WHITELEY, U.K.—The past year has seen a major transformation for Masstech, a U.K.-based provider of technology solutions to the M&E market, according to George Kilpatrick, who just marked his first anniversary as CEO of the company. 

As the former head of media and entertainment, EMEA, at Amazon Web Services, Kilpatrick was brought onboard to expand Masstech’s focus from storage management to a wider scope of content management, providing vendor-agnostic storage solutions to a wide range of M&E customers. Along the way, the company was also honored for its work in hierarchical storage management (HSM) with a Technical Emmy this year. 

“It’s been an interesting year,” Kilpatrick told TV Technology. “We’ve changed our whole approach to the market, which was basically looking after archives under Avid or other MAMs to now providing a full content management suite.

“So we can do orchestration of workflows, we can search more effectively, we have a much more effective UI where customers can in effect do content management rather than just looking after an archive in someone else's MAM,” he added.

The result of this expanded focus is Kumulate, which was launched at the 2019 IBC Show. Described as a “new intelligent storage and asset lifecycle management platform,” Kumulate’s unique workflow orchestration enables customers to automate multivendor and multiformat file transformations, across unlimited storage tiers in a hybrid cloud environment. Plus, it streamlines metadata interchange between third-party systems and metadata enrichment services to enable users to attain even more value from their assets.

Kilpatrick says this move enabled the company to go from maintaining and optimizing archives and storage as a provider of middleware to managing the entire storage chain, regardless of storage platform.

“We’re agnostic, we don't actually provide storage ourselves or LTO or on prem. In fact, now, we can manage any storage whether it's in the cloud, private, AWS or Azure and we continue to look after people's content sitting on prem,” Kilpatrick said.

Current events have forced broadcasters to ramp up their remote production capabilities as most stations and networks have had to adapt to broadcasting from home over the past two months. Kilpatrick says Masstech had already been preparing for this transition.

“The most interesting thing out of this COVID-19 situation is how those conversations [about remote production] have been happening for the past several years,” Kilpatrick said. “I came from AWS and we were talking to customers about cloud, remote editing and the advantages for quite awhile.”

Kilpatrick says Masstech has been spending a lot of time over the past several months explaining to its existing customers how they can use their existing solutions in a remote environment.

“We’ve been helping them with training, free software for free licenses to connect to cloud, basically helping them to allow their editors to produce content at home, upload it, pull archive material for editing on Macs, doing the changes and then uploading them to their production suites, all across the world,” he said.

One feature of Kumulate that has been particularly helpful for remote production has been a recently introduced virtual file system, according to Kilpatrick.

“VFS is our cloud connector and that's been very useful for customers to, for example, buy some more cloud storage, that allows them to access that,” he said. “Sometimes our customers can't send engineers to their tape rooms anymore or they want to limit engineers on site, so they're basically setting up new areas of storage for them.

“Two of our biggest news customers in the U.S. wanted the ability to search for assets on their archive and literally download them to the editors' desktop in their home so they could edit there and then upload to wherever it was required,” Kilpatrick added. “So we enabled those customers to do that. Clearly there are security implications so we’ve had to do that in a very controlled way but for these guys, this is their own content from their own archives so it was pretty easy for us to design that for them.’

Several other new product introductions were planned for the now cancelled 2020 NAB Show, including a new Adobe integration for Kumulate; Gateway, a new platform for controlled ingest from multiple sources; and Gallery, a new content distribution platform that Kilpatrick says they will provide more details on in the near future.

Earlier this year, Masstech, a provider of intelligent content storage and lifecycle management solutions, announced the appointment of George Kilpatrick as its new CEO. Kilpatrick joins Masstech from Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he was industry lead, media and entertainment, EMEA. Kilpatrick also previously worked at several divisions at Technicolor.

TV Technology Editor in Chief Tom Butts recently spoke with Kilpatrick about the future of Masstech and the industry's move to the cloud. 

TV Technology:Congratulations on the new appointment! Can you give us a little bit about your background and why you decided to join Masstech?

George Kilpatrick: I’ve been in this space for about 20 years, originally in the telco business and now media. Before Masstech I was with Technicolor for about nine years and then with Amazon Web Services for about two years, and then I joined Masstech. At Technicolor I ran the U.K. business for media services, which used many of the similar tools to distribute content to Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, and in fact, developed a number of cloud-based products.

At AWS we created a product called Showcase and then a product called Pulse, which worked to help both producers—in Pulse’s case—to develop much more efficient remote workflows for production companies and post houses; that’s gone on to be used by Technicolor now I believe. I also worked on distribution workflows as well.

I guess I got into cloud six or seven years ago. Clearly it was fairly rudimentary when we started, but I could understand and see where the power was, especially for media and entertainment, especially for distribution for production companies. In fact that’s why I went to AWS, because they asked for someone to, in effect, drive that business of the industry from here. And that’s what I did when I was with them.

TVT:What drew you to Masstech?

GK: With Masstech, for me it’s a very interesting space. Masstech was playing in the same area in terms of intelligent management assets and from my perspective, where, I believe, that product line could go given some of my experiences with cloud.

There’s a limited number of people who really understand the intersect between cloud and existing storage solutions and media—understanding in detail different file types, different workflows, different customer requirements and the subtle blends between what does a production company need, what does a distributor need, what does a broadcaster need.

I think clearly there was a wish for someone to bring in more cloud experience and some of the processes and more the way of thinking that is key for a company like Masstech.

TVT: Two years ago, Masstech bought SGL, how has that integration gone?

GK: We’ve combined SGL technology and the MassStore technology in our solutions. Both products—what we call FlashNet—originally came from the background of on-prem solutions but as we talked to our customers, they were all clearly engaged in discussing the full spectrum of options—from a full cloud solution and an on prem solution.

What we have found is that having been evangelists for the cloud for the last two years, we have a more realistic approach and I think hybrid is clearly the way ahead for the foreseeable future. We're uniquely positioned to help clients take that move.

They may take it slow, or in some cases a more aggressive stance, but it's very unusual that we have not found any customers yet go entirely cloud. So, if there's a hybrid element, you need some form of middleware layer to manage their assets in their multiple buckets, some in cloud, some NAS, some on-prem.

TVT:What is the biggest challenge facing broadcasters and media companies in adopting cloud technologies?

GK: Customers are intrigued by cloud but in some cases, maybe confused by what it can and cannot do. Yes, they can store and compute, but they were not aware, for example, that the UI was not provided for them, or that actually their assets are still their own to manage, not managed on their behalf by a cloud provider. So there's a degree of education that is still required.

There are also technical challenges and the cost model are very much at the top cost of any conversation. For example, egress charges—although customers might make a kind of OPEX model where they pay for what they use, they're also concerned about uncontrolled usage and they’re also concerned about egress charges in media workflows and because they work with such large files the costs can build up for pulling files from a cloud bucket.

There's also a degree of honesty needed so that when customers are looking at cloud they need to understand that what their full true costs are today. They need to include all of those things they don't like, such as overhead and engineers that have to go visit their data centers and utilities like air conditioning, etc.

Training and knowledge are also challenges. A lot of the cloud providers do try to do that but I think we are uniquely placed because we are helping people with real workflows and what advantages it can bring. Because we work in workflows with our customers on a day to day basis and support them, often we are the first point of contact for that conversation.

TVT:What impact has AI/ML had on expanding the reach of Masstech's platforms?

GK: We have integrated a number of AI technologies from multiple cloud providers—normally we're doing that on the behest of a customer who has a specific requirement. I think it's fair to say that it's still early. The theory is very exciting, with metadata tagging archives so they're better placed for monetization, for example.

The reality is that these can be slightly cost-prohibitive so we're working with clients to work with subsets of archives and data tools so we can come up with really focused cost-effective solutions for their particular needs.

So we're definitely seeing it and getting requests for it but whether we’re getting fully running production customers I'd say it's still early. We're testing a lot with people but I haven't found anyone in the media universe where we are using it really aggressively yet.

TVT:What other industries are you looking beyond broadcast media?

GK: Clearly our focus is M&E but it's more about video and video knowledge that we have and of course that is transmutable to other industries. We are looking at a number of relevant industries including oil and gas and medical, etc. If you think about airports storing huge amounts of surveillance data and the increase in file size because they're starting to use higher grade formats such as UHD, for example; that is having a massive impact, not only because the amount of storage is higher but then the actual complexity of searching and using that content means that systems like ours are going to be in more demand. It's a very small part of what we do today but I can see it growing.

TVT:What will Masstech be showing at IBC?

GK: We will be introducing our new Clover product to Europe. It has a reduced scale but the same functionality based on our MassStore product.

Going forward, we're going to further develop our microservices architecture and containerized architecture and will be converging the multiple solutions that we have within the product set so that we simplify it for our customers, because I think one of the things I've recognized is the need to make it easier to understand on the ground for customers.

We have multiple parts of our solutions, we have a workflow engine, we have a virtual file system, we have a transcoding engine, but we would like to modularize it so you as a customer can pick and choose what is suitable for them. Traditionally some of our solutions are headless, we're just going to architect them in a more containerized way. 

WHITELEY, England—Masstech has announced the appointment of George Kilpatrick as its new CEO, succeeding Joe French, who is stepping down after 20 years with the company.

Kilpatrick joins Masstech from Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he was industry lead, media and entertainment, EMEA. Kilpatrick has previously worked at both Technicolor Inc. and Technicolor Media Services Ltd.

“I’m very pleased to be joining Masstech as CEO,” said Kilpatrick. “It’s an exciting time for the M&E industry, and Masstech has a significant role to play. I’m looking forward to helping guide the company towards our goal of harnessing the latest Cloud and ML innovations to deliver the most innovative storage and content management solutions to our customers.”

“George’s extensive experience of the M&E space was of course a key factor in our decision,” added Roger Flynn, chairman of the Masstech Board. “The market is changing, and the Cloud is becoming more important to all M&E businesses. George’s previous roles, particularly most recently at AWS, make him the perfect candidate and we are extremely pleased to have secured him as the new Masstech CEO.”

Kilpatrick will take up his new role on April 5.