STAMFORD, Conn.—As part of a broader push to capitalize on the potential of AI in its ad sales and other operations, Charter’s AI and data commercialization business unit Spectrum Intelligence Ventures has announced its first product, a household intelligence platform called Latis.

Built on information spanning digital engagement, TV viewership, and connected device activity across approximately 30 million U.S. households and 500 million connected devices, Spectrum said that Latis is designed to transform real-world activity into intelligence that will help companies and organizations better understand consumer intent, context, emerging trends and shifting demand at national scale.

“The transition from data to intelligence is one of the most important shifts happening across technology and business today,” said John Lee, head of Intelligence Ventures for Spectrum. “Latis is designed to help power this next generation of AI-driven systems by transforming large-scale household signals into continuously evolving real-world intelligence that organizations can use to improve decisioning, automation, personalization and business outcomes.”

Spectrum reported that Latis continuously models household activities across digital, video and device signals, transforming household-level data into pseudonymized mathematical and privacy protected representations of household activity patterns.

This will help advertisers, companies and organizations better understand changing consumer intent, priorities, responsiveness and likely future actions across such industries as retail, automotive, financial services, travel, media, telecommunications and consumer goods.

For example, traditionally, a clear sign of a consumer’s interest in travel typically only becomes available only after a consumer has taken a clear transaction-oriented step, Spectrum explained.

Latis is designed to help identify emerging travel-related interests earlier in the consumer journey by transforming household-level activity patterns—such as destination research, engagement with travel-related content, and comparison of vacation options—into a pseudonymized and privacy protected sense of intent, interest, affinities and trends.

Spectrum also reported that Latis is designed to support a broad range of enterprise and AI-native use cases, including:

• Consumer insights and segmentation
• Media targeting, optimization and measurement
• Data clean room collaboration and enhancement
• Personalization and decisioning
• Model training
• Agentic AI acceleration

Spectrum said that Latus was designed with a privacy-forward architecture and governed access framework.

It enables organizations to obtain intelligence through secure collaboration environments, controlled integrations and governed infrastructure models designed to support enterprise privacy, security and governance requirements. Partners may use the intelligence outputs for permitted business purposes, such as advertising, marketing, measurement, research, customer engagement, analytics, personalization, and improving AI-driven tools and services, but the underlying household-level data stays within Latis’ controlled environment and is privacy protected.

Spectrum Intelligence Ventures is currently selecting a limited group of partners for beta participation. Beta programs include collaboration with Spectrum Reach to provide select partners early access to Latis intelligence combined with Spectrum Reach and wider media inventory to improve targeting and business outcomes. Broader availability is planned for the second half of 2026.

The DPP has published a new report exploring how media companies are using data to drive better decisions, stronger engagement, and improved commercial outcomes.

Making Data Pay is the result of input from over 70 contributors representing 19 content organizations and 19 vendors.

It explores data across four key areas of the media business: management and operations, audience engagement, business strategy, and the technology foundations that support them.

According to the DPP, despite significant investment in data capabilities, many organizations are still struggling to translate that investment into measurable impact. Making Data Pay examines where data is already delivering value, where complexity is emerging, and the practical lessons the industry has learned so far.

The report adds that while data is abundant, impact is uneven, suggesting that media companies are “drowning in data but lacking alignment” and need “data coherence”.

It suggests companies should begin by defining the questions and then find the data points to answer it. “Without purpose, dashboards multiply but strategy stalls,” states the report. “Data must drive decisions, not simply score past performance. Metrics that only look backwards aren’t enough to shape the future.”

The DPP urges companies to “measure what matters” by focusing on the metrics with the greatest strategic importance rather than those which are the easiest to measure.

“Across the industry there’s strong belief in the power of data, but turning that belief into measurable impact remains a challenge,” said David Thompson, technology strategist at the DPP.

“Successful data strategies aren’t just technology projects,” added Thompson. “When the questions being asked of data aren’t clear, organisations quickly end up measuring everything but understanding very little.”

The report is available for DPP members to download here.

This article originally appeared on TV Tech sister brand TVBEurope.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Roku today launched Roku Data Cloud, giving its partners seamless access to its proprietary TV data for analysis and making planning, optimization and measurement more transparent.

Roku Data Cloud connects advertisers, agencies and partners with accurate and reliable information from its TV operating system (TV OS), offering extensive insight into viewership habits, preferences and identity.

The company’s partners can access Roku Data Cloud via Roku’s clean room, driving outcomes via inventory in Roku Exchange. Roku Data Cloud offers brands a greater understanding of viewers and how to reach them more precisely, and provides a means to unearth ad campaign data to inform future strategy across all phases of the marketing cycle, the company said.

“Starting with Roku Exchange, we have been working for greater interoperability in the entire programmatic ecosystem, and Roku Data Cloud is the perfect next step on delivering business outcomes for our advertisers,” said Miles Fisher, senior director of strategic advertising partnerships at Roku.

“As the No. 1 selling TV OS, we believe Roku is in the best position to help advertisers reach consumers and is shepherding digital precision to the largest screen at home,” Fisher said. “We are committed to making Roku more accessible and performant, and Roku Data Cloud is a milestone of progress.”

Roku is partnering with companies across the planning, activation and outcomes and measurement phases of the campaign journey.

Expanding on existing partnerships, Roku will integrate its TV data into marketing intelligence platforms for planning, including:

• Omnicom Media Group, which will leverage the new solution to maximize the effectiveness of clients’ spend on the streaming platform, combining Roku viewer data with customized audience data in Omni, the open operating system that supports all Omnicom agencies, thereby enabling more precise planning and relevant messaging.
• PMG’s Alli, which allows media planners to gain valuable insights into audience behavior and preferences to tailor and optimize client campaigns. With the ability to plan directly addressable audiences, Alli connects strategic insights to media trafficking in an end-to-end solution that ensures marketing campaigns can be effectively targeted.

The company also plans to expand its partnership with Yahoo with three new integrations: enabling Yahoo ConnectID through the Roku Data Cloud, directly connecting the Roku Exchange to Yahoo Backstage and activating Roku audiences on the Yahoo Demand-Side Platform (DSP). Through the partnership, advertisers are expected to have seamless access to Roku inventory and later this year apply Roku audiences in the Yahoo DSP for enhanced targeting and performance across an entire campaign, it said.

To address outcomes and improve CTV measurement, Roku is partnering with:

• Innovid, which intends to collaborate with Roku to share in-flight campaign information. This allows the Roku Exchange additional signals to optimize for multiple KPIs, including reach, unique reach and conversions, to increase campaign effectiveness, relevance and impact.
• iSpot, a previously announced partner, which intends to continue to work with Roku on incorporating Roku signals into its measurement suite and share in-flight campaign insights for optimized campaign performance.

More information about Roku Data Cloud, Roku Clean Room and Roku Exchange is available online.

NEW YORK—IAB has released its annual report, “State of Data 2024: How the Digital Ad Industry is Adapting to the Privacy-by-Design Ecosystem,” which reveals substantial operational and financial adjustments being undertaken by the digital ecosystem as it moves towards a privacy-by-design architecture.

The study, conducted by IAB in partnership with BWG Strategy, surveyed over 500 advertising and data experts at brands, agencies, and publishers. The study found that the move to Privacy-by-Design, which refers to efforts to integrate privacy into the design of products, services and systems, is prompting substantial operational and financial adjustments being undertaken by the digital ecosystem.

“The meaningful investments being made are proof positive of the industry’s commitment to a privacy-first orientation,” said David Cohen, CEO, IAB. “Executives are taking notice and funding the right initiatives for the next stage of industry growth”.

Key findings from the study include:

• The researchers said that nearly all (95%) advertising and data decision-makers at brands, agencies, and publishers "expect continued signal loss and/or privacy legislation in 2024 and beyond."
• The industry is investing in hiring new Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), updating training for their staff, creating dedicated teams, expanding their legal expertise, leveraging new technologies, and increasing first-party data efforts.
• Additionally, 82% of the respondents said the makeup and structure of their organizations have been impacted by legislation and signal loss. Nearly 80% are training or planning to train their staff directly in data/privacy-related topics, while half of companies are creating or planning to create dedicated teams/departments (49%) and hiring or planning to hire external SMEs (48%).
• Respondents believe the new paradigm will challenge targeting, personalization, and measurement.
• More than half expect it to be harder to track conversions overall (55%), post-view conversions (52%), attribute campaign/channel performance (55%), measure ROI (55%), make optimizations (50%), and measure frequency (50%) and reach (47%). Nearly nine-in-ten ad buyers report shifts in personalization tactics, ad spend, and their mix of first, second, and third-party data. Over three-in-four cite selection changes in media channels and KPIs, along with more seller-direct deals.
• To improve data quality, brands, agencies, and publishers are turning to first-party data and data-enrichment tools.
• The study found that 71% of brands, agencies, and publishers are currently or planning to grow their first-party datasets, nearly twice the rate of just two years ago (41%).

“To tackle data quality challenges, it's crucial for brands, agencies, and publishers to continue to adopt innovative analytical methods including Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and media mix modeling that are less dependent on tracking signals and third-party cookies,” said Angelina Eng, vice president of Measurement, Addressability & Data Center, IAB.

The study also focused on how the shift to privacy-by-design is transforming media planning and buying. It found that ad spending that taps first-party data and engages audiences at scale are being prioritized. Nearly nine-in-ten ad buyers report a shift in message personalization strategies (89%), ad investment costs (87%), and over three-in-four cite selection changes in media channels (81%) and KPIs (79%), along with more seller-direct deals.

Ad buyers are also shifting budgets to Connected TV, retail media, search, and social networks which rely less on cookies, provide access to valuable first-party data and precise targeting, and contain embedded measurement.

The study also found that overhauling and reinventing data processes is a costly sea change that will hurt small and medium-sized publishers and favor larger companies. 

Large companies are investing more in identity anonymization training (79%) than small companies (64%). They are also investing more in training in privacy-preserving technologies (62%) — which can cost over $2 million annually — than small companies (44%).

Signal loss is already pushing advertising budgets toward closed ecosystems at a moment when independent publishers can least afford to lose revenue. 

“The industry’s embrace of privacy-by-design is the right thing for the industry and consumers alike,” Eng continued. “But if small independent publishers aren’t protected, the vibrant, independent open web that consumers love is at serious risk.”

The study, State of Data 2024: How the Digital Ad Industry is Adapting to the Privacy-by-Design Ecosystem can be downloaded here. 

NEW YORK—tvScientific, the performance advertising platform for connected TV (CTV), has announced that it is working with Blockgraph, a privacy-focused data collaboration platform, to improve programmatic targeting, measurement, attribution, and optimization across linear and connected TV (CTV). 

The integration of their solutions will help brands to make better use of their first party data in their marketing campaigns, the companies said. 

“Combining programmatic advertising with premium video is a complex challenge, and it’s becoming more complex with the expanding landscape of services and providers,” said David Koye, co-founder and CPO at tvScientific. “Our new partnership with Blockgraph gives our customers the tools they need to confidently and consistently optimize performance even as campaigns become more complicated. Blockgraph’s privacy-focused identity solution gives our customers the security they need to identify and target new audiences and measure their success.”

The new partnership will allow marketers and media companies using tvScientific’s performance advertising platform to activate first party programmatic audience campaigns using Blockgraph’s industry-leading identity platform, the companies said. 

Data owners will be able to safely and seamlessly deploy their aggregated and de-identified first party data. By incorporating retail data into tvScientific’s CTV targeting and measurement platform, direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands can target television advertisements to specific households according to their search, purchase and retail history to drive better campaign performance.

“This new partnership brings together our privacy-enhanced, deterministic household identity solution with tvScientific’s sophisticated demand-side platform,” said Jason Manningham, CEO of Blockgraph. “This collaboration will be particularly valuable to tvScientific’s customers, as they will now be able to apply their first party data assets more effectively and increase the overall ROI for their advertising campaigns.”

Compared to their competitors, D2C brands maintain particularly rich catalogs of first party customer data. D2C brands can apply this data to premium video assets—both linear and CTV—to improve campaign targeting, measurement and optimization, the companies said. 

The new partnership between Blockgraph and tvScientific will support inventory both bought and sold programmatically.

One early adopter of the solution has been Lull, a leading mattress brand. "Using tvScientific’s platform to leverage our first party data has allowed us to unlock an additional channel to retarget our existing leads and customers,” said Sharone Almog, vice president of marketing and eCommerce at Lull. “Data drives all of our decisions at Lull, so being able to target unique audiences who we know are interested in our brand has helped us boost campaign performance."

Television New Zealand (TVNZ), the country’s state-owned, commercially funded television broadcaster, is the first media company in Aotearoa [the Māori-language name for New Zealand] to adopt AWS Clean Rooms for its management of advertising, the web services company said this week during AWS re:Invent.

AWS Clean Rooms is an analytics service that helps companies more easily and securely collaborate on and analyze combined customer datasets—without sharing or copying one another’s underlying data, it said.

AWS Clean Rooms is assisting TVNZ to protect data about its viewers and audiences, such as show preferences and viewing trends—all of which is valuable to advertisers. TVNZ collects this data with viewer consent.

The broadcaster collaborates with advertising partners, such as McDonald’s and media company OMD, to analyze these anonymized datasets in a protected environment. This generates unique customer insights that help TVNZ and its advertisers improve their advertising and media strategy, helping to drive audience engagement and more personalized advertising and loyalty programs, it said.

TVNZ also uses Amazon Personalize, a machine learning (ML) service that enables companies to create real-time personalized user experiences to recommend content based on individual viewing behaviors, it said.

“If you want viewers to pay attention to your ads, you must show them personalized offers that resonate with their needs,” said Rob Hutchinson, general manager of Digital, Commercial at TVNZ.

“AWS Clean Rooms enables us to do this by working with our advertisers to deliver personalization while protecting customer data. Our advertising partners can set up AWS Clean Rooms at low cost in just a few minutes, creating an environment for us to collaborate and analyze data securely to drive innovations that excite our audiences. We’re mindful of our requirements in this area, and we’re excited to be offering innovation while working in a future-fit and privacy-centric way,” he said.

TVNZ worked with AWS Advanced Consulting Partner Slalom, a global technology consulting company, to implement AWS Clean Rooms. 

More information is available on the company’s website. 

CHICAGO—TransUnion has announced that it has relaunched and expanded its TruAudience marketing solutions line of business, which provides marketers, media companies, and technology providers with solutions to deal with consumer data, audience targeting, and measurement challenges.

The expanded TruAudience offering now marries the expansive consumer data, advanced identity resolution, audience building, and targeting capabilities of TransUnion and Neustar into a comprehensive and interoperable suite of privacy-enhanced marketing solutions. 

Additionally, the product suite now offers closed-loop marketing measurement and attribution and credit-informed marketing solutions, which weren’t previously available.

“The integrated capabilities of TransUnion and Neustar enable our clients to solve the biggest challenges they face at every step of the marketing process leveraging an industry-leading and newly enhanced identity infrastructure,” said Michael Schoen, executive vice president of marketing solutions at TransUnion. “These TruAudience capabilities transform the quality of our clients’ consumer data, improve their ability to attract and acquire customers across channels, and help them continuously measure and improve the return on their marketing investments.”

 More specifically, TruAudience suite of marketing solutions includes: 

• Data hygiene and enrichment
• Audience segmentation, creation, and syndication
• Measurement and attribution
• Data collaboration/Clean room
• Credit-informed marketing

In addition, TruAudience now leverages the proprietary data ecosystems of TransUnion and Neustar spanning 200 authoritative data sources including data from over 16 billion monthly phone signals, offline consumer data covering over 125 million U.S. households, and data spanning 10 billion real-time digital interactions daily. 

This expansive consumer data is onboarded, linked, and validated by TransUnion’s identity graph platform, (previously known as OneID from Neustar) to enable TruAudience clients to continuously cleanse and enrich their first-party data, deepen their consumer insights, and improve the accuracy of their audience segmentation, targeting, and measurement strategies. 

“The integration of the Neustar marketing product portfolio into TruAudience marketing solutions is a major milestone in the integration of TransUnion's acquisition of Neustar,” said Matt Spiegel, executive vice president and head of the media and entertainment business at TransUnion. “We know the future of personalized marketing starts with a detailed understanding of individual and household identity and we are confident that TruAudience delivers that intelligence. Just as importantly, we have a suite of products built on top of that identity infrastructure that enables marketing investments to be more precise, relevant, and effective.”

For more information about TruAudience marketing solutions, visit www.transunion.com/truaudience.

RESTON, Va.—TransUnion’s Neustar has announced that it has launched a new solution for AWS Clean Rooms by Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

AWS Clean Rooms was announced last November as a new analytics service that helps companies across industries and their partners easily and securely analyze and collaborate on their combined datasets—without sharing or revealing underlying data. 

Neustar’s Unified Identity solution for AWS Clean Rooms  allows brands, agencies, and publishers to effectively connect and enrich disparate first- and second-party data sources, improving their ability to build, reach and convert high value audiences across media channels while preserving privacy, the company explained. 

“Neustar’s collaboration with AWS Clean Rooms gives customers the ability to resolve identity fragments to actual consumers in the real world and improve their match rates to clean room partners,” said Ryan Engle, vice president of Identity Solutions at Neustar. “Together with AWS, we can better enable a privacy-first world with consumer trust at its heart, enhanced by the power of identity.”

Neustar’s solution allows AWS Clean Rooms customers to use Neustar’s identity graph and machine learning capabilities to resolve offline and online identifiers by responsibly connecting disparate events, location, and device data. 

This is important, Neustar said, because customers often struggle with low match rates between consumer data sets, which in turn impacts their ability to execute analytics or create scaled audiences. The Unified Identity solution helps overcome that problem by increasing match rates and providing rich attributes for new segmentations.

“With Neustar Unified Identity for AWS Clean Rooms, AWS customers are empowered to securely collaborate with one another using Neustar’s market leading identity resolution solutions,” said Adam Solomon, head of Worldwide Data Collaboration & Interoperability Solutions at AWS. “We are excited about Neustar’s vision to meet AWS customers where their data lives and help them deploy Neustar Unified Identity within AWS Clean Rooms alongside its built-in, privacy-enhancing controls.”

Neustar is a  launch partner of AWS Clean Rooms. Customers can begin to use Neustar with AWS Clean Rooms immediately here: Neustar Unified Identity. 

Protecting your data is a lot like your security practices. But legacy applications are no longer sufficient in this evolving digital transformation era. Some say now is the time to move on from old-school tools for data-management and look to new means for their data-protection solutions. This concept depends in part on how you and your organization view data as a valued commodity.

Storage systems and data products are a small part of the overall data-protection ecosystem. In recent times, some have claimed that so-called “legacy data-protection products” are little more than costly insurance. Up and coming new (and current) solutions can now help you address the most important aspects of data protection and help mitigate the complexity of keeping your data safe. Knowing the basics is imperative when establishing a path towards data protection.

Disruption in a New Light
The IT teams of today must look at their operations in a new light as nearly all industries—including entertainment—are being disrupted by entrants who are attracting customers away from their otherwise non-digital businesses. These new entrants can include “bandits” whose mission is to capture this data and exploit its value for themselves, including the illegal sale of that data or the ransoming of its usage by anyone, especially its owners.

The industry needs more help. It goes without saying that one of the new sets of challenges to IT-professionals includes finding sufficient workforce to support a growing set of digital requirements through the employment of its current (or newly hired) staff while continuing to protect the very assets that they manage or administer. Tools are available to aid in data protection, but it still requires proficiency and expertise in configuration and implementation of these new and usually advanced tool sets. The education and proficiency of these personnel are critical to securing the integrity of the data that they support.

Data is the lifeblood of any industry that uses digital technologies for its activities. It doesn’t matter what the business is or if it supports only a single entity or a myriad of other smaller segments within a global entity. Preserving your data is critical to survival, hence the IT industry must select from a multitude of products marketed to support and preserve this precious commodity.

Data protection is an essential function of enterprise IT management irrespective of the size or scale of the organization. As with any product you pay for, the intangible is almost untouchable until you need it, so let‘s first start by understanding what is meant by data protection.

For several years, storage solution specialists and vendors have recommended users include certain purpose-built commercial appliances in your storage architecture. Some of these legacy products were built to duplicate (clone, snapshot or other) and make available all your data sets in a quickly assessible, easily managed system that “auto-magically” would restore lost data from an independent archive platform with no losses or degradation in productivity. 

In actuality, these appliances or solutions were found to be a non-foolproof solution for maintaining data integrity, with the need, rationale and understanding of the requirements becoming a “missing link” in the overall solution set. As will be detailed later in this article—knowing about your data and the infrastructure it works within is a great first step to data assessment and protection methodologies.

Best Practices and Assessment
One of the suggested best practice approaches to ascertaining the validity or value of your data protection program is to do a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA). This practice describes a process designed to “identify risks arising out of the processing of personal data and to minimize these risks as far and as early as possible.”

DPIAs are important tools for negating risk and for demonstrating compliance with things such as General Data Protections Regulation (GDPR) especially in those areas or regions with strict adherence to data integrity and preservation where GDPR is required by law. Those companies who must comply with GDPR are likely well aware of the data-protection requirements with many guidelines and practices published widespread. 

Automated processes include those principles, which are outlined in ISO 27001—the compliance document for international standard certification describing how to manage information security. ISO 27001 Certification demonstrates that your organization has invested in the people, processes and technology (e.g., tools and systems) to protect your organization’s data. ISO 27001 provides an independent, expert assessment of whether your data is sufficiently protected.

As an outline to assess if your organization is at least thinking in the right direction, the following elements are considered the “pillars of integrity” and can help you understand key issues in data-protection.

First, know where your data is stored or located, as well as how to retrieve it during compromising conditions. Second, understand the sensitivity of the data you have stored, the importance of the data to your business and the likely business impact should this data be unavailable or compromised to unauthorized parties (including the public). If the data should be modified or corrupted, know how to and what it will take to recover or restore that data.

Know How Your Data Flows
Third, owners should be knowledgeable in the prevention of unauthorized access and/or data transfer. This concept is aided best when you know and understand where, and how, data flows in your system and elsewhere (including the cloud). Unprotected environments are one of the biggest culprits to data loss and include not just the storage itself, but all those services that might have access to the data or involve interchanging that data, such as email, accounting systems, e-commerce solutions, backup and such.

Fourth, know and carefully manage the identities of all individuals who have access to the data. Determine if the right identities (both machines and persons) are permitted access and determine who should not have access to the data. Assess all third-party suppliers, partners and understand to what level they have access to the data including when, for how long, what kind of visibility they have to other sub-systems and similar security level concerns.

And finally, know what controls are being used to protect your data. Are those systems operating as designed and are they operating effectively? Are there stop gap methods that will immediately cease all access should any compromise be detected? Do you have your data backed up on premises or in the cloud or both? 

The Digital Experience
Today, there are two broad ecosystems that support data management—on-premises and in the cloud. The ongoing global “digital transformation” (see sidebar for a descriptive definition) is witnessing a monumental shift from on-premises workflows to those that include and/or are migrating to the cloud. Organizations today are highly focused on the digital experience and think they have a good understanding of their customers’ digital experiences.

IT decision makers (ITDMs) see an urgent shift towards focusing on consumer’s digital experiences. Such experiences are just like security, which now requires investments in technologies, applications, people and customer access to any and all information. If you follow best practices in security and policy, likely you’ll be amplifying the integrity of your data using similar practices. l

Sidebar:

Digital Transformation by Definition
Defining the Digital Transformation (aka “DX”) is complex and broad-reaching—best identified by example with no generally agreed upon fundamental definition. 

Essentially, DX involves how organizations and governments are changing their mode of operation in order to improve service delivery, be more efficient and effective in their designs, and achieve objectives such as increased transparency, interoperability and citizen satisfaction. 

During the pandemic, many organizations were not ready for the digital transformation. All forms of organizations have attempted to capitalize on modern technology architectures bent on adding flexibility and agility to expand their competitive advantages amid the disruptions and experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

As some found out, any road to a digital transformation is seldom in a straight line. Results from expert interviews and reports indicate that “an amazing 40% of those organizations who commenced an all-out digital transformation initiative failed to achieve the desired business outcomes.” 

NEW YORK—Flowics has launched several new additions to its Data Connectors catalog, broadening the assortment of native integrations of live external data that can directly populate broadcast graphics created with its cloud-based engine.

Data Connectors integrate data from external third-party data providers into Flowics Graphics, making it possible to integrate live external data, such as sports statistics, betting data, weather information, financial data and cryptocurrency performance, into broadcast graphics without requiring the time and expense of developing a custom solution or entering data manually, the company said.

Rather, data flows seamlessly from third parties into Flowics Graphics and to designated cloud-based graphics files as directed, which enables users with little graphics knowledge to create live graphics displaying information audiences value, it said.

Among the connectors currently available are BetMGM, Sportradar, Stats Perform and The Weather Channel. The latest additions to the company’s Data Connector catalog include:

• Apex Legends, free-to-play battle royale-hero shooter game, published by Electronic Arts
• CoinStats, provider of financial information for Crypto assets
• Matsport, MSO and RTRT.me timing and race tracking providers
• OpenWeather, an open API for global weather data
• Polygon.io, provider of financial and stock market data
• PUBG, online multiplayer battle royale game developed and published by PUBG Studios
• Rouvy, a virtual cycling app

The architecture of Data Connectors enables integration of on-site data sources through the Flowics Middleware. This flexibility helps users who deal with data sources available only in a local area network instead of on the internet, the company said.

Data Connectors are add-ons to a Flowics Graphics subscription. Flowics subscribers that want to incorporate third-party data can choose as many connectors as they need, it said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

NEW YORK—In an important step forward in the industry’s efforts to improve measurement, the Media Rating Council (MRC) has issued a draft version of its Outcomes and Data Quality Standards. 

The announcement opens a 60-day public comment period on the Standards. 

The standards are intended to both improve the quality of data and standardize the measurement of Outcomes resulting from advertising exposure.

MRC’s Outcomes Standards initiative was publicly announced in June 2020, with preliminary guidance issued in March of 2021.

Since the release of this preliminary guidance, the MRC has been working with the Outcomes Advisory Group (a large group of MRC members, practitioners and interested parties including ANA, 4A’s, IAB and ACA) to produce a Public Comment Draft of the Standards.

The Standards address various Outcomes measures and approaches, including attribution and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), Market Mix Modeling (MMM) and experiments, as well as the underlying data quality associated with these methods.

Key provisions include:

• Guidance and requirements related to incorporating viewability, invalid traffic (IVT) filtration and audience measures into media and ad exposure attributed to Outcomes, building on previous MRC Standards;
• Definitions and requirements for “funnel” metrics from interaction, engagement, direct outcomes and efficiency metrics;
• Requirements for attribution approaches including MTA, such as decay curves, regression approaches, determining weight or value and lookback windows;
• Requirements for MMM approaches, such as coverage, spend data, modeling parameters and external/environmental factors;
• Requirements related to use of Test and Control approaches or experiments as validation, in combination or hybrid approaches and on a standalone basis;
• Detailed guidance and requirements for underlying data quality, including identification and key privacy considerations.

MRC noted that it will consider the comments it receives during the 60-day public comment period, which ends August 7th.  Shortly after that date, MRC will produce a proposed final version of the Standards for review by the working group.  

It is expected that the final version of the Standards will be issued publicly before the end of Q3 2022. 

The draft standard can be accessed at www.mediaratingcouncil.org. 

Unlike more traditional industries with legacy infrastructures, such as finance or healthcare, the media and entertainment industry has always been able to adapt quickly during periods of rapid change. However, the past decade has seen a dramatic change in the way film, TV, music and gaming are consumed. The rise of on-demand services means entertainment providers have had to rethink the way they deliver content in a seamless way. And the resulting wealth of data created, as a result of these new delivery methods, have opened up tremendous opportunities.

Data is central to this new era of entertainment. Industry leaders, such as Netflix, are making use of data to deliver standout customer service across different platforms and are reaping the rewards: the business currently boasts more than 150 million paying subscribers. As a result, long-standing industry behemoths such as Disney, Apple and Amazon are in constant competition to enhance their streaming offerings.

Newer players in the market like Hulu often have a more agile, data-driven approach, while more established businesses may have to manage data across multiple locations and business silos. These differing approaches may be a result of the fact that according to DataAge 2025, an IDC report sponsored by Seagate, 42% of media and entertainment companies lack a solid understanding of how best to adapt to the impending data-led future. There’s room for improvement across the wider industry and unlocking the value of this data is crucial to their future success.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE TAKING

With “YouTubers” regularly racking up more views than traditional TV programs and Twitch reporting that more than 15 million people spend an average of 95 minutes on the platform per day, multiplatform streaming services have become the norm. Distinguishing your brand and breaking through the noise to grab consumers’ attention has become a key challenge for media companies.

But, with data being the enabler for success in this forward-thinking industry, implementing a reliable data management infrastructure is a crucial first step for media companies to keep up with new competitors. According to IDC, from 2010 to 2018 data produced by the media and entertainment industry grew at a 43% compound annual rate, far beyond the growth rate of all other industries in the study.

To address this significant growth, investment in cloud-based infrastructure is vital. An open, cloud-based approach will enable businesses to remove silos across the organization, better identify new opportunities to capture, create, distribute and manage data more efficiently and translate that data into improved customer experiences.

DEVELOPING CONTENT USING DATA

Building a proper centralized infrastructure to handle all that data is only the first part of the journey. Adopting a data-led approach means that content creators, and the businesses commissioning and funding new content, have a vast range of new information at their fingertips, which they can use to make decisions.

Standard metrics, such as views, location and engagement time, are now supplemented with more in-depth and creative measures. For example, Netflix reports that 80% of users follow recommendations driven by algorithmic data analysis. Information such as when a viewer fast forwards through a scene, or what genre of content a user responds to, can be used to create more personalized customer experiences and drive overall engagement and brand loyalty. Investing in data collection technologies is the best way of making this happen. The media and entertainment sector needs to think creatively, anticipate new data sources and incorporate them into decision-making on an ongoing basis.

PRIVACY IS PARAMOUNT

Data collection and privacy has never been a more sensitive topic. As media and entertainment companies look to use data to innovate, they must always be mindful of protecting their customers’ personal information. Industry leaders face steep consequences in the event of any breach, for example in 2017, HBO suffered from a high-profile cyber-attack. The hackers threatened to release vital information about popular programs, which could have had a significant impact on future revenues. While the attack did not expose customer information, any cyber-attack comes with real reputational concerns.

On top of this, the media and entertainment sector is uniquely vulnerable to cybercrime. High-profile products, services that reach millions of consumers, complex production processes and extensive use of third-party vendors collectively to create a high-risk environment. The industry needs to invest in going beyond traditional security practices to counteract the risks. New types of customer data mean require new security and privacy technologies such as AI and automation, which can be used to spot potential attacks much sooner and take proactive measures to prevent them.

LEADING THE WAY

Moving forward, it is vital that incumbent media and entertainment companies consider and act on data if they want to maintain the position against upstart players and disruptors. A good data management infrastructure, with security baked in from the start, will enable these businesses to create, distribute and measure the success of their content more effectively. The businesses that embrace and invest in this approach now, will lead the way for the future.

Ted Oade is a director of Product Marketing at Seagate Technology for B2B products, the company’s multi-billion-dollar Enterprise, NAS and Surveillance lines. He is a veteran of the IT industry having played a wide variety of roles across marketing, product management, corporate strategy, operations and sales. He has the unusual distinction of being a non-engineer who was awarded several storage system patents. Ted lives, works and plays in Northern Colorado—the Rocky Mountains’ version of the Silicon Valley.

Videosys Broadcast, a leading supplier of quality camera control systems, RF links and camera backs to outside broadcast providers is launching Stagebox at IBC2019, on stand 10.F21. Enabling the delivery of video, audio and data from A to B over fibre, Stagebox allows outside broadcast operators to multiplex all audio and video components (microphone, monitors, talkback panel) onto a single SMPTE fibre cable and power remotely.

Stagebox improves outside broadcast production workflows by removing the requirement to run separate cables for each feed. It provides crews with a multi-purpose production tool, enabling all the feeds to be connected to the base unit in an OB truck and multiplexed onto a single SMPTE fibre cable. This greatly reduces rigging time and costs. Stagebox can also be used for the lighting director’s position or in a small remote studio.

Colin Tomlin Managing Director of Videosys Broadcast says, “As well as allowing all the video and audio components to be multiplexed onto a single SMPTE fibre cable, the system can manage four video and four audio signals in each direction, which can be selected from a small screen. This additional feature provides confidence to the operator that the correct signal has been selected. We are delighted to launch this at IBC 2019 and look forward to demonstrating it at the show.”

Additional Stagebox features include a monitoring output so the operator can check individual video and audio signals without interrupting the main feed and Stagebox talkback to the OB truck or studio, again adding an extra layer of confidence for operators.

Throughout the show Videosys Broadcast will also demonstrate its Camera Control System (CCU). Comprised of three units, Indoor Unit (IDU), Outdoor Unit (ODU) and Camera Receiver (RXSM-E), the CCU system provides an end-to-end solution from RCP to camera for the outside broadcaster, allowing them to seamlessly control their camera settings no matter what their location. The Videosys Broadcast CC system works with cameras from all the major camera manufacturers and has over 1000 deployments worldwide and is used by all major production companies at leading live events across the globe. 

It’s hard to imagine how much storage is being used and will be required by the Media & Entertainment industry. One authoritative study puts today’s total at nearly 52 Exabytes (1 EB = 1 billion GBs) and predicts almost 192 EB will be required by 2023.

M&E companies must determine how they will affordably scale their storage in an always-on environment to keep pace with this growth, as well as how they will actually find their media assets once they are stored. I’m sure you would also be interested in new ways to store and manage today’s crushing data load while setting yourself up to succeed for the long haul.

This white paper, “To Infinity and Beyond”, examines how a media workflow intelligence platform and scale-out object storage can be leveraged together as a media-aware storage platform that supports highly efficient, centralized media workflows. It also describes:

How M&E enterprises can reduce their overall storage costs and maintain fast access to stored assets in a HyperStore storage environment.

Why scale-out object-based storage is so ideal for nearline media applications supporting existing SAN and NAS production storage.

How Telestream’s Vantage can leverage the extensible metadata schema underlying Cloudian HyperStore and its custom metadata tagging to identify and retrieve media assets from storage without requiring a Media Asset Management (MAM) system.

Click here to download the full white paper.

The Oscars were over the weekend, and as we celebrate the latest top-of-the class movie productions, let’s not forget the innovative technologies that create today’s movie magic. The film industry is in the throes of an exciting digital transformation, revolutionizing the creation and consumption of our favorite films.

The 91st Academy Awards took place on Sunday in Los Angeles, but this year’s ceremony had already made history. The video streaming platform Netflix was up for its first ever Best Picture Oscar nomination, with Alfonso Cuarón’s film "Roma" pegged for the coveted award. Not to mention nine other nominations (it won three). Meanwhile, another Netflix original "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs," directed by the Coen Brothers, scooped three nominations—and competitor platform Hulu garnered a nomination in the Best Documentary section for "Mind the Gap."

This is a milestone moment for film, underscoring the shift in consumer consumption and the impact of nimble digital platforms on the content consumed. Ofcom reported that U.K. subscriptions to the three most popular online streaming services—Netflix, Amazon Prime and Sky’s Now TV—reached 15.4 million in the first quarter of 2018, overtaking the number of traditional pay TV subscriptions at 15.1 million. Viewers aged 16-34 watched more online streamed content (2 hours 37 minutes a day on average) than traditional broadcast content (2 hours 11 minutes). These stats might be impressive, but with 5G developments on the horizon, our streaming habits are about to be turbocharged.

Digital innovations are re-writing the rulebook for film on screen and behind the camera. In 2017, "Beauty and the Beast" was brought to life with a live-action re-make, and this year a string of Disney favorites will get the same treatment. Whether combining traditional and digital visual effects or going the full hog with feature length animations, a tremendous amount of data is processed in their making.

Every single element of a CG animation film is digitally crafted down to the finest detail. Whether it’s thousands of dragons flying over the ocean or exotic parrots falling in love in South America, production companies, at their core, are manufacturers of data. A single movie contains as many as half a billion files, which become digital assets that can be repurposed for future sequels.

• DreamWorks productions provide the perfect case in point. It takes hundreds of artists to work on any given DreamWorks feature, each of which takes three to four years to create. With a release target of two features per year, this means that there are, on average, 10 films in production simultaneously. This equates to an average of 400TB to 500TB of data spread across 500 million or more files. Creating characters such as Hiccup, Toothless and Astrid, and environments such as the Hidden World in the third "How to Train Your Dragon" film, requires some pretty heavy lifting, from a data and computation perspective.
• What do "Kung-Fu Panda" and "Shrek" have in common? They’re data-driven. But what does that really mean—and how has this evolved? When the first "Shrek" movie was produced in 2001, it required 6TB of data in total. In contrast, a single animated sequence from the current release of "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World" draws on up to 50TB of data.
• DreamWorks relies on sophisticated data management solutions to ensure 100 percent up-time—and as it grows its multimedia content creation empire, enabling engineers to focus on creative and production teams continues to be critical.

This means that optimal data storage and management is the key to keeping the production line moving, artists in progress and ultimately bringing stories to life on the silver screen. With the exponential growth of data in the movie making process, optimizing data center space, guaranteeing no downtime and reducing latency is essential for an award-winning performance.

As we celebrate another great year of innovations in film, we are certainly provided with the perfect point at which to pause and reflect on just how far we have come. While data nerds look ahead to the next-steps for data-driven film—from AI powered animations to 3D film capture and 5G charged viewing—the majority of film lovers are blissfully unaware of the magic taking place behind the screen, within the data fabric. Without it, our animations would be delayed or sub-par and our nightly Netflix binges would be peppered with frustrating downtime. This year, perhaps an Oscar should have gone to the data-driven technologies that make our favorite films possible?

Virtualization technology has already arrived in the broad world of smart business where automation and predictability hold the key to monetization. Industries such as telcos, manufacturing, energy, financial services and retail, among others, successfully adopted the cloud some time ago. However, when you look at the broadcast, media and entertainment sector and its vendors, it’s somewhat behind the curve. As a broadcaster, if you aren’t considering or testing cloud technology at this moment in time when other sectors have already made lucrative gains, then your business model is at a high risk of failure.

Long-established vendors in the world of broadcast, while still having a role in specialist functionality, are now joined—and arguably superseded—by a new influx of service providers. On the one hand, there are cloud companies like AWS, Azure and Google; on the other enterprise business management services like Salesforce and SAP.

MOVING FROM CAPEX TO OPEX

Over the last few years, these companies have broadened their feature sets to the point where the line on which one product finishes and another starts, has blurred beyond recognition. These "new" players are introducing completely new ideas when it comes to managing and delivering content, based on processing, connectivity and storage, while at the same time enabling the move towards new business models.

As one of the first companies in the U.K. M&E space to adopt a ‘cloud-first’ strategy and the first AWS certified M&E partner in the U.K., Support Partners are well versed in utilizing these disruptive technologies. As a company, our goal is to help all of our clients migrate parts or all of their infrastructure to the cloud by 2020.

Making the move from CapEx to OpEx is potentially transformative for the business models of content creators and deliverers. The OpEx model allows a direct link between costs and revenues, dynamically scaling on demand to capture those new opportunities. That, in turn, allows you to understand where profitability lies, and therefore concentrate on the more commercially compelling services.

Cloud technology is inherently agile. You can add new services, whether that is 4K Ultra HD production or machine learning for automated logging, simply by spinning up the appropriate microservices in the cloud.

A software-defined network allows you to move to a business-driven operation. Instead of someone in marketing asking for a channel and someone in engineering saying it will take six months to get it online, executives working in enterprise management software like Salesforce will be able to run a what if? exercise and immediately see how financially and operationally viable a new service would be.

[Read: It’s A Very Cloudy Forecast For 2021]

However, for most organizations it is daunting to make the jump to being cloud first, so where is the sweet spot between on-premises hardware and the cloud? Do you hand everything over to AWS, Azure or Google? Or do you use the cloud for its elasticity, stepping in when your on-premise hardware is at full stretch? And, if the latter, how do you know just how much hardware you should have on site so that it will be running close to capacity most of the time?

UNDERSTANDING SCALE

In a traditional broadcast architecture, the experienced system designer would look at a requirement and have a basic understanding of the scale. An installation might have, say, around 400 device ports, so to be safe the architect would specify a 512 x 512 router. Having set the size, the procurement people could talk to a selection of vendors and get the right deal on the right device. This CapEx model means that you can’t easily scale up without more investment or indeed scale down as and when required, plus you are tied to specific vendors.

In a virtualized environment the scale is equally vital when provisioning a system but it is far less readily understood. How many processor cycles do you need to render a 4K animated title sequence? How much storage do you need to edit a 13-part drama? How much additional processing power can you afford to call on in the cloud before you have to say a process will have to wait—and who makes that decision?

The answer: you need to understand the data. Not the content and its metadata, but the usage data. How much storage are you using and for how long? How many processors do you need, how many are in continual use and how many do you call on when a lot is happening?

Now the chances are you already have some cloud contracts or at least are negotiating at this very moment. The IABM/Devoncroft research published earlier this year said that 85 percent of broadcasters think they will be using the cloud in the next two to three years and 28 percent are already using it.

If you already have a cloud contract, did you get a good deal? It can be hard to tell when file transfers are billed by the gigabyte, processing by the minute, and asset management by the terabyte of storage.

This is a multi-dimensional matrix. The cloud provider will have a set of fees, which may include some hefty surcharges if you go over a certain level. The software provider will also have its own licensing model, which will be based on different parameters such as usage, nodes activated, codecs used etc.

The people providing media-specific software used to sell broadcast hardware. They have had to re-engineer their own businesses from a cash flow position where they received 100% of the value of a sale at the point of acceptance, to one where they are maybe hoping to get a recurring license of 20 percent of the value each year for five years. Their natural instincts are to ensure their return by nudging the license fee up; you may find yourself paying 25% a year, with the expectation that you will still be there five years from now. So, how can this be avoided?

AT A GLANCE

The solution is to have a means of monitoring and evaluating all the data and presenting it on a single pane of glass. If you were making something physical – a car, say – then you would want to be able to see the complete supply chain from component to customer on a single dashboard. Why should it be any different for the manufacture of intellectual property, like a television program or a commercial?

The solution surely lies in an integration between the broadcast and management infrastructures. Platforms like Salesforce have the dashboard functionality: you need to integrate it with the media technology to monitor trends, track usage and provide actionable insights.

Taking this approach builds an accurate, trusted dataset, derived from all available sources. Usage is reconciled between on-premise hardware and software services and cloud providers. That, in turn, gives you a real insight into how your transition to virtualisation and the cloud is performing.

More importantly, it allows you to apply predictive data analytics to do the what ifs? for your future plans. If you know accurately what you need in terms of processing, connectivity and storage today, you are in a strong position to make decisions for the future.

You know if you have a good deal today (or not), and you know what you want to achieve when you renegotiate. Armed with predictive data requirements, you are in a much stronger position to compare bids and costs. You are no longer locked into your current vendor for fear of getting a worse deal. You can use predictive analytics to understand how best to apply automation and machine learning, which microservices to spin up, and determine which spot instances are the best value at any particular time.

There is no doubt that the future for media is all about predictive automated workflows, running on software-defined architectures in virtualised environments, on-premise and in the cloud. Provisioning these systems calls for new skill sets and a new way of thinking.

At Support Partners, we have implemented predictive data analytics for one of the world’s biggest production and broadcast companies, but it is applicable to any media company. If you are not capturing your operational data today, you will not know where you are tomorrow. That will be the difference between commercial stability and the risk of failure.

Harry Grinling is the CEO of Support Partners.

INASNOW, BANK—Probably no other personal device that’s been introduced into the market over the past decade has affected our daily lives than the smartphone. Ten years ago, the idea of taking pictures (let alone video) with your phone was still a fairly new concept and hardly user-friendly. Today, nearly everyone carries an HD video camera in their pocket, and the impact has affected nearly all aspects of our

The concurrent rise of social media has had a similar impact, and video has played an important role as well. The success of apps like Periscope have given nearly anyone with a smartphone the ability to become their own private broadcaster (Facebook announced last month that it will offer the same ability for any subscriber to broadcast live video to his or her followers.) When you add in the success of Netflix and over-the-top devices such as Apple TV, it’s pretty easy to understand how video-over-IP is the future of mass—as well as personal—communications worldwide.

Recognizing and analyzing this phenomenon has been on the minds of Internet giant Cisco for years, and its most recent annual Visual Networking Index, released earlier this month, is seen by most in our industry as a reliable predictor of the future impact of mobile IP video. Its 2016 report can probably be best summed up in our headline.

“Since 2000, when the first camera phone was introduced, the number of mobile users has quintupled,” according to the report. “By 2020, there will be 5.5 billion mobile users, representing 70 percent of the global population. The adoption of mobile devices, increased mobile coverage and demand for mobile content are driving user growth two times faster than the global popular over the next five years. This surge of mobile users, smart devices, mobile video and 4G networks will increase mobile data traffic eightfold over the next five years.”

Not surprisingly, mobile video is predicted to have the highest growth rate of any mobile application. The demand for higher resolution video, more bandwidth and processing speed will spur the growth of more advanced compression standards as well as 4G networks, which will carry more than 70 percent of all mobile traffic by 2020. By then, global mobile data traffic will reach 30.6 exabytes per month, (up from 3.7 exabytes in 2015), with video consuming 75 percent of that data traffic. Obviously, this will have a huge impact on policy and innovation, and the report notes the rising importance of alternative IP transport resources such as M2M (machine-to-machine) connections and WiFi Hotspots.

Where does broadcast fit in all of this? Well one of the “alternatives” left out of the report was ATSC 3.0. We don’t have to remind you of the advantages of broadcasting one-to-many as opposed to the one-to-one nature of IP video. And how the upcoming spectrum auctions will impact the future of TV broadcasting remains to be seen. (TV Technology has never outright opposed the auctions as such, but rather has advocated that the FCC treat broadcasters fairly in the process.) In the meantime, we’ve placed our bets on the future of our industry with ATSC 3.0. Although the next-gen standard is still in development, what happens as it is rolled out over the next several years will determine our future survival.

(Image from this rather odd YouTube video with neary 5.2 million views..)

Anyone who attended (or read about) this year’s NAB Show was unable to escape what was probably the biggest trend in our industry: the transition to IP and the increasing acceptance of the concept of “cloud” storage and computing for media operations. While there is still some skepticism about its role in our industry, there is also an increasing acknowledgement that we’re heading towards a cloud-based ecosystem.

Whether it’s wired or wireless, IP or traditional broadcast, the concept of handling the various elements of the media production workflow—from ingest to playout— within the cloud will be required if our industry wants to fulfill today’s mandate of delivering media anytime to any device. Whether you have a smart device or just a simple PC, you’re already using and taking advantage of the flexibility and robustness of cloud computing in both your personal and professional daily life.

Data servers at NetApp’s data center in Morrisville, N.C. The ATSC realizes the importance of the cloud for the future of broadcasting. “The ATSC 3.0 transport layer is based on using IP encapsulation for streaming and file delivery, rather than the MPEG-2 Transport Stream encapsulation as is currently used,” said ATSC President Mark Richer. “Besides similarities to the Internet, the use of IP transport enables incorporation of hybrid services, where components of services can be delivered by broadcast and broadband in a way that they can be synchronized. Woven throughout the structure of ATSC 3.0 is the basic notion that components of services can be delivered by different mechanisms (broadcast, broadband, or even pre-delivered by push in advance) and combined as needed to create services. This gives the broadcaster a large degree of flexibility and control over the services they offer.”

As our industry has progressed and the use of the cloud for the delivery of virtualized storage-on-demand has become more commonplace, vendors have added services and capabilities that take advantage of the increasing availability of IP-based delivery and high-speed connections. I had a chance to discuss these trends with a number of industry colleagues at this month’s NewBay Media “Cloud Tech Summit” in Raleigh, N.C. Although the conference was off-the-record, I can say that there was a general consensus that cloud computing has advanced enough to make the technology—whether it’s public, private or “hybrid” (a combination of both cloud and on-premise storage that has become a more popular option in our industry)— easier and more reliable to use. Improving workflows and the ability to deploy new channels and services on the fly—with little to no additional hardware or manpower needed—are among the most attractive features of cloud computing for our industry.

Nevertheless, there is still understandable skepticism about reliability, cost and security. In an industry whose livelihood depends on high-value content, there is still a reluctance to hand over certain parts of the workflow chain to third parties. And what happens when the Internet goes down? Industry players such as Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft Azure and others have taken steps to alleviate such concerns but it will take time before more broadcasters get onboard. While it may be inevitable, many of us are still weighing the risks such a universal transition will entail.

In our “Moving to IP” special report in this issue, we look at some of these trends, including the use of software-defined networking and software-as-a-service (SaaS) that are making the use of cloud technologies more relevant for our industry.

The cloud is an essential, critical part of our future.