CDSA

LAS VEGAS — With a brand-new West Hall to explore at the Las Vegas Convention Centre, and a projected 50,000-plus attendees to see the exhibits, nearly 40 MESA member companies descended on the first in-person NAB Show since the start of the pandemic.

Here’s a brief look at what some of the companies brought to the event:

Visual Data Media Services

Visual Data Media Services came to the NAB Show ready to not only show off VIDA, its cloud-based content OS SaaS platform that streamlines end-to-end media workflows, but also to tout the reactions.

“We worked on this product for 18 months, written from the ground up, taking the best of the best from every cloud provider, and it’s vendor-agnostic, allowing content owners to manage who they work with in terms of third-party vendors,” said Symon Roue, managing director of Visual Data. “That’s something a lot of companies have found very appealing. With VIDA we’ve built an efficient warehouse for you to pick, pack and ship.”

Aiming to create new efficiencies for managing, migrating, distributing and monetising library content, VIDA gives users total control over their content in a secure, central environment, one that flexes to fit specific company needs, with tons of features, including natural language-based clip searching and viewing, as is library migration, direct distribution to more than 500 partners and a “shopping cart” functionality to facilitate secure content purchases.

“It’s a practical application to how content is managed,” said Arkadiusz Musial, director of software engineering for Visual Data. “And it’s great to hear confirmation on how efficient it is.” One of those companies is BBC, which is using VIDA to manage tens of thousands of assets, sell clicks to documentary filmmakers, and allow access to content to researchers. “It offers a workflow that acts as a fulfilment service,” Musial said.

End-users can easily conduct accelerated searches with VIDA, select clips, perform rights verifications and go through a check-out process to purchase and directly download content, something that sped up ordering and customer service for BBC in completely new ways, Roue said. Using VIDA, content managers can migrate entire libraries, regardless of formats or specifications, and users can perform deep searches across multiple archives.

“You’re able to surface content you didn’t even know you had, and create commercial value by searching the metadata,” Roue said.

Above all, VIDA takes advantage of today’s cloud-first environment, he added: “The trust is higher, the cost is lower, and the tooling available has really improved. Content owners can use these services and sleep better at night.”

Friend MTS

Friend MTS used the NAB Show to announce it has brought new technology partners into the fold, improving its anti-piracy and content security offerings.

Friend MTS welcomed Axinom and castLabs to the Friend MTS partnership programme, integrating their offerings to provide customers with end-to-end security and comprehensive protection against content theft and piracy.

“Growing the community of Friend MTS technology partners allows us to provide holistic content protection solutions to a broader customer base across industries like sports, entertainment, and corporate communications. We now have a network of industry leaders that we are proud to work with around the world,” said Dennis Scott, director of channel of sales for Friend MTS. “Our primary focus is to help customers protect their premium video content, and by collaborating with complementary technology providers we are able to extend our portfolio. In addition to our core services of watermarking, monitoring and anti-piracy solutions, our partner network enables us to offer DRM, conditional access management, and every component of a highly effective content security platform.”

Axinom provides software products for content-first platforms, enabling encoding, content management, security via multi-DRM, and monetisation. The partnership between Friend MTS and Axinom will allow consumers to receive complementary watermarking and monitoring solutions to Axinom’s DRM.

Meanwhile, castLabs offers software and cloud services for digital video markets worldwide to enable premium movie and TV distribution. Deploying castLabs’ multi-DRM service, DRMtoday, with Friend MTS monitoring and watermarking will allow for the detection of illegal content and the ability to then take down streams via DRM.

Wasabi

Whit Jackson, VP of technology alliances for M&E at Wasabi Technologies, put the industry benefits his company offers pretty succinctly during the NAB Show: “The one area where the cloud is falling short is the cost savings,” he said. “With Wasabi you’re not going to pay a toll every time you access or move your content.”

With a $6 per terabyte per month price point, Wasabi has been putting competitive pressure on other cloud-service vendors for years now, and the company upped the pressure again during NAB, with the announcement it was partnering with Signiant, to better deliver mission-critical infrastructure to media and entertainment players.

The partnership will enable accelerated transfer of media assets and associated metadata from customer locations into and out of Wasabi hot cloud storage, a nod to the increasingly heavy data needs of M&E, thanks to larger files and the rise of remote production teams, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic.

By leveraging Wasabi hot cloud storage and Signiant intelligent file transfer, joint users will be able rapidly ingest content files of any size into low-cost cloud storage, and then distribute content out to stakeholders located worldwide.

Signiant’s file acceleration technology nearly eliminates latency, while Wasabi eliminates the complexity and expense of other cloud storage services by not charging for data egress, API calls and other data management actions, the companies said.

“As the M&E industry leverages the cloud to meet these modern challenges head on, it’s critical to control project costs while also giving production teams a high-performance, flexible, and secure solution to get the job done,” said Greg Baumhover, direct of global partnerships at Signiant. “Not only does Wasabi deliver fast write and read performance, its simple and transparent pricing allows M&E companies to do more with less and now with Signiant Jet teams can move assets to the cloud at blazing speeds.”

Jackson added: “Media and Entertainment has become one of Wasabi’s most important lines of business due to the sheer amount of content that needs to be stored and made instantly available to the new workflows that have emerged in the COVID world. Addressing these new realities should not be cost prohibitive, and that is where Wasabi is changing the game.

“Through our technology partnership with Signiant and our disruptively simple pricing, M&E companies benefit from the industry’s fastest file movement and best cloud storage to keep production projects on schedule and under budget.”

Databricks

Data and AI specialist Databricks used the NAB Show to unveil its Lakehouse offering for customers in the media and entertainment industry, featuring support from a host of major technology players, including Amazon Web Services, Cognizant, Fivetran, Labelbox and Lovelytics.

Lakehouse for Media & Entertainment enables organisations to deliver better data and AI outcomes for consumers, advertisers and media partners, featuring a single and collaborative platform for data, analytics and AI. Early adopters are Acxiom, Warner Bros. Discovery and SEGA.

Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment incorporates data solutions and use-case accelerators for industry use cases like AI-driven recommendation engines, customer lifetime value and churn, quality of including community toxicity analysis, advertising optimisation and more. Using Databricks, organisations can leverage their data to build a holistic view of their audience and advertisers, and make real-time decisions with advanced analytics.

“With Databricks’ Lakehouse Platform on AWS, Warner Bros. Discovery is powering the future of content discovery and audience experiences. By leveraging data to better predict consumer behaviour and provide personalised content recommendations in real-time, we are able to customise the viewer experience and improve overall engagement for our customers,” said Martin Ma, group VP of engineering at Warner Bros. Discovery.

Marc Aldrich, GM of global media and entertainment at AWS, added: “Being able to deliver more value through big data, analytics and AI is one of the top focus areas for media and entertainment organisations around the globe. We are delighted to support Databricks’ Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment on AWS, which will help customers produce smarter consumer experiences, better advertiser outcomes and an enhanced content lifecycle through the power of data.”

Databricks expects Lakehouse for Media & Entertainment Solution Accelerators to help users save weeks or months of development time for data engineers and data scientists. Recommendation Engines, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Streaming Quality of Service and Toxicity Detection for Gaming are built into the platform.

Technicolor

Technicolor unveiled a new feature for its Advanced HDR suite of HDR production, distribution and display solutions, with the debut of a “no compromise” round-trip feature, that promises to ensure the highest quality HDR and SDR output in a single production process .

This two-way conversion process between SDR and HDR leverages machine learning to maximise the image quality of any HDR format, and is geared especially toward live productions, with broadcasts involving a variety of content formats and quality levels. Advanced HDR will now be a solution that’s backward compatible and able to create both SDR and HDR without compromising the quality of images in either format.

“Broadcasters working in live broadcast environments — such as sporting events or newscasts — need to address the fact that infrastructure has not evolved to the point that allows HDR to easily be distributed to consumers,” said Tony Bozzini, head of business development for Advanced HDR.

“This is especially important for live broadcasts — such as sporting events and newscasts — because they compete — or compare — admirably with the new HDR visual experiences delivered in theatrical releases and through streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime.”

Qumulo

Who doesn’t love free stuff? How about a petabyte of free storage?

That’s what Qumulo is offering the cloud builders with its new Cloud Now programme, a no-cost, low-risk, rapid solution for customers looking to move their workloads to the cloud to avoid supply chain constraints. The Cloud Now programme provides free cloud software and underlying storage, with a white-glove onboarding experience. The offer is available for Qumulo Cloud Q across the three major supported public clouds for customers to build proofs of concept at scales up to one petabyte.

The idea behind Cloud Now is to allow customers to find the right workloads for the cloud and test their workloads faster without paying for software licensing and cloud infrastructure costs on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

“Building your data platform can be complex and the current challenges with supply chains make acquiring hardware to build even harder,” the company said in a statement. “Between the rapid growth of unstructured data, ever-increasing storage capacity requirements, and stringent budgets, IT departments are running into a data centre problem — capital expenditures and lack of scalability are a roadblock to innovation and becoming more difficult to justify. These delays impact end users and businesses as projects are put on hold while waiting for infrastructure to be delivered.

“The Cloud Now programme offers free Qumulo software licensing, free cloud infrastructure capacity, and a white glove onboarding for proof of concepts up to one petabyte, dramatically reducing project risk. And the Qumulo Multi-Cloud file data platform provides multiple benefits to customers in the cloud.”

Synamedia

Synamedia was among the top newsmakers of the NAB Show, with a slew of announcements. That continued April 26 with yet another partnership announcement, with Synamedia choosing Amazon Web Services for the next phase of its VIVID software-defined workflows.

The company said that the combination of Synamedia’s technologies and AWS’s cloud services will allow customers to execute their cloud strategy with a faster time to market keep total cost of ownership low.

Service providers will be able to activate Synamedia’s pre-integrated video workflows (VIVID PowerVu Distribution, VIVID Low-Latency Streaming, VIVID Compression and more) using AWS services.

In addition, the AWS Partner Network (APN) allows Synamedia to offer its customers a cost-effective consumption-based business model.

“As cloud migrations continue to take new shapes and forms, video service providers are looking for new ways to bring in measurable return on investments,” said Julien Signes, EVP and GM of video networks for Synamedia. “They are demanding agility and lowered barriers of entry to enable new use cases — we make this a reality due to our infrastructure strategy. With AWS, we’re broadening the feature set of VIVID to embrace more workflows, with new levels of scalability that meet the needs of customers around the world. Simply put, we’re empowering the streaming era in part by teaming with best-of-breed providers.”

Vittorio Sanvito, director of EMEA partner development at Amazon Web Services, added: “We’re proud to continue supporting Synamedia as they develop cloud-based solutions that enable their customers to deliver world-class video experiences. By using AWS’s reliable, flexible, and secure cloud services to underpin Synamedia’s VIVID video workflows, customers can access innovative, industry-leading features delivered through a single platform.”