams to work on the same system without using each other’s resources. The transfer system supports automatic playout staging of media to multiple tiers of storage with different timings. In addition, it adds the ability to send stories across different sites.

The search engine has been optimized for large datasets with millions of assets. This improves the responsiveness and user experience of working with these large systems. Improvements have also been made to the search system.

A more interactive thesaurus allows users to make changes to an existing thesaurus to keep it relevant, while providing managers with review functionality to keeping it consistent.

Viz One will be part of the Journalist at the Center of Production presentation at the Vizrt Live Stage on stand 7.B01.

Read all of TVNewsCheck’s IBC 2018 news here.

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Independent MAM technology solutions specialist Tedial is showcasing its cutting-edge live sport solution SMARTLIVE. The solution, which marries artificial intelligence (AI) to an innovative metadata engine to bring the back office and archives closer to live than ever before, now includes fully integrated Speechmatics, speech-to-text capability and a new auto-logging tool.

The company is also showing its HYPER IMF solution, which now includes a host of new tools that significantly improve the content delivery and management to non-linear platforms by providing assembly-on-the-fly. Tedial is also demonstrating new cloud storage support capability for its future-proof, hybrid content management solution, Evolution aSTORM.

SMARTLIVE, Tedial’s comprehensive live sports and event solution for remote logging, PAM support and automated story-telling, now includes an auto-logging tool, which automatically creates all logging information for every event using AI technology. It can analyse commentary tracks and insert the corresponding logs into event logs and it can provide video recognition of action and players. This is particularly relevant for less popular sports where data feeds may not be available and when manually logging events is not cost-effective.

SMARTLIVE is now fully integrated with Speechmatics speech recognition technology, which enables speech-to-text integration by annotating incoming live media. This provides two new workflows, using a live feed, SMARTLIVE can automatically create an event blog, which allows the operator to search for any comments made during the match. This blog is stored in the library with the attached file locators automatically created by Speechmatics. The second workflow allows the operator to import a file or drop it into a watch folder and manually generate the speech to text from the commentary track.

SMARTLIVE leverages AI tools and provides 100 per cent compatibility with existing PAM systems. Using a unique metadata engine, SMARTLIVE automates media logging, clip creation and distribution, including social media pitches.

Tedial’s HYPER IMF, an end-to-end MAM solution that supports IMF formats for ingest, archive and delivery, now includes automatic leader insertion, which incorporates all the elements required for each platform (e.g. bars/clock etc.). HYPER IMF also now includes automatic localization based on delivery profile, enabling all credits and text insertions for every language required to be added automatically. Throughout the show Tedial will also demonstrate new features for its IMF Markup Tool, a simple-to-use editor that addresses the versioning requirements typically needed for distribution. Designed for fast validation and repair of IMF packages, this intuitive tool functions independently of expensive third-party systems, making it an extremely cost-effective solution and easy-to operate for users.

Tedial’s media factory solution, Version Factory, now supports 60 additional new platforms that minimize the challenge faced when delivering multiple content to non-linear platforms; each with a different flavor and format. Using Version Factory and HYPER IMF, Tedial can easily support existing and new platforms, delivering content in the correct format with audio tracks and subtitles in the correct language, as well as any additional components required (artwork/trailers etc.).

High-resolution media files are increasing all the time, driving the critical need for efficient storage management. At IBC 2018, Tedial will showcase Evolution aSTORM, the company’s future-proof, hybrid content management solution. Evolution aSTORM, which now supports Google Cloud and AWS Glacier cloud storage, changes the storage paradigm from the traditional HSM approach (multi-tier vertical) to a true object based storage environment (multi-site, horizontal). aSTORM transparently manages various storage tiers across departments and locations. Highly scalable and reliable, Evolution aSTORM allows broadcasters to adapt and optimize their investments to cope with technology changes or when storage related costs decrease.

Read all of TVNewsCheck’s IBC 2018 news here.

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Dalet, a provider of solutions and services for media organizations and content professionals, will showcase the latest version of its flagship Dalet Galaxy five platform for Media Asset Management (MAM) and Workflow Orchestration, along with two major product introductions: the Dalet Media Cortex AI services and the Dalet OnePlay new-generation studio automation solution.

A nominee alongside Euronews for the coveted IBC2018 Innovation Awards content creation category, Dalet will showcase the new version of the market-leading Dalet Galaxy five MAM and Workflow Orchestration platform, introducing the following major enhancements:

Dalet Media Cortex —The new Dalet Media Cortex SaaS enables Dalet Galaxy five customers to connect and consume AI services on demand in a pay-as-you-go model. For media organizations to get full business value from their AI investment and operate at scale, they need the right method and the appropriate platform. Dalet Media Cortex makes it simple and effective. It connects and orchestrates smart combinations of cognitive services while managing all the complexity of data alignment. The AI-generated data is displayed at various levels of the Dalet Galaxy five application, in a set of new intuitive UIs, to provide contextual, actionable insights and recommendations to the users.

Dalet OnePlay — Dalet OnePlay is a new-generation studio automation solution designed to modernize live production with synchronized multiplatform distribution. An extension of the Dalet Galaxy five platform, Dalet OnePlay fully leverages the MAM, NRCS and workflow orchestration capabilities to open up new forms of collaboration inside productions, automating more complex events, and eventually helping create new forms of audience engagement and revenue opportunities while optimizing costs. Dalet OnePlay benefits any sho production, making it an ideal solution for newscasts, sports magazines, live and live-to-tape studio shows. Dalet OnePlay’s modern and efficient UI and UX combined with the agile Dalet Galaxy five News Production and Workflow Orchestration platform enables custom live production workflows with more advanced collaboration and unrivaled operational flexibility, way beyond traditional automated production control solutions.

Cloud, Remote Editing and IMF Workflows — In addition to the new AI and studio automation product introductions, Dalet Galaxy five features several important enhancements that will be showcased at IBC. For hybrid on-premises and cloud deployments, the platform offers auto-scaling capabilities to balance infrastructure load and optimize costs. This new feature allows selected media processes to scale up and down automatically, according to a combination of process predictions, business rules and real-time demand.

Dalet will also showcase new remote editing capabilities that leverage the AWS infrastructure as a service resource. Dalet OneCut editors — such as journalists working in the field — can connect to the central bureau or facility to search and browse content, seamlessly mix it on their timeline with locally stored content (even in offline mode), and offload the rendering to the central site.

A pioneer of component-based workflows, including IMF workflows industrialization, Dalet Galaxy five creates real business opportunities for global distribution. Key Dalet Galaxy five MAM and Orchestration functionality stores rich technical metadata, with workflow design tools, to automate IMF processes such as complex CPLs creation/rendering and supplemental IMF Packages management.

Shown at IBC are new Dalet WebSpace tools for preview, review and approval of all objects of an IMF package, including the CPL, with a glance at the Video Timeline available on any web client, eliminating the need for mastering tools.

Read all of TVNewsCheck’s IBC 2018 news here.

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Tedial, an independent MAM technology solutions specialist, has announced major updates to its Evolution enterprise MAM solution at IBC 2018. The company will showcase its new cutting edge live sport solution SMARTLIVE and its HYPER IMF end-to-end  IMF platform. It will also bring Evolution aSTORM, its future-proof, hybrid content management solution to IBC. Demonstrations will be held throughout the show on stand 8.B41.

SMARTLIVE — IBC will mark the first official debut of Tedial’s SMARTLIVE at a European Trade Show. SMARTLIVE, a comprehensive live event solution for remote logging, PAM support and automated story-telling, leverages AI tools and provides 100 per cent compatibility with existing PAM systems like EVS and SAM. Using a unique metadata engine, SMARTLIVE automates media logging, clip creation and distribution, including social media pitches. Marrying AI to MAM, SMARTLIVE  is the only solution capable of automating the event metadata ingest process and creating a production environment for teams, managing multi-camera and multi-venue feeds, providing multiple, instantaneous live searches to bring historical archives to live events, and automatically generating highlights and delivering them to digital platforms and social networks.

HYPER IMF MAM — Tedial’s HYPER IMF, an end-to-end MAM solution that supports IMF formats for ingest, archive and delivery, will be demonstrated with a host of new features that significantly improve the content delivery and management to non-linear platforms by providing assembly-on-the-fly. HYPER IMF now includes automatic leader insertion, which incorporates all the elements required for each platform (e.g. bars/clock etc.). HYPER IMF also now includes automatic localization based on delivery profile, enabling all credits and text insertions for every language required to be added automatically. Prior to HYPER IMF, broadcasters had to manually enter this data or create complex code for every destination; a costly and time-consuming process.

Tedial’s media factory solution, Version Factory, now supports an impressive 60 additional new platforms that minimizes the challenge faced when delivering multiple content to non-linear platforms; each with a different flavor and format. Using Version Factory and HYPER IMF, Tedial can easily support existing and new platforms, delivering content in the correct format with audio tracks and subtitles in the correct language, as well as any additional components required (artwork/trailers etc.).

HYPER IMF is a highly flexible and open system with full integration to new third-party systems for delivery. As an active member of SMPTE, Tedial has access to a huge, diverse and influential network that enables the company to support new specifications and formats before they reach the end-customer.

High-resolution media files are increasing all the time, driving the critical need for efficient storage management. At IBC 2018, Tedial will showcase Evolution aSTORM, the company’s future-proof, cost-effective content management solution. Evolution  aSTORM changes the storage paradigm from the traditional HSM approach (multi-tier vertical) to a true object based storage environment (multi-site, horizontal).

aSTORM transparently manages various storage tiers across departments and locations. Highly scalable and reliable, it allows users to quickly adapt their investments when technology changes or when related storage costs decrease. A multi-tier agnostic solution, aSTORM transparently and seamlessly manages online, cloud, and deep archive storage with complex algorithms based on customer-tailored business rules. It can virtualize file locations to enable multi-site operations, cloud workflows and hybrid scenarios, offering an “augmented perception” of their physical location.

Read all of TVNewsCheck’s IBC 2018 news here.

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NewTek offers end-to-end, all-IP video production with new products, technology updates, virtualized control room software, affordable yet uncompromising 4K workflows.

NewTek Product & Technology Announcements at NAB 2018:

• NewTek LiveGraphics
  • A new paradigm in video graphics – create in Adobe Photoshop and animate in After Effects, then output in 10 channels of UHD graphics in real-time on TriCaster TC1 and NewTek IP Series live production systems
• NewTek NC1 Studio I/O IP Module
  • 4-channel SMPTE ST 2110 connectivity for TriCaster TC1 and NewTek IP Series
• NewTek Connect Spark Pro
  • World’s first 4K UHD portable NDI converter with near-zero latency and HD/SD support
• NewTek Remote Storage – Powered by SNS
  • High-capacity, high-performance, best-of-breed systems with 4 channels of direct NDI streaming & integrated MAM; 3 varieties of desktop and rack-mounted models available
• NewTek Virtualized Products (NVP) – Introducing live production in a virtualized IP environment
  • See the NewTek IP Series – NVP demo at Cisco Booth #SU8502CM
• NewTek NDI Announcements
  • New Adoptions – hundreds of companies are announcing and showing NDI products, with major new announcements including NDI for Skype by Microsoft and NDI for Avid Media Composer
  • New & Improved NDI Tools – NDI Scan Converter 2 with vastly improved image quality at full 60Hz; NDI Studio Monitor with many improvements for signage applications, web control and more
  • NDI Version 3.5 – Massive optimizations for performance, network connectivity, and discovery, including UDP with FEC (unicast & multicast), plus reference FPGA hardware implementation coming soon
• NewTek Premium Access Subscription Program
  • Includes access to: LiveGraphics, LivePanel™, Advanced Audio I/O, NDI KVM, Virtual PTZ, Virtual Set Library, and more
• TriCaster TC1 and NewTek IP Series FREE software upgrade
  • A vast array of new features and enhancements

Pricing & Availability

NewTek Premium Access will be available beginning in 3Q for the limited time special introductory subscription price of $99 per month, or $1,149 per year. NewTek LiveGraphics will be available as part of the Premium Access subscription plan in 3Q. NewTek NC1 Studio I/O IP Module will be available in 3Q at $14,995 U.S. MSRP.  NewTek Connect Spark Pro will be available in 3Q at $995 U.S. MSRP. NewTek Remote Storage – Powered by SNS will be available in 3Q with prices starting at $7,995 U.S. MSRP.  International pricing will vary.

NewTek integration with Viz Mosart will be available in Viz Mosart version 4.1, scheduled for release in 3Q 2018. Contact Vizrt for appropriate Mosart pricing.

Read all of TVNewsCheck‘s NAB 2018 news here.

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DBi (Digital Broadcast Inc.) has been supplying automated master control and MAM solutions for 16 years.

DBi’s MediaFire automated master control solution simplifies implementation of newer technologies such as IP, ATSC 3.0, SCTE 104, and OTT without disrupting operations or obsoleting current product. This hybrid approach assures maximum efficiency while reducing capital costs. The solution features file and linear ingest, transcoding, MAM and multi-channel playout with full redundancy. DB’s comprehensive control, monitoring and automation assures robust and failsafe operation in a system that is fully expandable.

MediaVault, DBi’s MAM/archival solution has been deployed in installations ranging from broadcast to PEG users. The unique human interface enables users to adapt MediaVault to their particular application without burdensome layers of screens not relevant to the specific task. The system also enables flexible options such as speech-to-text, OCR, baseband inputs, transcoding and more.

Integration to storage devices ranging from SAN and NAS to Blu-ray, LTO and virtually any other near or off-line device is simple. Additionally MediaVault has well developed interface protocol to NLE and traffic systems.

DBi provides USA-based 24-hour service and support with no call center waiting.

Read all of TVNewsCheck‘s NAB 2018 news here.

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VSN is a global technology company specialized in providing advanced solutions for the broadcast and media sector. It offers solutions based on standard IT infrastructure solving the needs of creation, distribution and management of audiovisual contents in TV channels, public institutions, IPTV, universities, contents distributors and news agencies.

• Advanced new features of VSNExplorer PAM for streamlining and speeding-up processes in production environments and giving continuous control of ongoing projects.

• Customized reports on VSNExplorer BI, transforming any data source of any existing broadcast system (including the MAM software) into meaningful information for business analytics.

• VSN’s complete solution for News & Live Sports production, which enables custom at-a-glance management of tasks, fast cataloguing of media, high reliability Live and VTR feeds’ video ingest, news wires automatic reception, and tracking across multiple media location & storages.

Read all of TVNewsCheck‘s NAB 2018 news here.

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Tedial is a provider of media (MAM) and content management solutions. Its media IT platform, Tedial Evolution, provides global media companies and broadcasters next-generation MAM and business driven media workflow. Tedial supplies the world’s only fully end-to-end IMF compliant MAM solution, marrying media preparation and logistics into a complete supply chain, and a single workflow “Version Factory” that delivers thousands of media version from a single asset. For 2018 Tedial innovations includes a sports event tool that supports and extends production systems from industry leading vendors. Tedial Evolution is designed to reinforce a collaborative working environment and drive workflows for linear, VOD/OTT and live event services.

Tedial will introduce Smart LIVE, a comprehensive live event support tool and a major breakthrough in sports production. Smart LIVE, a totally unique development in the industry, leverages artificial intelligence (AI) tools to increase the number of highlights created automatically, thus reducing production costs and boosting revenues for production companies.

Before any action happens, Smart LIVE ingests a LIVE data feed and automatically creates an event inside its metadata engine. Simultaneously, Smart LIVE automatically creates the corresponding log sheets, the player grids and a schedule of the event.  All these preparations are linked and organized by collections, so an entire season of sports events can be prepared automatically in advance. 

During events, live data is ingested, and the system can be configured to automatically create clips based on actions, keywords or logged occurrences. Smart LIVE automatically pushes content to AI engines; video and audio recognition can be leveraged to generate additional locator data and annotate the media proxies. And the system can automatically publish clips or push content to social media platforms.

Smart LIVE is agnostic to any sports or data providers.  Its powerful metadata engine can be easily configured to create an automatic metadata ingest process addressing the more demanding and the more complex sport workflows. Smart LIVE dramatically increases the utility of the MAM GUI interface, bringing the MAM much closer to LIVE production than ever before.

Smart LIVE is 100% compatible with PAM providers such as SAM or EVS, which makes it the perfect tool to orchestrate all business processes on top of an existing PAM. It can then manage the media life-cycle or media movements between different sites, thanks to Tedial’s award-winning AST storage management system, or simply manage historical sport archives.

Tedial will demonstrate Smart LIVE’s automatic highlight creation feature, its integration with AI engines, speech to text integration annotating incoming live media, and the automated publish feature with TELLYO, provider of a cloud-based video production, editing, streaming and distribution platform, and a Tedial technology partner.

Tedial Hyper IMF — Tedial will also be highlighting its HYPER IMF, the industry’s leading end-to-end IMF workflow leveraging IMF methodologies to save users in storage and versioning costs. HYPER IMF is a true IMF solution that supports IMP and supplemental file ingests and creation of unique CPLs for archive, versioning and delivery. This complete solution can leverage IMF markers for soft-parting and pre-mid-post roll insertions.

Tedial Augmented STorage (AST) — Tedial’s award-winning Augmented STorage (AST) system takes its place as the new paradigm in hierarchical storage management (HSM). AST expands traditional HSM into a multi-site, multi-tier heterogeneous storage enabling cloud deployments, multi-site operations or hybrid clouds with minimal impact on upper layers. Fully AXF Compliant!

Version Factory for distribution — Tedial’s highly scalable and flexible content publishing to linear and non-linear platforms are based on IMF CPL component definitions and OPL delivery profiles for automating the creation and distribution of thousands of versions.

Read all of TVNewsCheck‘s NAB 2018 news here.

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Hamblin, based in Los Angeles, will be responsible for defining solution guidelines to fulfill customer business requirements, and educate customers in the use of best-practices for broadcast and media operation/workflows.

Prior to joining Tedial, Hamblin was director of engineering at 20th Century Fox Film. There he led a cross-functional team of systems, video, and sound engineers responsible for supporting a broad range of the studio’s post production and digital supply chain services and for implementing new technologies and solutions.

Earlier in his career, he held leadership positions in post-production for feature films, television and visual effects.

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MAM systems started at several hundred thousands of dollars, counting software and related storage, and often required significant additional spending on complex systems integration to make them actually work. Many broadcasters simply put them aside as a project for tomorrow.

Come 2018, the television industry’s thinking about media asset management has definitely changed.

More and more broadcasters today are investing in software-based MAM systems that use metadata to track a piece of content from ingest through production to playout, then archive it in a way that allows easy future access.

Prices have come down, with many MAM vendors now selling modular solutions that start in the $50,000 range, and new cloud-based services can make archive storage far less expensive than traditional on-premise hardware.

A more important driver, say MAM vendors, is the pressure on broadcasters to compete in today’s multiplatform world, where even small-market TV stations are expected to deliver a wealth of content to the Web and mobile devices in addition to their core broadcasts.

Having a way to easily find, access and repurpose their assets is now seen as a requirement of doing business.

“There’s a need to produce a lot more content in quantity, and curate pieces for multiple audiences,” says Arnaud Elnecave, VP of marketing for Dalet Digital Media Systems, which counts both the NBC and ABC O&Os as MAM customers. “That calls for a need to be way more efficient.”

The value of a MAM system is in being able to connect with disparate systems in a broadcast plant — or across multiple facilities — to quickly give a broadcaster unfettered access to content.

Improvements in software interfaces and interoperability standards mean that making a MAM system work is a much easier, less costly proposition than 10 or 15 years ago, says Elnecave.

And customers today better understand the value of making the investment, which starts at around $80,000-$90,000 for a system with 25 users and then scales up into the millions for big installations with hundreds of users.

“If you understand how to use it for a good digital transformation, it pays for itself,” Elnecave says.

With so much of broadcasters’ news content going to digital distribution, one of the focuses for Dalet is using data analysis to accurately measure how content is performing on social media platforms like Facebook.

The company is also developing new tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) to help journalists sift through the myriad sources of digital content that they are ingesting in a typical day.

“We’re adding machine learning and AI to help further automate processes with predictive analytics and better recommendations,” Elnecave says. “We’re introducing something called Content Discovery where the platform will suggest content that’s relevant to an assignment or piece they’re working on, and tie it in with video, audio or script, going from the pool of available content.”

MAM vendors like Dalet and Avid have their underpinnings in news production, while others like Pebble Beach and TransMedia Dynamics come from the master control/playout side of the house.

Ross Video, which launched Streamline in 2015 as an extension of technology it originally developed for its Xpression graphics system, is another player in the increasingly crowded MAM marketplace.

“I think that MAM is one thing that most broadcasters are realizing they probably should have invested in years ago, and they are prioritizing to invest in now,” says Jenn Jarvis, marketing product manager for Ross Video’s “Streamline” product.

“When you have an asset, but you actually can’t find it easily, it’s like you don’t have the asset. What’s the use of having it in-house if you can’t find it quickly?”

Tedial provides MAM systems that manage long-form content for marquee customers like Fox, HBO and Sony Pictures, and has been a leader in supporting the SMPTE Interoperable Master Format (IMF) standard, which makes it easier to reversion content for different international markets.

Now the Spanish firm is looking to grow its business into sports production by integrating with production asset management (PAM) systems from EVS and Snell Advanced Media.

The first step, taken last fall, was to create a content ingest tool for live feeds that allows the Tedial Evolution MAM system to share the same files and live metadata as the EVS IPDirector and immediately enter content into archive workflows. An early customer for that system was ITV Sport in London.

Now Tedial has created a new product, “Smart LIVE,” that combines that EVS integration with artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically create sports highlights for on-demand or social media distribution without any manual intervention.

“What we’re trying to do with the metadata is to ingest real-time stats, couple that with an AI engine, and automatically create highlights,” says Jerome Wauthoz, VP of products for Tedial, who will be demonstrating the system at NAB.

Automation supplier Pebble Beach entered the MAM market last year with its Beluga system, which it created in partnership with U.K.-based asset management specialist Blue Lucy.

Beluga offers targeted file delivery, content preparation and integrated QC (quality control) workflows. It builds on content management capabilities that already existed in Pebble Beach’s Marina multichannel ingest and playout product, which is used by Scripps Networks, Bloomberg, Encompass Digital Media and CNBC.

“The entry into content management and workflow orchestration is relatively recent for us,” says Tom Gittins, chief commercial officer for Pebble Beach. “I think, like a number of other companies, our customers want us to come further up the media logistics food chain.”

Gittins has also noticed a shift in the way customers think about investing in MAM, with many aiming for systems with a smaller scope than they would have five or 10 years ago.

“There’s a growing trend toward point-based solutions,” Gittins says. “Customers are forgetting the ideas they used to have, of a huge, overarching MAM system. Now they are happier to identify ‘fenced-in’ areas, specific areas where they can get a solution installed reasonably quickly.”

MAM vendors are responding by selling more modular software products, which work better in an increasingly virtualized broadcast world where functions that used to require a dedicated box now run on common off-the-shelf IT hardware.

Another consideration is cloud-based storage, as some broadcasters are choosing to store archive material that doesn’t require instantaneous access with services like Amazon AWS’ S3 or Microsoft Azure instead of paying for an on-premise system like an LTO (Linear Tape-Open) archive.

“The concept of a MAM is evolving,” says Belsasar Lepe, co-founder and SVP, products and solutions for Oolaya, an online video firm that’s branched into MAM after acquiring Nativ in 2015. “Certainly, you will have use cases where you have to be on-prem, but people are moving to the cloud.”

U.K.-based TransMedia Dynamics (TMD), whose enterprise-class Mediaflex system is used by Discovery for its playout centers in both the U.S. and Europe, has created a scalable, cloud-native version called Mediaflex-UMS (United Media Services) aimed at smaller operations.

“Our trend in the last couple of years is making the product smaller, driven by the needs of the cloud market,” says Paul Wilkins, director of solutions and marketing for TMD.

“Five years ago, MAMs were quite monolithic chunks of software, and that doesn’t lend itself to the cloud. So, we re-architected ourselves into microservices, that all run independently of each other — a single service just handles transcoding, or auto-QC.”

An early customer for Mediaflex-UMS is Chicago-based Weigel Broadcasting, which operates multiple stations in several markets as well as the diginets MeTV, Heroes and Icons, Movies! and Decades.

Weigel has purchased Paragon+, a content management system that runs as an application on the Mediaflex-UMS platform. The TMD system will interface with existing program scheduling and playout automation systems and manage multiple tiers of storage, tracking new assets as they arrive and placing them in the appropriate level (play-to-air, nearline or archive servers).

Like most MAM vendors, TMD is agnostic as to what kind of storage customers use, whether it is an on-premise Quantum or Isilon NAS (network attached storage) system, robotic tape storage or a cloud-service like Amazon S3.

“Our product supports a fully virtualized environment, so it’s just a question of how much throughput goes through the machine,” Wilkins says. “Those virtual machines could be hardware servers in your own rack room, or running off a host server in the cloud; it’s irrelevant to us. Where you end up is that most systems really need to be a hybrid, where you still have got some content on-premise.”

Aveco President Jim O’Brien, whose company provides MAM and playout software to companies like Televisa and ESPN Brazil, agrees with the importance of on-premise storage for playout applications.

He cites massive Internet failures in recent years, such as the Mirai botnet attack in October 2016 where three hackers vying with each other in the online game Minecraft took down big chunks of the internet, and the operator error at Amazon Web Services in February 2017 that knocked out several popular websites for hours.

“For going directly to air, the cloud is not great,” O’Brien says. “Play-to-air is still best suited for on-premise systems.”

On the other hand, cloud storage is very effective in news production for quickly and cheaply sharing content among stations. Bitcentral has been using cloud-based architectures for over a decade in its Oasis asset management system.

Oasis started with placing disk-based content servers at TV stations that could store news stories and allow for easy sharing within station groups or from the field via a broadband connection.

Oasis is used today by more than 200 stations including those of the Raycom, Hearst and Tegna station groups. About 500 stories per station, per month are shared by Oasis’s heaviest users, says Bitcentral CEO Fred Fourcher, and stations generally keep about seven days of content on high-speed solid-state servers.

Bitcentral now offers on-site or off-site digital archiving through its Oasis Wellspring product, which can store content on disk-based servers or LTO systems, depending on customer preference.

Fourcher says the key to Oasis’ success has been integration with newsroom computer systems (NCRS) like Avid’s iNews and AP’s ENPS through the MOS (Media Object Server) protocol. That makes accessing the video in Oasis seamless to news directors and reporters using the NCRS, and makes it easy to grab a relevant story from another market to add variety to the nightly newscast.

“When you think about asset management, it comes down to how you tie the workflow together, and unless it’s tied into the workflow, it doesn’t get used,” says Fourcher. “At TV stations, our MAM is seamless into what they do every day.”

An early focus for Bitcentral was providing easy access to the MAM from the field, which Fourcher says was a product differentiator. Now he is looking at “extending an asset management system upstream into the connected camera workflow, and downstream into all connected platforms.”

Bitcentral is working with camera manufacturers that have built-in encoding capabilities in their camcorders to make sure they can transmit files directly into Oasis. It has also created an add-on product to Oasis called Multipath that handles digital distribution to Websites, mobile apps and social media platforms.

Avid is looking to build on the established success of its Interplay platform, which spanned both production and media asset management, with its next-generation MediaCentral product, which is being used by NBC in its Winter Olympics coverage.

MediaCentral has specialized production, editing, graphics and asset management modules and is designed to work on both virtualized platforms (with VMware) and the Microsoft Azure cloud.

“That gives customers flexibility, both from a cost perspective and an operational perspective,” says Ray Thompson, Avid director of broadcast and media solutions marketing. “They can use the cloud, whether that’s a private or private deployment, and take advantage of the flexibility the cloud is affording [them].”

The MediaCentral | Asset Management module runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to exploit Microsoft’s “cognitive services,” bringing AI and machine-learning capabilities to media asset management and news production. Those features include auto-indexing of content; “phrase-find,” searching for specific words in content; speech-to-text capability; and speech recognition, searching for any written word in a document or clip.

“It can find a very specific asset in the library, and then it finds specific places in the clip where the actual word is said,” explains Thompson. “Then you can easily drag and drop that into any product.”

One of the design parameters for MediaCentral was to better allow content sharing across the type of large station groups that were previously Interplay customers. A relevant example would be Sinclair Broadcast Group, which in 2015 signed a 10-year deal with Avid for enterprise-wide editing and content management systems.

“You take a station group with 75 or 80 stations, they may have had Interplay and used it to store assets and archive them,” says Thompson. “But as news stories go from a regional to a national story, grabbing from a silo is rather difficult. With MediaCentral, they can share a common library with powerful metadata to auto-index that content, while taking into consideration new sources.”

Read all of TVNewsCheck‘s NAB 2018 news here.

The post Media Asset Management For The Masses appeared first on TV News Check.

Aspera, an IBM company | Booth SL5910 | Website: asperasoft.com | 5900 Hollis St, Suite E, Emeryville, CA 94609 | (510) 849-2386 

Aspera Files — Aspera Files is an SaaS solution for sharing large files and data sets directly from cloud and on-premise storage — located anywhere, to anywhere, with anyone. It unifies Aspera’s most advanced core technologies, features, and capabilities into a simple-to-use SaaS solution that helps businesses of any size — from the small organization to the global enterprise. Using Files, organizations can store and readily access files and folders in multiple cloud-based and on-premises storage systems. Sharing among users is as easy as browsing or dragging-and-dropping — regardless of where the files are located — freeing collaboration from traditional boundaries among colleagues in both local and remote locations.

Product Information: http://asperasoft.com/cloud/aspera-files-saas/ Product Datasheet: http://asperasoft.com/cloud/aspera-files-saas/#resources-5343 Price: Aspera Files is offered as a subscription service with the options to provision under an All-Inclusive pricing model with built-in storage and transfer capability and/or a Hybrid pricing model that supports both storage deployed in your data center and at other leading cloud infrastructure providers. Other flexible pricing options are available based on volume of data transferred, amount of data stored, and number of Workspaces needed. Additional options such as connected on-premises transfer servers and storage are available for an additional connect fee. Files is offered in three editions to meet a wide range of sizes and needs: Personal, Business, and Enterprise. See http://files.asperasoft.com/pricing/ for more information. Availability: Immediate To set up an appointment: Mark Dallesandro,  mailto:sales@asperasoft.com

Aveco | Booth SU 8516 | Website: www.aveco.com | 923 S. Candler St., Decatur, GA 30030 | 818-292-1490 

Aveco ASTRA MAM integrates into Master Control Automation, Production Automation, Editing, Graphics, NRCS, Video Server, Transcoding and systems. Aveco provides advanced video search, local-and-multi-site operations, and integration with many industry PAM and MAM platforms to provide industry-leading workflow automation.

Product Info: https://www.aveco.com/en/products/detail/13/astra-mam Data sheet: https://www.aveco.com/en/document-download-center Availability: Now 

Aveco’s Redwood Blue and Redwood White, two integrated ingest-graphics-and-playout engines, with Astra MAM are also new for NAB 2018. With video server and graphics from OEM partner Harmonic and Aveco’s award-winning automation, Redwood Blue is another innovative contribution to Aveco’s broad product line. Redwood White is a simpler integrated playout system with exceptional price-performance using commercial off-the-shelf hardware.

Product info: Redwood Blue: http://www.aveco.com/files/media/0/y54wf/redwood-blue-ds-1010-01.pdf

Redwood White: http://www.aveco.com/files/media/0/dq5sj/redwood-white-ds-1011-01-1.pdf Availability: Now

Avid Technology | Booth SU801 | Website: www.avid.com | 

65-75 Network Dr, Burlington, MA 01803 | 978-640-6789 

MediaCentral | Asset Management — The fully customizable MediaCentral | Asset Management workflow module enables users to find assets fast, streamline content delivery across any platform, and create new revenue opportunities. Part of the next generation MediaCentral production suite, MediaCentral | Asset Management provides advanced asset management for news, sports, and post production teams of any size, and manages the entire content lifecycle, with easy asset browsing and retrieval across multiple tiers of storage for reuse or repurposing.

Product Information: http://www.avid.com/products/mediacentral/mediacentral-asset-management Product Datasheet: http://www.avid.com/products/mediacentral/mediacentral-asset-management/features Price: NA Availability: https://www.avid.com/contact-sales?mql=medcenasset For more information: Avid Sales at 978-275-2480 

Bitcentral | Booth SU2610 | Website: www.bitcentral.com | 4340 Von Karman Ave., Suite 400, Newport Beach, CA 92660 | 949-253-9000 

Bitcentral’s Oasis is a collaborative workflow solution for news production and archiving. Oasis enables field centric “story first” tools allowing users to contribute from laptops, tablets and mobile devices using a secure, and managed file transfer system.

The complete Oasis asset management system is securely shared across all authorized users including those in the field, with an efficient interface for uploading or downloading content to aid in remote story production.

External story repositories such as CNN™ can be tied directly into Oasis along with the ability to migrate any and all content from the station’s archives into the BitCentral’s Core News platform. This integration gives seamless access to near line and deep archived content within the station or reporters in the field.

Product link: https://bitcentral.com/product/oasis/

Dalet Digital Media Systems | Booth SL8010 | Website: www.dalet.com | 88 Pine Street, 8th floor, New York, NY 10005 | 212- 269-6700 

Dalet Galaxy — Dalet Galaxy is a Media Asset Management (MAM) and Orchestration platform which unifies the content chain by managing assets, metadata, workflows and processes across multiple and diverse production and distribution systems. Specially tailored for media workflows, this unique technology platform helps broadcasters and media professionals increase their productivity while providing operational and business visibility. The platform incorporates: Collaborative User Tools such as Social Media Panel and Dalet Xtend, Multiplatform Distribution, Content Discovery, IMF package production and distribution, Business Intelligence, and more.

Product Info: http://www.dalet.com/platforms/galaxy Datasheet: http://www.dalet.com/sites/default/files/DLT_PlatF_Galaxy_Web.pdf Availability: Immediate To set up an appointment: alex@zazilmediagroup.com

Ooyala | Booth SV100 | Website:  www.ooyala.com | Corporate HQ: 2099 Gateway Place, Suite 600, San Jose, CA 95110 | 650-965-8920; international & toll-free: 877-366-9252 | sales@ooyala.com  

Ooyala Flex is a comprehensive, data-driven media logistics platform that builds efficiency, cuts errors, saves costs and earns more at every stage of production — even before you shoot a single frame of video.  Ooyala enables content companies to save money, time and resources on major productions, solving logistics problems from early script drafts to shooting, syndication and optimization.

Product Info:  http://www.ooyala.com/media-asset-management Datasheet:  www.ooyala.com Availability: Immediate To set up an appointment: http://go.ooyala.com/wf-events-nab-show-2018.html

Pebble Beach Systems | Booth SL4528 |Website: http://www.pebble.tv | 12 Horizon Business Village, 1 Brooklands Rd, Weybridge, Surrey, UK, KT12 0TJ | +44 1932 333790 

Beluga — Broadcasting from the cloud opens up a host of opportunities to streamline broadcast workflows, but the transition from on-premise operations can be a difficult one. Beluga provides workflow, content management and video processing tools which integrate closely with Pebble Beach Systems’ flagship automation system, Marina, to help with this. Developed in conjunction with media asset management specialists Blue Lucy, Beluga offers agile, intelligent workflow automation which is simple to deploy and highly focused on the task of preparing content for linear playout, OTT and VOD distribution.

Beluga delivers targeted file delivery, content preparation, and integrated QC workflows without the need to deploy a full enterprise MAM solution. Video, audio, graphics and subtitle files are received and prepared for linear playout or VOD, with QC processes and transcoding handled in the cloud or on premise.

Quantum Corp. | Booth SL8511 | Website: http://www.quantum.com | 224 Airport Parkway, Suite 550, San Jose, CA 95110 | 408-944-4000 

Quantum’s new Xcellis Scale-out NAS solution delivers the highest levels of storage performance and scalability in a cost-effective Ethernet-based appliance. Powered by Quantum’s StorNext shared storage and data management platform, the multiprotocol, multiclient Xcellis Scale-out NAS appliance unites robust media and metadata management with industry-leading scalability and unmatched performance to support content creators’ most demanding collaborative workflows and ease their transition to IP-based infrastructure. A single Xcellis Scale-out NAS solution performs at least three times better than that of the market’s next best NAS offering. An Xcellis NAS cluster can scale performance and capacity together or independently to reach hundreds of petabytes in capacity and more than a terabyte per second in performance.

Product Info: http://www.quantum.com/products/scale-out-storage/nas/index.aspx Datasheet: http://www.quantum.com/products/scale-out-storage/nas/index.aspx Availability: Immediate To Set Up An Appointment: mailto:Brad.Cohen@Quantum.com

Ross Video Ltd. | Booth SSL3305 | Website: www.rossvideo.com | 8 John Street, P.O. Box 220, Iroquois, ON, Canada, K0E 1K0

Streamline is Ross Video’s media asset management and workflow solutions for media environments that acts as a central hub for your productions, providing a complete system for indexing and cataloging your vast collection of graphics, video, and other assets. Streamline offers time and money saving workflow tools to make you more efficient and leverage your existing content in new productions, while promoting clearly defined processes for work order requests and management.

Tedial | Booth N1420 | Website: http://www.tedial.com | Parque Tecnologico de Andalucia, Severo Ochoa, 33, Malaga, Spain 29590 | +1 (424) 645-5300 ext. 602 

Smart LIVE — Tedial’s Smart LIVE marks a major breakthrough in sports production. A totally unique development, Smart LIVE leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to increase the number of highlights created automatically, thus reducing production costs and boosting revenues.

Smart LIVE ingests a LIVE data feed and automatically creates an event inside its metadata engine before any action happens. Simultaneously it automatically creates corresponding log sheets, player grids and an event schedule.  All preparations are linked and organized by collections, so an entire season of sports events can be prepared automatically in advance. 

During events, event data is ingested, and the system can be configured to automatically create clips based on actions, keywords or logged occurrences. Smart LIVE automatically pushes content to AI engines; video and audio recognition can be leveraged to generate additional locator data and annotate the media proxies. The system can automatically publish clips or push content to social media platforms.

Smart LIVE is agnostic to sports or data providers, and 100% compatible with PAM providers such as SAM or EVS. Its metadata engine is easily configured to create automatic ingest processes addressing demanding and complex sport workflows.

Product Info: http://www.tedial.com/solutions/live-events-production/ Datasheet: N/A Availability: Following NAB, to set up an appointment: contact@tedial.com

TMD Ltd. | Booth SL5329 | Website: http://www.tmd.tv | Tower House, High Street, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire HP20 1SQ, United Kingdom | +44 1296 745 080

Mediaflex-UMS Orchestrator — TMD’s Mediaflex-UMS Orchestrator workflow engine is designed for delivering business efficiency throughout the media content life cycle. It controls a wide range of third-party devices, integrates to numerous business systems, and supports simple or complex software-defined workflows that automatically adapt, based on metadata values. The powerful Composer workflow designer allows automated workflows to be easily created, cloned, and edited in-house at any time without recourse to expensive programmers or TMD’s professional services. There are no restrictions on the number or complexity of workflows and no need to restart the system to implement workflow changes.

The scalable, agile Mediaflex-UMS platform makes it ideal for implementation on premises, in the cloud, or as a hybrid solution. Media applications, which run on the platform, are available for every element of the media supply chain.

Product Info: http://www.tmd.tv/mediaflex-ums/core/mediaflex-workflow Availability: Immediate To set up an appointment: mailto:enquiries@tmd.tv

Vizrt | Booth SL2416 | www.vizrt.com | 352 7th Avenue, 14th Floor, New York 10001 | 212-560-0708

Viz One efficiently manages all media assets. Teams can use one seamless tool for video management for live and online media productions — with easy access from their PC or Mac desktops.

Viz One makes it easy for teams across entire organizations to find, upload, preview, log, cut, send, and manage media. The primary tool, Studio, is web-based and accessible from any desktop, so users can edit and approve media remotely. Viz One task lists are driven by our workflow engine, providing transparency and flexibility. The newsroom plug-in sits directly within existing iNews, ENPS or Octopus clients.

Read all of TVNewsCheck‘s NAB 2018 news here.

The post NAB 2018 Tech Hot Topics Products: MAM/Storage appeared first on TV News Check.

The HPA Tech Retreat, which will be held Feb. 19-23 in Palm Desert, Calif., is an annual event that provides a forum for engineering, technical, and creative talent, as well as business leaders from all aspects of digital-cinema, post-production, film television, video and related technologies to network, learn and exchange information.

Fernández-Campón’s presentation will use real-world references and examples to discuss the guidelines that a new generation of MAM systems must follow to offer an IMF end-to-end workflow, including: leveraging IMF specifications, managing new version generation efficiently to ensure replication doesn’t occur until required, delivering content into an IMF specification seamlessly, and ingesting the IMF packages as they arrive and being able to generate new ones according to the SMPTE specifications.

It will also reveal specific facts and figures relevant to adopting IMF, such as resources optimization (Storage, CPU), reducing the processing times, interoperability and workflow efficiencies.

Fernández-Campón is responsible for product solution design at Tedial, ensuring that the company’s products adhere to SMPTE and IT standards. He plays a crucial role in configuring and facilitating Tedial’s broadcast Enterprise installations and leading the on-going adaptation of the system to third party products and solutions.

His experience with computer-related companies dates back to 1997 when he launched his career with telecommunication giant Alcatel in software development. In 2000 he moved to the university research group that would become Tedial, where he was involved with software development and system analysis for the company’s first versions of its flagship Tarsys Media Asset Management solution.

The post Tedial’s Fernández-Campón To Present At HPA appeared first on TV News Check.

Focused on an increase in productivity and efficiency, Grupo Multimedios turned to Tedial to assist with managing the day-to-day media preparation and distribution requirements of six new regional channels, supplying both internal production and acquired content from the centralized MAM to the channel operations.

A leader in live event production, Grupo Multimedios plans to incorporate Tedial’s Sports solution in its EVS production system to improve overall efficiency and enhance its archives.

Relying on the Tedial Evolution award winning software modules, Grupo Multimedios will deploy the MAM with the company’s AST Hierarchical Storage Manager and the Evolution MPM workflow systems to provide an end-to-end solution integrating transcoders and the Adobe Premiere editing suite. The Adobe Premiere solution includes the Tedial plug-in for tight, “drag-and-drop” assimilation between the software tools.

To monetize their media to the maximum extent, Grupo Multimedios will leverage the Tedial Evolution solution to expand its operations beyond the regional network channels by automating the distribution of prepared media files to YouTube and other over-the-top (OTT) supply channels.

“After analyzing the MAM marketplace and evaluating systems, we determined that Tedial Evolution supplies us with the most reliable and field-tested solution, while controlling costs in a consolidated operational hub,” says Enrique Calderón, IT director of Grupo Multimedios. “As an EVS partner with joint installations around the world, Grupo Multimedios is excited about the opportunities to use our productions for additional revenue and brand awareness.”

“The unique and thorough software tool integrations will provide Grupo Multimedios superior archive metadata, efficient workflows and reduced labor operations,” added Esther Mesas, CMO/CSO for Tedial, “We are proud to include Grupo Multimedios as a client and look forward to supporting their expansion plans.”

The post Grupo Multimedios Consolidates, Integrates With Tedial appeared first on TV News Check.