TV TECH: What do you anticipate will be the most significant technology trends at the 2022 NAB Show?

JON FINEGOLD: The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated many of the trends that were already happening including cloud adoption, remote collaboration and expanded global distribution. In 2020, the industry had to scramble to adapt quickly and now we’re seeing companies looking, not backwards, but rather to shore up those new workflows making them more permanent, more scalable and more secure. We expect the 2022 NAB Show to be a showcase of how media companies are embracing these new workflows and a place to share new innovations and best practices to be prepared for this new future…which is now.

TVT: What will be your most important product news?

FINEGOLD: Since we last gathered in Las Vegas in April 2019, Signiant has experienced unprecedented growth supported by our ongoing commitment to innovation. In 2021, Signiant acquired two companies—Lesspain Software and Levels Beyond—for their media industry expertise and technology. Signiant is leveraging these acquisitions to accelerate the delivery of new platform services that facilitate deeper interactions with media assets on customer-controlled storage connected to its SaaS platform.

At this year’s NAB Show, Signiant is introducing new capabilities on the Signiant Platform that make it easy to find, preview and take action on media assets across distributed storage.

Additional NAB highlights include:

At the 2019 NAB Show we first introduced Signiant Jet, an award-winning SaaS product that, for the first time, made lightning-fast, automated file movement accessible to SMBs. Thanks to continued innovation, an enterprise version of Jet is now available to navigate more complex networks—adding bandwidth controls, firewall relays, expanded APIs and more 

With the enterprise version and with Jet’s unique inter-company capability, there is no easier, faster or more economical way to automate content exchange between companies of all sizes.

Jet employs Signiant’s fastest transport yet. Our recently patented architecture uses machine learning to adapt to network conditions and data sets in real time and is capable of multiple Gbps speeds.

TVT: How is your new product different from what’s available on the market?

FINEGOLD: Signiant’s proprietary transport technology has long been trusted by the media industry for mission-critical file transfer applications across the global supply chain. Our software provides fast, reliable, secure movement of large datasets via any IP network, with comprehensive control and visibility at any scale. These benefits are more important than ever in today’s hybrid cloud, multi-cloud world, where the Signiant Platform plays a foundational role in the modern media technology stack. This unified means of accessing media assets located in diverse, distributed storage repositories has set the stage for innovations that extend beyond file transfer into other value-add interactions with the content.

TVT: How has the Covid pandemic affected your company's business over the past year and half and how will it impact how you exhibit at this year's show?

FINEGOLD: Since the pandemic’s abrupt lockdown and immediate need for remote workflows, Signiant has seen explosive growth on our Media Shuttle product, more than doubling its number of connected companies to 50,000+ and surpassing 1,000,000 global end-users. Remote work initiatives, security requirements from the studios, broadcasters and streaming services and cloud imperatives have all been significant growth drivers.

TV TECHNOLOGY:What do you anticipate will be the most significant technology trend at the 2018 NAB Show?

JON FINEGOLD: The continued move to 4K/8K, the evolution of VR/AR and the growth of OTT are all interesting trends in 2018, and of course cloud initiatives and security remain on everyone’s mind. Those things all mean bigger files and more complex workflows, making Signiant’s sophisticated and secure file transfer solutions an even more critical part of operations.

TVT: What will be your most important product news?

FINEGOLD: We have recently made significant advancements across all three of our products.

Manager+Agents now offers Flight and Media Shuttle integrations, enabling Manager+Agents to connect with Signiant’s SaaS products for automating cloud workflows as well as system-to-person workflows.

Flight is now faster with extreme multi-Gbps transfer rates, as well as offering more flexibility in where files can be transferred to and it also integrates seamlessly with Managers+Agents.

Media Shuttle, with over 200,000 users worldwide, is far and away the market leader for person-initiated file transfers. We recently added new capabilities including expanded foreign language support, including Japanese; content protection to create “for your eyes only” encrypted transfers; and a System-to-Person Automation API, which allows customers to integrate Media Shuttle with other systems such as MAMs and DAMs.

TVT:How is your new product different from what’s available on the market?

FINEGOLD: Our solutions offer many unique or best-in-class features; however, our Manager+Agents solution has one important attribute that has never been replicated. Specifically, it was designed from the ground up to operate at scale. M+A’s central database and policy-based architecture allow configuration information to be automatically propagated out to hundreds or thousands of endpoints. In contrast, operating at scale was an afterthought for other solutions on the market, requiring an administrator to touch each endpoint for individual configuration. This is a huge differentiator for a worldwide deployment at scale, since the costs associated with managing endpoints quickly become prohibitive–making M+A the only practical solution.

TVT:What is it about the NAB Show that brings you back every year?

FINEGOLD: M&E is our core market and the NAB Show is one of the best opportunities to network with our customers and partners and discuss their changing business needs. The show also provides a tremendous opportunity to hear from industry thought leaders to get a snapshot of the entire industry and where it may be headed, which helps us define the future product developments that our customers will need.