Basingstoke, UK — September 10, 2018 - EditShare a technology leader in intelligent shared storage, QC and media management solutions, announced today that the EditShare QScan Automated Quality Control family (AQC) of products, powered by the award-winning QUALES AQC engine, now supports Aspera Orchestrator customers with integrated automated quality control. QScan simplifies compliance and delivery requirements with robust quality control capabilities that leverage a patent pending QScan Single-Pass Analysis process which can be applied at any point during the workflow. New integration with Aspera Orchestrator, a web-based workflow automation application that enables high-speed transfers, lets facilities set up AQC workflows that ensure files meet compliance coming in and leaving the facility.

Howard Twine, director of software strategy, EditShare explains, “The integration is a straightforward plug-in, allowing Aspera Orchestrator customers who are building file based workflows to leverage AQC when they are sending or receiving files from another party. With all the varying broadcast requirements and global delivery demands, AQC has become critical for just about any media facility doing business outside their immediate territory.” Twine elaborates, “If you are delivering to Japan or the UK, you need to check against PSE levels. With the UK, its DPP AS-11 for broadcasting material and for many OTT platforms, you need to comply with IMF standards. And of course, there is verifying files on the way into the facility to ensure that valuable post time is not wasted on non-compliant files. AQC is a time and money saver all around and simply a must for delivery workflows.” Known for its intuitive visual inspection interface and automated QC accuracy, QScan is designed for both creative and technical operators, giving an instant visual presentation of the quality checked file, as well as in-depth detailed analysis, making it easy to adopt across facilities.

IBC2018 attendees can see the new QScan/Aspera Orchestrator integration on the Aspera Partners Village stand 7.B25.

“The expanding number of delivery platforms and their respective requirements is technically challenging for many content producers and distributors to navigate. Making it easy to use the best platforms is important in many facility workflow conversations and design,” comments John Wastcoat, vice president, business development, Aspera. “Bringing together the robust capabilities of Aspera Orchestrator with quality control systems like EditShare’s QScan allows our customers to remove much of the complexity and potential headaches from not knowing if their media is compliant with any of the growing number of file formats. This type of offering gives businesses confidence that what they are handing off - whether it’s to the post department for color grading or to an OTT provider, is spot on. In an industry where deadlines are tightening, there is no room for file errors, so this integrated solution can be a fundamental part of our customers’ workflows.”

For more information on QScan, please visit qscan.editshare.com.

About EditShare

EditShare is a technology leader in networked shared storage and tapeless, end-to-end workflow solutions for the post-production, TV, and film industries. Our ground-breaking products improve efficiency and workflow collaboration every step of the way. They include video capture and playout servers, high-performance central shared storage, archiving and backup software, media asset management, and Lightworks – the world’s first 3-platform (Windows/OS X/Linux) professional non-linear video editing application.

©2018 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare is a registered trademark of EditShare LLC.

Press Contact

Nick Govoni
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ALEXANDRIA, VA.—You knew it was coming, right? When you walk around with more computing power in your pocket than it took to launch a Saturn V rocket to the moon, you get the hint that computers are increasingly doing work that we either don’t like doing or never could do before.

For example, take logging raw video and creating data files to let news organizations search for just the right clip when we need it. Need a shot of a burning building on East Main from November? Bingo… the AI system logged it and made it available on the server.

AI is also the tool behind giving viewers a better experience when they visit a station’s web page.

[Read: AI And The Digital Transformation]

“As consumers become more driven to personalized experiences, news stations need to keep up with dynamic content,” said Drew Martin, technical product manager for Grass Valley. “AI can provide rich end-user experiences with minimal manpower. This generates more viewership and small operating costs.”

WORKFLOW BENEFITS

And AI is not just for the viewers.

“AI can bring huge potential benefits to broadcasters, with particular relevance in areas of the workflow that are labor-and time-intensive—like ingest,” Martin said. “By enabling broadcasters to track how operations are being used across their organization, AI-based solutions can create more efficient operations and bring costs down by identifying trends. As broadcasters of all sizes are under pressure to produce more with lower budgets, AI-based solutions can help them focus their resources on creating more compelling content.”

Although Grass Valley has no current AI-related products, Martin said the company plans to add AI functionality to upcoming product releases.

Brick Eksten, chief technology officer for playout & networking at Frisco, Texas-based Imagine Communications, recommends using AI to test supply chain management enhancements before integrating them into a facility’s workflow.

“In a machine learning/artificial intelligence solution, the system could learn enough about the content types [by watching content] and could experiment with various combinations in an offline environment, until you have sufficient confidence that it is providing better management of the supply chain in real time than manual methods, optimizing for cost and quality at the level of each individual piece of content,” he said.

Another potential role is in monitoring. “An AI-assisted multiviewer could provide more in-depth information about each signal, but also put that in context across all of the individual devices that make up that particular channel of content,” Eksten said. “Today we monitor by exception; Tomorrow that monitoring will be more predictive and seamless.”

HUMAN OVERSEER

As promising as AI technology is, many operations touched by AI still need to have a human overseer to ensure smooth operations.

“We’re already seeing artificial intelligence being used as a tool to create content like highlight clips, with Aspera being used for the ingest of video content and the automated delivery of the produced assets,” said Richard Heitmann, vice president of Aspera, an offshoot of IBM. “The natural next step to automated production is automatic publication of personalized media experiences. But we are still in the early days of the technology, and there is a human-review element that won’t go away anytime soon.”

IBM has been developing AI applications for decades, and Aspera has been leveraging that background for its broadcast products.

In April 2018, IBM partnered with the Masters to bring cognitive highlights to the golf tournament, according to Heitmann. “IBM’s AI technology quickly identified key highlights based on cheering, high fives, commentary and TV graphics such as banners within specific video frames,” he said. “As a result, video editors were able to use Aspera technology to distribute highlight reels at high speed in near-real-time for fans.”

INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT ROLE

For broadcasters, it’s all about what you do with your bandwidth—the more effectively a broadcaster uses its broadcast bandwidth, the more profitable it can be. For this reason, AI products can now address bandwidth, including learning from one encoding session to improve the next.

“AI plays an increasingly important role in video encoding, where it can significantly help improve workflows,” said Reinhard Grandl, director of product management for Austria-based Bitmovin. “By continuously learning the parameters used in previous encodes, AI-optimized settings can be applied to every new video file. Furthermore, every asset that will be encoded with our service helps to train this machine-learning model and makes the prediction for future encodings more accurate. This results in faster processing times and significantly higher quality with no increase in bandwidth.”

The savings from properly configured AI-driven encoding are substantial, Grandl said.

“Netflix, for instance, estimates that its use of AI to automate workflows and reduce customer churn saves the company around $1 billion annually,” he said. “This not only increases the quality of experience and quality of service for users, but also reduces the number of bits required to achieve the same quality stream. YouTube is also at the forefront of using AI to reduce overall video latency and encoding costs.”

Netflix and YouTube are noteworthy examples, but is there anything AI can do for a call-letter TV station?

“Call-letter stations can receive immediate benefits from TVU Networks’ products with AI,” said Paul Shen, CEO of Mountain View, Calif.-based TVU Networks. “For example, the TVU Transcriber service is available today and ensures FCC compliance of any video content a station puts on air, on social media or any digital media platform. The AI engine in Transcriber detects the need for closed captioning in content and will automatically transcribe the missing speech as closed captions. In addition, TVU Transcriber uses AI to detect profanity and can automatically mute the audio.”

The tantalizing ability to deliver targeted content to web viewers is also within reach of TV stations, Shen said.

[Read: Media 4.0: Using AI To Meet Viewers’ Preferences]

“With the TVU MediaMind Platform, all digital and broadcast production groups can truly collaborate to cover the same story, while allowing each group to customize and deliver the completed program based on viewer demographics,” he said. “As a result, a station can cost-effectively create targeted content and allow it to better serve digital and broadcast viewers using the same raw videos. This becomes a truly story-centric workflow.”

Not only will a properly configured AI system process video as it is ingested, it can also dip deep into existing library files and process those.

AI functionality has recently been integrated into Prime Focus Technology’s, Clear Media ERP, Media Asset Management system, according to T Shobhana, vice president and global head of marketing & communications for the company. “[Clear] helps automatically recognize elements within audio and video, and generate associated metadata, making it easier to sort, locate and use content across all MAM workflows,” she said. “With Clear, content owners no longer have to rely only on manual effort to tag and catalog assets, as this is a time-consuming and expensive process.”

However, keep in mind that AI capability in MAM systems is not completely hands-off from a human standpoint—yet.

“All these functionalities require human review and quality control right now, but one of the key characteristics of AI and machine learning is the ability to learn and improve over time,” Shobhana said, “so we expect these functions to continue to evolve going forward.”

Over the past five years, artificial intelligence has moved out of the laboratory and into real products—you only have to go as far as Apple’s Siri and Google’s Alexa to find examples in the real world. The idea of a computerized assistant has now become real to millions, and that increases the pressure for similar machine aids in various professions and industries… including broadcasting.

It’s clear that the most efficient use of bandwidth and the ability to quickly create targeted programming are of great interest to broadcasters, and artificial intelligence is helping to make that possible.

NEW YORK—Aspera, an IBM Co., will be at NAB Show New York to demonstrate how Telestream Vantage powered by Aspera combines Aspera’s FASPStream high-speed streaming technology and Telestream Lightspeed Live Capture media processing platform enable production teams to work on live video feeds from remote locations in near real time.

Telestream Lightspeed Live Capture and Vantage Open Workflows powered by Aspera delivers broadcast-quality video streams from the venue to the remote production facility live. Creative teams can now begin working on a live capture feed delivered from a remote location while the event is taking place. Transcoding, packaging, editing and other downstream workflows can start immediately, shortening the production cycle and increasing the value of the produced content. The end-point can have a range of hosting environments, including centralized on-premises, private or public cloud and the streams can be written to multiple locations concurrently to aid in redundancy and business continuity.

IBM Aspera’s FASPStream software line is capable of high-quality, live streaming over commodity Internet WANs. Built from the ground up by Aspera, the software utilizes the FASP bulk data protocol to transport any live video source and provides timely arrival of live video and data independent of network round-trip delay and packet loss. Less than five seconds of start-up delay is required for 50 Mbps video streams transported over 250 milliseconds round-trip latency and three percent packet loss. The FASPStream technology is integrated into Vantage using the available APIs to provide a seamless user experience.

Aspera is exhibiting in booth N839.

LOS ANGELES—It’s a fab four that will be honored with the Hollywood Professional Association’s 2016 HPA Engineering Excellence Awards, as Aspera, Grass valley, Real D and SGO all will be recognized. According to HPA, the Engineering Excellence Awards spotlight companies and individuals that provide services to the professional media content industry for outstanding technical and creative ingenuity in media, content production, finishing, distribution and/or archiving.

Aspera will be honored for its FASP Stream application software, which enables live streaming of broadcast video globally over commodity internet networks. Grass Valley’s GV Node real time IP processing and edge routing platform has also been tapped for the award; it provides accurate switching of video signals from SDI or IP. The RealD Ultimate Screen is another recipient, delivering images in both 2D and 3D formats. And the group is rounded out with SGO’s Mistika, a DI post-production system.

The HPA Awards will also take time to recognize excellence in 12 craft categories, present the Lifetime Achievement Award to Herb Dow and the Charles S. Swartz Award to Michelle Munson.

All winners and honorees will be recognized during the HPA Awards gala on Nov. 17 in Los Angeles.

NEW YORK—With the onset of 4K and higher-resolution video formats comes the inevitable impact on storage. By some accounts as much as 12 terabytes of content is being produced daily, and it has to be stored somewhere.

The cloud is increasingly becoming an option. Cisco’s annual Global Cloud Index report predicts cloud data centers could execute 78 percent of all IT workloads by 2018, compared to just 22 percent for traditional (on premise) data centers.

A GOOD TIME FOR TRANSITIONING?
Numerous broadcast vendors, as well as major players such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon offer off-site storage solutions where video can be transferred for longtime archiving and backup. With so many options, the time to make the transition to the cloud could be now, especially if existing hardware systems are due for an upgrade.

“For those operating on production systems that were installed in the 2007–09 timeframe, they are reaching the end of life, and now is the time to look to an infrastructure that is cloud-ready,” said Jay Batista, general manager of Tedial’s U.S. operations, a division of the Spanish-based provider of media asset management software.

The cloud can be used to archive content and also provide access as needed.

“This is a great time to look at your business,” Batista added. “If you are producing scripted programming and push it over to a distributor or syndicator the cloud offers a way to save daily raw cuts as well.”

Production facilities can also leverage the cloud and pump up the storage or ramp it down as needed for short-term storage said Batista, especially as there can be times when more media comes in due to peaks in a sports or news cycle.

Mike Palmer, vice president of business strategy at Masstech Innovations “For those looking at the news model or daily content that might need to be retrieved often, a privately hosted cloud service works best,” said Mike Palmer, vice president of business strategy at Masstech Innovations, a Markham, Ontario-based provider of digital media management systems. “It offers immediate access and the storage cost is low.”

It may be necessary to watch key performance indicators to determine when more or less cloud storage is needed in the short term.

“Those business analytics are available, and can be set up to measure traffic and how it corresponds to storage on the cloud,” said Batista. “It is this cyclical nature of business that will determine the best way to leverage the cloud.”

SEND AND FORGET
Although increasing file sizes could prompt more broadcasters and media companies to turn to the cloud for longterm archiving, the move is not without issues. In many cases the cloud could be a “send and forget” option primarily.

There are three main issues to consider when determining whether to archive to the cloud, according to Alex Grossman, vice president of media and entertainment at Quantum, a San Jose, Calif.-based provider of storage management systems.

“The first issue is how secure is the cloud, so that you know it is archived but won’t get touched by anyone,” Grossman explained, adding that content owners should be able to feel secure that the cloud is reliable. “Are multiple [backup] copies maintained and how do you prove that?” he asked. The only way to ensure that the content has been actually backed up is to do auditing by downloading it and that can cost money.

The third issue isn’t just that the content will be there but that the cloud provider will be as well.

“What happens if the cloud vendor opts out of the business?” Grossman asked. “This leads to how you might move the content to a new place. These are the things not so much to worry about, but to consider when moving content to the cloud.”

The biggest issue however could remain cost, especially as video production moves to 4K, where files truly put the “big” in big data.

“One aspect to keep in mind with the cloud is that this isn’t a onetime payment,” said Chris Luther, director of professional services at SGL Broadcast, a U.K.-based provider of archive and storage management software for post production, news, sports and government. “You are in fact paying for that storage every month forever. It might only be a fraction of a cent per file, but files larger than 2GB often have to be broken up, and consider that 4K is about a gigabyte a minute. So every production needs to be broken up into two-minute chunks. In many cases we are seeing that broadcasters may be expecting too much of the cloud at this time.”

Michelle Munson, CEO, AsperaON THE DOWNLOAD
What goes up to the cloud will need to be downloaded when needed, and this is another factor that has to be considered, especially as cloud facilities could be geographically far from a production facility. The cloud is only going to be as reliable as the infrastructure to transport that data over vast distances, and should the connection be slow or unreliable, the data can be difficult, even impossible, to download or otherwise access. This creates more pressure on available bandwidth, according to Michelle Munson, CEO of Aspera, an Emeryville, Calif.- based next-generation software technologies transport vendor.

“We’re seeing that volume has grown and that only serves to take more bandwidth on the pipe,” she said. “Today you need to move terabytes of data, and we are striving to make all storage equal, independent of location or the amount of any data.”

The size of the files remains that issue, for the up and download.

“It is a double problem,” said Colin Dixon, founder and chief analyst of nScreenMedia a research firm that covers online media. “Today’s video files are massive if they are uncompressed and this takes up a lot of bandwidth, but every time the file is needed it can take a long time to download it.”

The time it takes to download is the other half of the equation, as the content might be safely archived but not immediately accessible when it is needed.

“It can take a long time to get the content, so in many cases you need to plan around it,” said Savva Mueller, director of product management at Masstech Innovations.

PRIVATE OR PUBLIC?
Some of the issues surrounding cloud archiving can also be overcome by creating a private cloud as opposed to utilizing a public cloud-based solution from Amazon or Microsoft.

“Public [cloud] at a price per gig can add up, and that can be a hard model to justify for archiving,” said Palmer. “Local storage to your own cloud servers can be a larger upfront cost, but you own that [cloud server] forever.”

Such a solution could be hosted externally or in a company’s own data center, and could take advantage of the economy of scale. A lot of this depends entirely on the type of content that is being archived and when it might be needed.

“If you are looking at a news model then a privately hosted model could be better,” added Palmer. “There is immediate access and the storage cost is low.”

By contrast, for short-term storage with a finite amount of data, a public cloud could be the better option. Yet the public option does mean giving up some control.

“There are still a lot of execs out there who are worried about the cloud,” noted Tedial’s Batista. “The content may not be secured and that can be a problem.”

In some cases these concerns are magnified based on where the public cloud may be located.

“You don’t have control where the data is stored,” said Luther. “Why would anyone trust that their content might not end up on a server in China and be replicated even before it is officially released in America?”

For the coming year, Munson expects that demand for cloud storage will continue to grow, even as issues such as file size, security and cost need to be addressed.

“The use of cloud infrastructure will become more commonplace,” she said. “It is no longer an experiment. We are seeing the industry take techniques from high-performance computing and tie it to video production.”

EMERYVILLE, CALIF. – When Aspera arrives in Amsterdam for the 2015 IBC Show, it will be bringing its portfolio of high-speed file transfer software and automation systems for the broadcast and media industries. Among these will be Aspera’s new SaaS platform, Aspera Files.

Aspera Files

Built on Aspera’s FASP transport technology, Aspera Files allows organizations to establish a branded web-based presence for the exchange and delivery of any size file-based media or data between end users across separate organizations, combining multiple storage platforms. Content can be stored and accessed in multiple cloud or on-premise storage systems, and can be shared via a drag-and-drop feature. Distance-neutral exchange of any size data over the Internet is also allowed.

In addition, Aspera will show a number of other products powered by the next generation of FASP. This includes the FASPStream, which expands FASP transport technology for live and near-live data streaming; the latest version of Aspera Orchestra, with new features to improve performance within high concurrency environments; and Aspera Direct-to-Cloud Storage, which is able to transfer large media formats from source directly to object storage destination with native I/O for all major cloud storage providers.

IBC 2015 will take place from Sept. 11-15 in Amsterdam. Aspera will be located at booth 7.B27.