Broadcast workflows in every industry are under pressure from a simple reality: more content is being created than ever before.

Today’s production environments are generating massive volumes of high-resolution media. At the same time, expectations for speed, accessibility, and content reuse continue to increase. Traditional Media Asset Management (MAM) systems, while foundational, were not built for this level of scale.

The result is a growing gap between what organizations produce and how efficiently they can manage and use that content. MAM is no longer a storage system. It is becoming a media supply chain.

Where Traditional MAM Workflows Break Down
In many environments, MAM still relies heavily on manual processes:

• Metadata is entered by hand
• Content is organized based on folder structures or naming conventions
• Finding specific clips depends on knowing where to look or who to ask.

These approaches can work at smaller scales, but they break down quickly as content libraries grow. Search becomes slower and less reliable, duplicate content accumulates, and teams spend more time locating assets than using them.

In live production environments, where turnaround times are measured in minutes rather than days, these inefficiencies directly impact output. If the team's metadata is manual, the workflow is already broken.

The Role of AI in Modern MAM Workflows
AI is not replacing MAM. It is making it work better.

The biggest difference is that AI reduces the manual effort required to manage and find content. Instead of relying only on file names, folders, or memory, teams can use systems that automatically generate metadata, making content easier to search.

Automating Metadata and Improving Search
One of the most immediate impacts of AI is in metadata generation.

Speech-to-text transcription allows spoken content to be indexed and searched. Object recognition can identify people, logos, or scenes within video, while scene detection breaks long-form content into usable segments.

This reduces the need for manual logging and significantly improves how content is searched. Instead of relying on file names or folder structures, users can locate assets based on what actually appears in the video. For broadcast teams working under tight deadlines, this can reduce search time from minutes to seconds.

Supporting Content Reuse and Faster Turnaround
AI also changes how content is reused. As organizations place greater emphasis on digital distribution and near-real-time publishing, the ability to quickly identify and extract relevant moments becomes critical.

AI-assisted workflows can surface key segments within longer recordings, making it easier to generate highlights, cutdowns, and supporting content without having to review hours of footage.

This is especially valuable in live production environments, where content often needs to be repurposed immediately across multiple platforms.

Operational Impact on Production Teams
The impact of these improvements is operational.

Teams can manage larger volumes of content without a proportional increase in staffing. Content is easier to access, share, and repurpose, improving collaboration across locations and departments.

Post-production timelines are shortened, and workflows become more predictable. When metadata is generated consistently, and assets are structured reliably, teams spend less time searching for content and more time using it.

What AI Doesn’t Solve
While AI addresses several challenges within MAM workflows, it does not replace the need for a well-designed system.

Storage architecture, signal flow, and overall workflow design still determine how effectively content moves through an organization. AI enhances these systems, but it doesn’t compensate for gaps in infrastructure or poorly defined processes.

Successful implementation depends on integrating AI into a broader production environment, rather than treating it as a standalone solution.

If you’re reviewing your own workflow, a MAM readiness assessment may help highlight where manual processes are still creating bottlenecks.

Takeaways
As content volumes continue to grow, the ability to manage and use media efficiently is becoming a defining factor in broadcast operations.

AI-powered Media Asset Management is helping close the gap between content creation and content usability. Automating metadata, improving search, and enabling faster content reuse allow teams to work at the scale modern production demands.

For many organizations, the question is no longer whether AI should be part of the workflow, but how effectively it can be integrated into the systems that support production from capture through distribution.

LONDON—As Europe’s largest media company, Sky Group delivers premium content at a scale few media companies can match. Operating across multiple markets has meant managing a patchwork of siloed systems, inconsistent tooling, different operational practices and varied compliance requirements, preventing us from fully leveraging economies of scale.

Our challenge required not only a technically innovative approach to future-proof Sky’s content supply chain, but also a long-term strategic solution that would unify operations across the Group.

In short, we needed a radical shift onto a single platform.

One Group, One Platform
To address this, we built Media­Mesh, a unified cloud platform that centralizes QC, enrichment, conversion, and distribution at scale. The MediaMesh architecture—an API-driven, modular framework—brings together a curated ecosystem of in-house built microservices and products from leading industry partners, each selected for their ability to solve specific pain points.

For this project, we partnered with several companies, including SDVI, whose Rally platform provided the base layer that integrates with new and legacy tooling to retrieve metadata and media from dispersed systems and storage, in order to orchestrate content through the group’s platform.

Telestream’s Qualify serves as the automated quality control (QC) function at ingest, validating assets against Sky’s technical standards before proceeding further. Through close collaboration with operations, years of QC data were audited to optimize a system that flags issues early and reduces false positives compared to legacy tools, significantly minimizing manual review effort and downstream issues.

AWS ran AI to identify on-screen subtitles and spoken language to automatically identify localization requirements to fast-track downstream dubbing and subtitling efforts. This language detection has also allowed Sky Italia viewers to filter content by precise audio language, unlocking new levels of discoverability and personalization.

Codemill’s Accurate.Video platform not only plays back content, but provides a collection of audio controls, the ability to enable/disable subs and dubs for review and can present different time-based markers along a timeline (e.g., segmentation points, QC errors, sections needing localization).

We also deployed TMT Insights’ Polaris, which provides operations with a single platform identity, abstracting them from the multiple backend services, to streamline their operational practices. The Polaris UI provides visibility into metadata, end-to-end monitoring, workflow anomalies, prioritizes task management for steps requiring human intervention, communication threading and launching specialized functions such as editing tasks, various exports and ad hoc workflows. These functions help operations meet critical SLAs with confidence, reduce touchpoints, and speed up time to air.

Whether it’s ingesting content from over 300 content partners, enriching it with metadata and access services, or distributing it to platforms like Sky Glass and NOW, MediaMesh ensures every step is automated, observable, and streamlined. And the elastic scalability allocates sufficient system resources to meet the changing business demands.

To deliver a platform as ambitious as MediaMesh, we had to rethink not just our technology stack, but our internal capabilities. This meant evolving from a traditional broadcast engineering mindset to a software-first organization. TV engineers retrained as software engineers, embracing cloud-native development and modern DevOps practices. This transformation has not only accelerated delivery but fostered a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

Business Benefits
By centralizing workflows, we can develop and deploy features once, rather than duplicating effort across multiple systems, delivering consistent benefits across the entire group. This streamlines internal investment and speeds up our time-to-market when delivering new features. Today, MediaMesh processes more than 2.7 million assets annually, equating to more than 10 million minutes of content, and manages around $2 billion worth of media across our ecosystem.

As we continue to evolve MediaMesh, we’re exploring new ways to enrich content, streamline compliance, and personalize viewer experiences across markets. The platform’s modular design ensures we can adapt quickly, whether it’s integrating new services, responding to regulatory changes or supporting future product launches. MediaMesh has laid the foundation for a more agile, scalable and collaborative future at Sky, and we’re excited to build on this momentum to shape next-generation content processing.

More information is available at www.telestream.net.

LOS ANGELES—I’m the super­vising editor for NBC’s “The Voice,” which is produced by MGM Television and recorded on the Universal Studios lot. I was the first editor hired on the show 15 years ago, and I’ve been on every episode since—that’s 700 episodes and nearly 1,100 hours of broadcast programming over the last 15 years.

We use Avid as our editing solution. The major advantage of using Avid is we start and finish everything in Avid. From offline to final online to color, everything is done inside of that.

Right now, we have about 35 editors, including about eight to 10 assistant editors. I think another dozen producers and story producers are also all accessing the media, all able to see everything, and they’re all remote. And I don’t mean we have some in Burbank and some in L.A. We have people in North Carolina; we have people in Virginia. We’ve had people in Maine and Japan; we’ve had people all over the world working on our show.

A Unified Solution
Having one, unified program that handles all of that has been absolutely beneficial and the cornerstone of our being on the air. I don’t think there’s any other production that hits the Avid hardware and software nearly as hard as we do.

I’m on Media Composer with the Symphony option and so are two of my online editors. The reason for that is we start and finish everything on “The Voice” inside of Avid, including color, final online and output of the master.

We use a lot of image stabilization. Those save our show because it’s a huge concert, and those cameras jiggle, and there’s nothing worse than seeing your artist or your coach jiggling around. I’d say easily between 600 to 900 stabilizations will be done in a two-hour episode.

We also use the “Animatte” effect in Media Composer for multiple reasons. We don’t like to break the fourth wall by showing camera people running through the audience, so we use that to duplicate audience members to hide cameras. We want viewers to be engaged in the performance, and if you see some guy running across the stage with a camera, that kind of pulls you out of it. Avid gives us the proper tools to maintain our illusion, to maintain the moment, without having to go to an external program.

Creating a Uniform Feel
Every episode of “The Voice” is a challenge because of the nature of the show. In an average two-hour episode, we introduce 13 to 15 new “characters,” if you will. Each story needs to have a life of its own, but we have to have some type of uniform feel to the show so when you turn it on, you recognize “The Voice” for what it is.

Our editors are constantly striving to give enough individuality to each of the story pods to showcase each artist individually, as well as maintain a high level of editorial status and make sure that editors are also as creative as possible, but without going completely astray.

We know our audience has faith in what we do and what we say about our show is real. When the first note comes out of an artist on stage—with the coaches’ backs to them in their chairs—that is the first time coaches hear them or see them when they turn. The audience sees our artists in their stories beforehand, but the coaches don’t get any of that information. It is legitimate; that’s the first note that the coaches ever hear. ●

More information is available at www.avid.com.

ORLANDO, Fla.—I started my first TV job in 1985 in the Orlando market at WESH-TV, loading 2-inch carts into an ACR25 for commercial playout and news playback on ¾-inch tape. At the same time, Florical Systems released its first product, TimeShifter. Since then, I moved on to Betacart, live shot acquisition and master control while Florical stepped up the technology with ShowTimer and AirBoss.

Forty years later, we’re both still here—my employer, Hearst Television, which acquired WESH in 1998, operates 35 stations nationwide. Every day, we manage the flow of syndicated shows, network feeds, commercials and promos that need to reach the air without fail.

My current role is to make sure that content is prepared, validated and delivered to our stations in a way that is both reliable and efficient. Ingest and media asset management sit at the center of this process, and over the past two years, we’ve transformed how we handle them with Florical.

The Deployment
We began rolling out Florical’s ingest and asset management module in 2024 with the goal of creating a stronger foundation for how content enters our ecosystem—whether that content is coming in from distributors, agencies or internal production teams. By putting ingest and asset management in place first, we were able to establish group-wide consistency in how files are received, cataloged and validated.

Earlier this year, we completed the next phase of that transition, moving our stations onto Florical’s AirBoss automation for playout. Having the ingest and asset-management tools already in place made that transition much smoother, because the content feeding automation was already standardized and predictable.

Stephanie Sobiech, our content coordinator, is on the front line every day, handling program and promo distribution and working directly with incoming feeds from Pathfire, PitchBlue, Extreme Reach, OTSM and our networks. With Florical, she no longer has to manually track whether a file is complete or in the right format; the system validates incoming content automatically and flags any problems before they reach the air chain. That has freed her to focus on higher-level coordination instead of chasing technical errors.

Commercials and syndicated programming represent another critical part of our workflow, and Florical has helped us bring real efficiency to that process. At Hearst, we operate on a “touch-once, distribute-to-many” model.

A single program or commercial may need to be delivered to 25 stations, and Florical’s workflows allow us to handle that with economies of scale. The content is ingested and validated once, then mapped and distributed to all the stations that need it. Our dedicated commercial preparation and approval team depends on these workflows every day to ensure spots and shows are delivered consistently group-wide. Instead of repeating the same steps, they can focus on confirming the content is correct and ready, knowing the distribution piece is handled efficiently.

The benefits extend to housekeeping, as well. Because the system manages distribution centrally, we can avoid duplication and unnecessary storage at the station level. At the same time, archived content remains accessible through AWS, so if a station needs to pull material back, it can be retrieved quickly without adding complexity to the local workflow.

Error Reduction
Since completing the rollout, the biggest change I’ve seen is consistency across the group. Whether it’s Stephanie managing syndicated feeds, the commercial team approving spots or operators checking final playlists, everyone is working under the same ingest and distribution standards. We’ve reduced manual errors, shortened turnaround times and freed people to spend more energy on coordination and quality control rather than on chasing missing files.

Looking forward, the metadata foundation we’ve built with Florical puts us in a strong position for the next phase of automation. AI-assisted workflows that can reconcile traffic logs, detect anomalies, and even self-correct ingest issues will depend on having robust and consistent metadata. For us, that future starts with the reliability we’ve already gained from
Florical’s ingest and asset-management tools.

More information is available at www.florical.com.

SPRINGFIELD, Ore.—In 2007, I began filming Mark Warmer restoring an Mopar Muscle Car and the “Graveyard Carz” series began. Shortly thereafter, Warmer and I co-founded production company The Division, focusing on reality television, and today “Graveyard Carz,” a reality show chronicling the restoration of Mopar Muscle Cars that are often deemed beyond repair, is the longest-running series on MotorTrend’s linear network.

Over the years we’ve learned a lot, particularly when it comes to streamlining workflows and increasing efficiency. We’re a small crew, handling virtually everything in-house: shooting, editing, mixing, color correction, producing, mastering, delivering and social media. (I even do voiceover for the show.)

Better Collaboration
Previously, our post workflow was hampered by the fact that any last-minute edits involved changing multiple projects and tracking multiple changes across multiple versions. In moving to DaVinci Resolve Studio, I was most excited by team collaboration via Blackmagic Cloud. My hope was that I could color-correct while my fellow executive producer, Jeffrey Osborns, could mix—in a proper DAW [digital audio workstation], like DaVinci Resolve’s Fairlight. Even more, I hoped that our talented editor and animator Nick DeAngelo would be able to add b-roll—all simultaneously. We still have some details to iron out, but overall, I’m very pleased with the improvements to our workflow.

While the move to DaVinci Resolve Studio and Blackmagic Cloud was an essential step forward, I thought why not streamline further by bringing editing into production (vs. just post) for larger, multicam shoots with an ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISO switcher?

I knew the ATEM ISO model shined when used with DaVinci Resolve for postproduction, so why not direct and capture episodic shoots in a live production style, with pre-edited segments enhancing efficiency, while maintaining the flexibility to further edit in post?

For these shoots, we record onto the local hard drive, saving the .DRP file (i.e., a DaVinci Resolve Project file) along with it. This enables us to switch cameras and direct the shoot in a “live” style while maintaining the flexibility to edit afterwards. The ability to edit with proxies and then switch to Blackmagic RAW at the push of a button for final grading is unique. This can be a fast and appealing workflow if you don’t mind working with multiple cameras in the sync bin.

Pre-Editing Segments
Now, we can pre-edit larger segments while making sure we have coverage of the action. We use headsets to communicate during the shoot, with the ATEM operator informing the crew which camera is being used or how to adjust a shot. While this live directing approach is something we’ve done without a switcher, it’s a terrible waste of resources when it’s so easy to have someone simply push buttons and edit the segment live. It gives the editor a huge leg up when they have a large segment.

Additionally, it’s much more pleasant for a producer to watch something that appears to be edited. It’s also possible to mix cameras in this workflow, and even to process the resulting .DRP in such a way as to produce a classic multicam clip, if that workflow is more appealing.

As an independent production company, we have leveraged social media for promotion from the very beginning—so using the ATEM for multicam live streams is also exceptionally valuable to us. We’ve used it to live stream on social media platforms, and I am confident we will continue to do so.

For more information, contact Blackmagic Design at
408-954-0500 or visit www.blackmagicdesign.com.

WASHINGTON—When I started Broadcast Management Group, our goal was simple: to make high-end broadcast production accessible anywhere, without compromise. Over the past few years, that vision has evolved into something much bigger: a fully connected, cloud-enabled production ecosystem that supports everything from major network shows to global corporate communications. At the heart of it all is Grass Valley’s AMPP ecosystem, which powers every aspect of our operation.

Our new network operations center, aka the “BMG Cloud Control Center” in Washington, D.C., represents a complete rethinking of how we deliver media services. It’s not just a facility; it’s our private cloud, where all of our production, playout and media asset management (MAM) systems live. Grass Valley’s AMPP and Framelight X are at the core of that infrastructure, providing the flexibility, scalability and reliability that today’s broadcast clients demand.

Unified Operations
Inside the NOC, our Grass Valley K-Frame switchers anchor the control rooms, and every one of our mobile trucks uses Grass Valley LDX cameras for live capture. We’ve also built a centralized video shading room powered by GV Creative Grading, which means our engineers in D.C. can shade cameras anywhere in the country. It’s an incredibly powerful way to unify our operations and deliver consistent quality across every production.

When people talk about cloud production, they often think of lightweight tools or “good enough” solutions. That’s not what we do; we’re handling Tier 1, broadcast-level productions that demand reliability, redundancy and performance. AMPP gives us that—a virtualized platform that combines the horsepower of traditional infrastructure with the agility of the cloud. It’s the operational heartbeat of our entire company.

We run two main business lines: live production and managed broadcast services. On the live side, we package major news, sports and entertainment events for networks nationwide. On the managed services side, we design, build and operate facilities for clients—everything from control rooms and studios to podcast and streaming setups. What ties all of it together is our AMPP-powered private cloud. Whether a client wants a fully local setup, hybrid workflow or completely remote operation, we can spin it up instantly through AMPP.

A great example of this in action is our work with UBS Financial. They were consolidating offices in New York and wanted a new studio and control room, but without the overhead of maintaining all their own backend infrastructure. We rebuilt their systems from the ground up and connected everything directly into our NOC. Their editing workstations, playout channels, and storage all reside in D.C., powered by Grass Valley AMPP and Framelight X. Their editors log in remotely and can cut files in real time, even while shows are on air and more video is being recorded.

That’s a massive leap from where they were, relying on portable drives to store nearly 30 terabytes of content a year. Now, every asset is searchable, secure and immediately accessible, not just in New York but potentially across UBS’s global offices. That’s what the future of live production looks like: Instantaneous, global and flexible.

The Future of Live
We’re applying the same model for VPM, a PBS affiliate in Virginia, by building an entire broadcast facility, all Grass Valley cameras and AMPP Asset management.

Grass Valley has been an exceptional partner in this journey. Their technology gives us the backbone to support enterprise-grade operations while scaling effortlessly for creative demands. Together, we’re proving that cloud production doesn’t mean compromise, it means opportunity. With AMPP and Framelight X, we can deliver broadcast-quality production from anywhere, for anyone, at any scale. And that’s exactly where the future is headed.

More information is available at www.grassvalley.com.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —Building audience loyalty is the ultimate goal for storytellers around the world. In an age with never-ending content, how can you guarantee audiences will consistently turn to you?

As Africa’s leading entertainment platform, we understand that challenge well. It’s beyond owning the rights to the right content; it’s also about knowing how to distribute, archive and leverage it well.

MultiChoice South Africa offers entertainment in all its forms: from SuperSport, Africa’s premier sports broadcaster, to DStv, a video entertainment company, and GOtv, a digital terrestrial television platform known for its affordability.

Delivering engaging stories across all platforms is no small feat. Knowing our content is enjoyed by over 23.5 million households in 50 markets across sub-Saharan Africa, we understand our duty to our audience.

Managing 24/7 Media
For our extensive media portfolio, receiving live and file-delivered content requires a system capable of prioritizing and distributing that content, at scale, in a 24/7 operation. This is why we count on Viz One, Vizrt’s enterprise media asset management (MAM) system, to strengthen both the live content distribution and storage management.

MultiChoice uses Viz One to produce, acquire and package media for sports and entertainment for over 200 channels broadcast across the African continent. In essence, Viz One catalogs MultiChoice’s vast media portfolio and makes it available to our users. They can search across asset and timeline level metadata captured from every item in the system to preview material and create shot selections, quickly finding the right piece of media in the expansive archive in a matter of minutes.

The MAM system makes content available for editing and dubbing workflows, regardless of whether it is currently importing or sits within our ever-growing archive, which currently stands at over 1.5 million hours of HD content.

This means that the assets captured for top-tier sports—including football, cricket, rugby, motor racing— as well as any other program and commercial material, are properly stored and readily available. Then, our MAM team creates the highlights, program versions and stage media for playout every day of the week.

In 2010, the Media Asset Management Engineering and Support team was created at MultiChoice, and by 2015, we had more than doubled in personnel. I’m responsible for managing the full MAM system and engineering support team, which means coordinating between multiple teams, including the MultiChoice Operations and other engineering teams, for road mapping the workflows and any process enhancements required.

For the last 14 years, we have grown the MAM System from a small IBM Tivoli Storage Management digital tape storage with 800 terabytes of data—managing and transferring commercial content only and the Ardome MAM System—to an IBM Tivoli Storage Management digital tape storage with more than 72 petabytes of data. This was replicated at our DR site, managing all content processing of the entire content broadcast on MultiChoice and SuperSport linear and digital channels.

It’s paramount for the efficiency of all MultiChoice platforms and programs that we use our digital tape storage as efficiently as possible.

Supporting Creatives
It’s undeniable the potential the creative industry has across Africa. Being responsible for researching and helping implement new technologies that streamline our platforms and processes, I know well how technology can help ease the creative process.

Because we have the trust of millions of households across the continent, we have taken this rich revenue of the attention economy to amplify African stories, investing back in the talent of our audiences. From supporting M-Net’s channels, which create original productions of authentic stories, to enterprise development such as MultiChoice’s Innovation Fund and Africa Accelerator, we’re committed to elevating African talent.

By leveraging our unique platform, we enrich a broad ecosystem of consumer services for creatives across Africa—all underpinned by scalable technology. As we grow, so do the stories we share and keep.

More information is available at vizrt.com.

LOS ANGELES—Xytech Systems, a provider of media resource management software, has announced a merger with Fabric, a developer of media supply chain and metadata management solutions. The name of the new company will be announced at a later date and will be led by Fabric CEO, Rob Delf. Xytech’s current CEO, John O’Connor will become Chief Operating Officer.

The two companies are targeting the expanding market for data-based media resource management and supply chain-based media production with Xytech known for its comprehensive media resource management solutions including asset management, localization, formatting, packaging and transmission services and Fabric’s metadata and supply chain management tools.

By integrating their technologies and expertise, the new entity “will deliver innovation and efficiencies to media organizations in producing, managing, and distributing their content,” the company said.

“To me, that is a really big opportunity to move the needle forward and be more technology-focused so the architects of the supply chains are saying Xytech will work for us for the future, while at the same time preserving this very specific functionality that the industry’s relied on for 30 years,” Delf told TV Tech sister brand TVBEurope. “That’s the purpose of the merger.”

The two companies expect the merger to deliver substantial customer value by reducing time spent on media management tasks. The combined solution will feature greater automation and data handling, allowing organizations to quickly access and manage their data and resources with minimal manual intervention. This efficiency translates into faster decision-making and a more agile response to market demands, according to the company.

“Fabric’s award-winning media supply chain and metadata management solutions complement Xytech Systems’ powerful resource management tools perfectly,” said John O’Connor, CEO of Xytech Systems. “Together, we’ll provide our customers with powerful tools that simplify their workflows and accelerate their business processes.”

Private equity firm Banneker Partners, which specializes in investing in resource management and supply chain management tools, acquired Xytech in 2021.

“We are excited about the transformative merger between Xytech and Fabric, a partnership poised to redefine the standards in media resource and data management,” said Kenneth Frank, Partner at Banneker Partners. “By uniting their strengths, we are merging mission-critical technologies with the industry’s leading management team to pave the way for the innovation that Xytech and Fabric customers need for the future. This isn’t just about combining companies; it’s about creating an exceptional, data-driven, and future-focused media and entertainment platform.”

PARIS & DENVER—Dalet and Veritone, Inc. have announced a technology partnership that integrates the Dalet Flex media workflow ecosystem with Veritone’s AI-powered Digital Media Hub (“DMH”).  

The integration enables a seamless workflow from content creation through production, curation, packaging and distribution for media, sports and entertainment customers to monetize their digital media archives, the companies said. 

A demonstration of the integration will be available at the upcoming NAB Show from April 14 to 17 at Veritone’s booth (W1642) and Dalet’s booth (W1713).

“With content consumption being at an all-time high and media-rich organizations seeking new ways to bring in additional revenue streams, monetization of media archives and assets is key,” states Carl Farrell, CEO and Board Member of Dalet. “The combined power of Dalet and Veritone enables customers to overhaul their monetization initiatives, exposing and licensing their assets quickly, securely and with the highest level of control.”

The Dalet and Veritone referral partnership enables media and entertainment companies to maximize the return on investment of their content assets to generate new revenue streams. The secure, scalable and robust solution enables media-centric organizations to automatically deliver content to partners while remaining in control of their content catalog.

“Veritone’s AI-enabled technology has long been the tool of choice for some of the world’s most recognized brands because of its ability to more efficiently and effectively organize, manage and monetize content,” said Sean King, senior vice president at Veritone. “Veritone and Dalet share a commitment to unlocking the true potential of digital content and we’re pleased to offer the content monetization capabilities of DMH to complete Dalet’s end-to-end platform and provide endless revenue opportunities to their customer base.”

Key features include:

• A cloud-native ecosystem to produce, manage, distribute, transact and monetize digital media content and archives.
• Uniquely advanced rich metadata management, to drive content catalog exposure and automated publishing based on business rules.
• The ability to easily implement branded digital marketplaces, offering a familiar content shopping experience for B2B clients, partners and affiliates.
• Customizable B2B portals, flexible monetization business models and granular searches based on extensive metadata, including timecodes. 
• A highly efficient secure solution with a common vision, long-term shared roadmap, and outstanding customer service. 

 Learn more at www.dalet.com and Veritone.com.  

We are at the dawn of the "composable enterprise” age, an era that will see business teams leverage existing digital capabilities to create new products and services without starting from scratch every time. A composable approach increases agility in digital transformation, relieves pressure on the IT team and frees up time for innovation.

Composability incorporates the basic principle of modularity; systems should be built from cohesive and loosely coupled components (modules). This means that a system will consist of different components with well-defined functionality which are interrelated and work together efficiently.

Media business composability is the mindset, technologies and set of operational capabilities that enable Media & Entertainment (M&E) organizations to innovate and adapt quickly to changing business needs. It’s based on applying modularity to M&E businesses to achieve the scale and pace required by business ambition. According to Gartner*, the idea of composable digital business operates on four basic principles: 

• More speed through discovery: Ability to discover and understand design opportunities to guide, track and secure change
• Greater agility through modularity: Partitioning a domain into managed components to scale and control change
• Better leadership through orchestration: Prescribing and negotiating interactions between components to enable recompositing and forming processes
• Resilience through autonomy: Minimizing dependence of components from each other to maintain integrity of change

Agility and flexibility are quickly becoming the two pillars of digital transformation success, allowing modular business capabilities to be assembled and combined. Packaged Business Capabilities (PBC) are software and service components that represent a well-defined business capability, functionally recognizable as such by a business user and reusable in the design of custom assembled products, applications, and services. 

Today's user interface technology, coupled with the composability of PBCs, enhances the application experience through simple plug-and-play actions. It is the codeless (NoCode) approach to software development, allowing applications to be created without any prior knowledge of traditional programming languages. Citizen developers, or less experienced programmers, can build applications by assembling PBCs and using graphical workflow designers.

If we can quickly create business-ready applications and solutions, then we can design and adapt new media services on demand. Media services can be simply defined as modular units which concentrate on a single business functionality. Modular media services can be easily reused in various contexts and can also be composed to satisfy new requirements. On the other hand, modularity in media services prevents the propagation of changes to other services and thus simplifies maintenance of service-oriented systems. 

The Future of MAMs
Composable digital business means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks. To guarantee M&E business continuity, it is necessary to have a strategy to integrate legacy media systems, such as CMS, DAM and MAM. 

The question immediately arises: Can a monolithic application be a PBC? The answer is YES, if the application offers an API organized into blocks of functionality. Each block would correspond to a different PBC, easily identifiable by a business user. It must be understood that this is a temporary solution to facilitate the digital transition to a composable architecture of the organization.

Legacy MAMs offer a level of automation restricted to the set of third-party systems that have been integrated point-to-point over the years. Today, many more functions are required and there are a multitude of media applications, as well as other IT products, to process complex workloads and create new media services, both in the cloud and on premises. In addition, the MAM vendor is responsible for keeping the 3rd party integrations updated to the latest versions in its orchestrator. The reality is that classic MAM orchestrators have become insufficient and can potentially hold back the digital transformation of M&E organizations. CMS and DAM systems are in a similar situation.

If we decouple the orchestration, automation and workflow design services from the MAM, moving them to an application and media systems integration platform, then we will achieve a more open and agile architecture for the M&E organization’s digital ecosystem. Moreover, product vendors (applications, media systems) are responsible for integrating with the platform and keeping it updated so that customers can choose them. The MAM is freed from the integrations and workflow design, which it delegates to the platform, and will be integrated as another application. 

In this scenario, the new generation of MAMs will be focused on organization, documentation, review, collaboration, order generation and asset access traceability. It’s expected that the new generation of MAMs will be based on microservices, focused on asset management and integrated with the media integration platform, which guarantees interoperability and compatibility with the rest of the applications and systems of the M&E organization.

Agile Media Service Platform
Process automation has always been a key pillar of digital transformation initiatives, automating, orchestrating, and monitoring end-to-end business processes to create an efficient and scalable solution, however this remains a challenge for businesses. Many M&E organizations are adopting tactical automation strategies that focus on automating specific tasks aimed at solving specific problems:

• Business-driven automation: Automation efforts within companies are increasingly business-oriented rather than IT-oriented.
• Composability: Process automation based on reusable PBCs.

M&E organizations demand flexibility and agility to create new services by adding and/or replacing applications and systems from multiple vendors. Service modularity is thus a key concept for a service-oriented perspective of the enterprise. The future of flexibly designed media services lies in an agile media service platform, easily reconfigurable by self-sufficient customers, simplifying the addition of new capabilities and using reusable components:

• Identify automation opportunities
• Intuitively map/model business processes using PBCs
• Rapidly implement service-specific automated workflows

Users want seamless, effortless integrations and developers want to spend less time on repetitive software programming tasks and integration maintenance. The days of the traditional, complex monolithic content management systems, which generate huge dependence on software vendors to provide the agility required to integrate new applications within the digital ecosystem, are over.

The natural alternative to legacy systems is an application and system integration platform that provides the flexibility and elasticity necessary for the creation of new services in an agile and efficient manner. Using PBCs, which abstract the complexity of all the underlying technology, the customer can choose the components and systems they need to integrate to create their network media service supply chain.

Democratizing innovation really means unlocking the basic tools and creating PBCs for people who are going to innovate on their own. In fact, a composable architecture built with PBCs makes it easy for business users to participate in the design and implementation of new features and services.

Innovation is inhibited not by legacy systems but by a legacy mindset. Ensuring the future competitiveness of the M&E industry will require it to be more efficient, predictable, sustainable and resilient. This implies a change in mindset to overcome existing industry legacy systems and silo-thinking. Improved collaboration and innovation are crucial to achieving this.

Service orchestration and automation platforms are key to delivering customer-centric agility and the rapid move toward a composable media business. To accelerate digital transformation, improve customer experience, create new services, automate processes and optimize costs, we propose an agile and composable media service platform, which will pave the way toward future-proof and continuous innovation.

SYDNEY—Silver Trak Digital has launched version 3.0 of its cloud-based Media Room asset management solution with a host of new features. 

The features include a fully elastic Aspera cloud service allowing users to collect and distribute files at up to 3Gbs, a frame accurate player, clipping, transcoding and frame rate conversions, the company reports. 

It also boasts per-recipient dynamic watermarking, IP restrictions and 2FA for increased security. There’s full studio grade DRM and enhanced artwork capabilities for electronic screener campaigns as well as AI/ML, speech to text, face and logo recognition, enhanced audio handling and a new Media Room Media Centre for controlled sharing of content.

“Media Room 3.0 is the culmination of nearly a decade’s development,” explained Silver Trak Digital COO Christian Christiansen. 

“Media Room 3.0 sets a new high bar as a result of working in such close partnership with the broadcast, news, sports, distribution, production and post production industries over the past ten years,” he added. 

An example of the effectiveness of Media Room 3.0 comes in the distribution of content, which gets a major boost when it is aggregated and collected through Media Room, the company said. 

The content is easily uploaded by third party producers or post production facilities into Media Room which in turn also provides a secure sharing environment for rushes. Media Room then facilitates the storage and management of hundreds of thousands of files in every imaginable format and then delivers them to clients around the world via a simple, straightforward and efficient Media Room-generated delivery.

Christiansen noted that one of the major benefits that comes with Media Room is the overall business of Silver Trak Digital itself. Any client who uses Media Room has easy access to the many services Silver Trak Digital offers such as “eyes on” QC, content preparation and packaging for over 100 OTT, SVOD and AVOD platforms, DCP creation and distribution and much more.

“Media Room benefits all of our clients by making them more efficient, more mobile and agile,” Christiansen concluded. “As such Media Room 3.0 is a tremendous asset to the industry in Australia as it enables cost effective access to digital services so they are no longer cost prohibitive and challenging.”

Remember when we were told we would stop using paper because of computers? When we’d all have flying cars? And how technology in broadcast and media was supposed to make things easier? It seems like none of these promises of the future—made in the past—have come true. Why?

I won’t dive into paper usage or flying cars (I’ll settle today for a good electric car), but media management really should be easier. So why isn’t it?

Is it that we now deal with an ever-increasing amount of media? Is it that today’s media includes a ton of metadata or not enough? Is it that we now have so many formats? The answer is a resounding “yes” to all of these questions… and others.

IT’S A MESS

The majority of today’s “modern” media environments are often inefficient and disorganized, costing you time, money and peace of mind. Assets aren’t properly organized and tracked, probably taking up space on expensive near-line storage (or even sitting in a file room somewhere) and causing delays in production.

Is your facility one where archives are spread across tape and cloud, and locating the files you need is time consuming and cost prohibitive, especially with cloud egress fees when you move the wrong file? At times, do you have so many assets coming in that you can often miss the details your teams need in order to create better content? Are workflows spread across systems that can’t communicate?

That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

So, what should your media world look like? That’s a question worth answering.

There’s a saying when it comes to media—I don’t know who said it first, but they were right: “Your media is useless if you can’t find what you’re looking for.” And you’ve got more and more media every day.

MAM—media asset management—is supposed to make all your painful media issues disappear. But that hasn’t been the case. So, let’s design a MAM system that deals with all the pain points of handling media today, tomorrow and into the future.

POINTS TO PONDER

Here are some guidelines. You can think of it as a shopping list, or a comparison to what you have today or even a wish list.

Let’s start with the media itself. You need to be able to handle multiple resolutions (from proxy to 4K and potentially higher), as well as a multitude of file wrappers. Whether you convert to an in-house file format is a choice each facility will need to make on their own, the pros and cons are too exhaustive for this article. But what do you do with all that media? Where should it live?

While you might think that the answer depends on if your organization is in one or multiple locations, that’s really not the case. If assets are potential revenue drivers, the safest place is in the cloud, where backups exist. In that way, you can take advantage of cloud-based workflows to better unify and provide the flexibility to work from anywhere, and several other advancements that the MAM can take advantage of, like having a single place to search for everything.

Metadata should be easy to create, from simple names, dates, locations and topics all the way up to entire transcripts, where AI can play a massive role. And that leads us directly into storage that is searchable, efficient and flexible; with a variety of ways to search. If you’re looking for that one piece of footage among thousands (or millions), you need to be able to find it fast. And not everyone is great at coming up with search terms (how many times have you had to reword a Google search to find what you were looking for?). That’s a place for more AI.

Here’s an example: Let’s say that you needed to find every instance of when every senator said a specific phrase, going back to 2016. That would be an insane search, were it not for the transcript included with the metadata. Too many results; limit by party affiliation or timeframe. Not enough; expand the timeframe.

Have the ability to not only archive media—(which is only half of the equation)—but to be able to restore that media intelligently.

Make sure your MAM plays nice with your other systems and workflows. You want a clean process, not roadblocks. It may be hard to believe, but some operations still rely on sneakernet.

Have the right creative tools that seamlessly interface with your MAM so that producers, directors and editors don’t have to think about the process, they only have to think about being creative.

I’ve mentioned AI above, and it deserves an explanation. Today, while AI may seem like something we’re still waiting for (unless you’re Google or Amazon), it’s perfectly suited to work in a MAM. AI is simply any technique that enables a computer to do a rules-based task just as a human would. Add some AI machine learning and AI gets better at doing that task. Add deep learning to machine learning and speech and image recognition becomes commonplace for AI algorithms.

That’s where a MAM should be today. To paraphrase from an old 1970’s TV show: MAM should be better than it was before. Better. Stronger. Faster. But it shouldn’t cost six million dollars.

Namdev Lisman is executive vice president of Primestream.

Boston, MA, USA — May 20, 2019—EditShare, a technology leader in intelligent scale-out storage, Automated Quality Control (AQC), editing and media management solutions, today announced it has taken on a majority investment from private equity firm ParkerGale Capital (ParkerGale). Focused on profitable founder-owned technology companies, ParkerGale’s carefully curated portfolio is a mix of software-oriented businesses that are supported by the firm’s financial investment and in-house operating team whose mission is to help portfolio businesses rapidly scale and bring to market new innovative products and services. EditShare founders, Andy Liebman and Tara Montford, will continue to lead EditShare innovation and customer success and remain the company’s largest individual shareholders. Industry veteran, Conrad Clemson, will join the leadership team as EditShare CEO.

“We have created a company that not only delivers products and solutions that appeal to the media production market, as shown by our returning customers, but also to a company such as ParkerGale, which has had the insight to see how valuable EditShare has become. ParkerGale’s deep-seated history of helping profitable companies like ours achieve their next stage growth goals will enable our team to expand and develop the EditShare product range into even better solutions for our customers in the future,” comments Tara Montford, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President Business Development, EditShare. “EditShare has always been extremely customer-focused and without our customers’ engagement, we would not be where we are today. Riding the momentum of double-digit growth over the last three years combined with the investment by ParkerGale, we will have the resources at hand to accelerate all our plans and deliver on our innovative roadmap while retaining that personal touchpoint with our customers.”

Deployed at thousands of facilities around the world, EditShare solutions are used to power the creation of many of today’s blockbuster feature films, captivating TV series, documentaries, sports programs, live events, educational programs, corporate communications and more. Its ultra-scalable distributed media management platform enables businesses of all sizes to drive media production workflows with greater ease. EditShare’s secure collaboration environment connects users to content and production tools, allowing businesses to hire the talent they require, anywhere in the world.

“We are proud to offer industry-leading solutions that enable our customers to respond to market demands with greater efficiency and ultimately take advantage of new opportunities to grow their businesses,” comments Andy Liebman, EditShare Co-Founder and newly appointed Chief Strategy Officer. “Our incredibly talented team is dialed into our customers’ needs and next steps. They are developing and delivering innovative solutions that facilitate collaboration and efficiency such as the EditShare Flow hybrid media management platform that can cut production time by as much as 50% and EFS Shared Storage Auditing, an important content security capability that helps mitigate content theft. Our innovations span all aspects of media production from an individual storyteller who is using the Emmy-award winning Lightworks to enterprise broadcasters automating productions with EditShare’s metadata-driven workflow solutions. With ParkerGale’s infusion of capital, EditShare will be able to execute much faster on the many more incredible product and workflow ideas we have for all of our customers.”

Leading the company through this next stage of growth is EditShare’s new CEO, Conrad Clemson, who recently led Cisco’s Video, Mobility, and Cloud organizations. “Andy founded EditShare in 2003 when he needed a more flexible and affordable solution for media sharing. His invention of high-performance Network Attached Storage for editing transformed the industry in a way others weren’t imagining at that time," comments Clemson. "EditShare’s history of leading the industry with groundbreaking innovations and solving customer problems before they even recognize them goes deep, and with this investment, the EditShare team will be even better positioned to continue to deliver transformative solutions to an industry that is in greater demand for it now more than ever.”

Devin Mathews, Founding Partner at ParkerGale concludes on the new partnership and expanded resources, “We couldn’t be more excited to embark on this partnership with the EditShare team. In our research, we were particularly impressed by just how much customers love the EditShare suite of products - a testament to the tremendous foundation this company has built.”

To learn more about the expanded EditShare leadership team and its solutions for media & entertainment production, please visit https://www.editshare.com/management

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 groundbreaking products improve efficiency and workflow collaboration every step of the way. They include video capture and playout servers, high-performance EFS central shared storage, AQC, archiving and backup software, media asset management, and Lightworks – the world’s first three-platform (Windows/OS X/Linux) professional non-linear video editing application.

©2019 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare® is a registered trademark of EditShare.

Press Contact

Alex Molina

Zazil Media Group

(e) alex@zazilmediagroup.com

(p) +1 (617) 834-9600

###

Paris, France – February 27, 2019 – Dalet, a leading provider of solutions and services for media organizations and content professionals, today announced that Israeli national radio network Galei Tsahal (Galatz) is upgrading to the Dalet Galaxy five Media Asset Management (MAM) and Workflow Orchestration platform to enable workflows that better serve its audience with greater access to content across its digital channels and social networks. A leading music radio station that sets the tone and playlist for the country, Galatz is also known for its news and thematic programs featuring politicians, military leaders, and influential citizens. A Dalet customer since 2006, Galatz undertook the upgrade to enhance production and delivery of its music and news-related content through social media networks, enhance its reporters’ abilities to file stories from the field using Dalet On-the-Go, and use AI-powered speech-to-text algorithms to enable wider accessibility to its rich historical archives, which date back to its founding in 1950.

“The upgrade to Dalet Galaxy five is enabling us to build a new content value chain, better integrating our social media channels across our operations, and leveraging AI services to make our entire inventory more discoverable and better monetized,” states Izak Pasternak, head of the technical department, Galatz. “We are able to make this quantum leap forward with the confidence of a decade-long partnership that is embedded in collaboration and success.”

Amplifying audience engagement
With Dalet Galaxy five, Galatz will be able to make all content that is produced in the production system available to social media publishing with a click of a button. Social media content performance (views, likes, shares) will be analyzed by the broadcaster; that data will be used to make better-informed decisions as to what to provide audiences next, helping to deliver a more enjoyable experience to listeners. Because the system is fully integrated with social channels, Galatz will be able to easily tap into the newly indexed archives and distribute topical collections of historical content across social networks - something that they have not been able to do before. Izak explains, “In terms of social media, today there is no connection between the system that is broadcasting content and the social media channels we want to publish to. With more and more people consuming news and content through social networks, it’s imperative for us to move to an integrated platform that can help us engage with audiences on a whole new level. Dalet Galaxy five enables us to do just that.”

Reporting from the field
Connecting in-the-field reporters directly to the newsroom, Dalet On-the-Go lets journalists organize and submit comprehensive news packages from their mobile device. Users can record interviews, write stories, and assemble and upload packages to the Dalet Galaxy five content catalog for sharing across the station or sending direct to air.

AI opens the archives
With a vast amount of valuable historic information under its care, Galatz wanted to make its archives open to the public for the first time online. Leveraging Dalet Media Cortex, the new AI cloud service of Dalet Galaxy five, the network applied AI-driven, speech-to-text algorithms to all archived content, turning it into text that is both searchable and accessible via an online portal.

“Until now our content producers had to manually add metadata into the media asset management system, then an archivist would review it to make sure it was filled in properly,” explains Izak. “If our archives team wanted to find something, they had to remember how it might be catalogued and in which categories. Going back into the archive to transcribe it all manually would have been cost-prohibitive.” Izak continues, “Now, with Dalet Media Cortex everything is searchable since it’s processed through the speech-to-text engine. This saves us significant resource time and effort. And what’s more important, Israeli citizens can sit at home and enjoy the archive, simply by searching online. Dalet Media Cortex has made it extremely easy to search and find content from any point in time since 1950, which to a large degree, is the history of Israel itself.”

Dalet’s Johann Zemmour, general manager of Dalet EMEA and APAC concludes, “Dalet is proven time and time again as a trusted technical partner to help customers achieve successful business transformations. In this case for Galatz, Dalet’s forward-thinking development of AI tools within Dalet Media Cortex enables the network to expand the use of its archives by making an extremely large amount of content available and searchable to its citizens. That could not have been realistically achieved by any other means.” Zemmour concludes, “Galatz recognizes the importance of providing its audience with experiences on the platforms of their choice and worked closely with Dalet to deliver on that demand.”

About Dalet Digital Media Systems
Dalet solutions and services enable media organisations to create, manage and distribute content faster and more efficiently, fully maximising the value of assets. Based on an agile foundation, Dalet offers rich collaborative tools empowering end-to-end workflows for news, sports, program preparation, post-production, archives and enterprise content management, radio, education, governments and institutions.

Dalet platforms are scalable and modular. They offer targeted applications with key capabilities to address critical functions of small to large media operations - such as planning, workflow orchestration, ingest, cataloguing, editing, chat & notifications, transcoding, play out automation, multi-platform distribution and analytics.

Dalet solutions and services are used around the world at hundreds of content producers and distributors, including public broadcasters (BBC, CBC, France TV, RAI, RFI, Russia Today, RT Malaysia, SBS Australia, VOA), commercial networks and operators (Canal+, FOX, MBC Dubai, Mediacorp, Mediaset, Orange, Charter Spectrum, Warner Bros, Sirius XM Radio) and government organisations (UK Parliament, NATO, United Nations, Veterans Affairs, NASA).

Dalet is traded on the NYSE-EURONEXT stock exchange (Eurolist C): ISIN: FR0011026749, Bloomberg DLT:FP, Reuters: DALE.PA.

Dalet® is a registered trademark of Dalet Digital Media Systems. All other products and trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

For more information on Dalet, visit www.dalet.com.

Press Contact
Alex Molina
Zazil Media Group
(e) alex@zazilmediagroup.com
(p) +1 (617) 834-9600

####

Basingstoke, UK — Febuary 12, 2019 - EditShare a technology leader in intelligent scale-out storage, AQC and media management solutions, announced today that Raygun, located in the heart of Dublin, Ireland, has centered its creative media workflow around EditShare Flow media asset management, EFS shared storage, and archiving solutions. A stand-out in national commercial work, Raygun’s busy facility is known for its high-end visual effects and audio capabilities. To manage the growing complexity of working with 4K media files, Raygun architected a media foundation that featured several EditShare XStream EFS single node shared storage systems, ARK tape library, and Flow media asset management. Offering a centralized content repository with tools to collaborate, manage and automate the full content lifecycle from the moment it arrives in post to the tape archives, the new EditShare workflow connects the facility’s creative rooms which include Avid and Premiere edit suites; DaVinci Resolve colour grading suite; Autodesk Flame finishing suite and Avid Protools sound studios. Raygun co-founder Jess Felton comments on the immediate value of the investment, “The EditShare system has transformed how we share content between departments and is very much at the heartbeat of our facility. With the ever-increasing demand for 4k content and beyond, we were in need of an intelligent shared storage workflow which was bulletproof and scalable, a system all departments in our facility could connect to and work from with ease. We identified EditShare's EFS Scale-Out storage nodes as a perfect and affordable fit for Raygun, initially setting-up a 2-node system, with a plan to bolt on extra nodes as our workload grows.”

The EditShare single-node Xstream EFS enables small and emerging studios to migrate their workflow into a modern scale-out environment that can expand by simply adding a node, easily supporting business growth without sacrificing performance or reliability. “The beauty of an XStream EFS–based installation is that it can be configured with additional capability such as High Availability Metadata servers, dedicated Flow and Ark servers, workflow automation, QC solutions along with nearline disk and offline tape libraries to create a dynamic workflow infrastructure that adapts to the facility’s needs. This is important for fast-paced and fast-growing facilities like Raygun. The flexibility to scale on the fly without overinvesting in the infrastructure optimizes the overall investment in tools and technology without sacrificing on firepower or innovation,” states Tara Montford, Managing Director, EditShare. The fault-tolerant XStream EFS design ensures that there is no single point of failure with options for configuring for high availability workflows. Presented as a single namespace, XStream EFS eliminates administrative tasks such as balancing project workloads on multiple raids, luns, volumes or file systems. Completing the storage infrastructure, EditShare Ark seamlessly integrates with XStream EFS, providing a tiered storage flow that keeps archival content searchable and easily retrieved.

Providing a control layer across the storage and archives is EditShare Flow media asset management. Staff can log on from any laptop or workstation and browse content libraries, review work and automate tasks such as transcoding or file migration from online to offline storage. Felton elaborates on the benefit of having Flow. “Flow Browse is the real star here. It has really changed the way we use, search for and archive our assets. Knowing that everything is secure and catalogued really takes the sting out of bringing back long forgotten projects and sometimes obscure elements. It plays well with Avid and it's something I turn to every day.” Raygun plans to expand the media asset management configuration to include the web-based Airflow for remote workflows. Felton explains the value this will add to the facility services and efficiency, “Flow makes sharing projects and content easy, and allows all our creatives instant access to the material they need to complete each job. We're also excited to roll out the remote access features of Airflow to our clients and suppliers, allowing remote collaboration and secure delivery of dailies/rushes from anywhere in the world.”

For more information on EditShare XStream EFS, Ark archiving, and Flow media asset management and all other EditShare solutions, please visit www.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 groundbreaking products improve efficiency and workflow collaboration every step of the way. They include video capture and playout servers, high-performance EFS central shared storage, AQC, archiving and backup software, media asset management, and Lightworks – the world’s first three-platform (Windows/OS X/Linux) professional non-linear video editing application.

©2019 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare® is a registered trademark of EditShare.

Press Contact

Alex Molina

Zazil Media Group

(e) alex@zazilmediagroup.com

(p) +1 (617) 834-9600

Basingstoke, UK — December 6, 2018 - EditShare a technology leader in intelligent shared storage and media management solutions, today announced that The Liverpool Screen School has upgraded the existing media infrastructure to the latest EditShare XStream EFS storage platform as well as added EditShare Flow media asset management (MAM), AirFlow for remote access, and QScan automated quality assurance to support its Journalism, Media Production and Film Studies programs. Noted for their “theory and hands-on practice” approach to education, the school enjoys an internationally recognized reputation for their work as well as the strong links they have forged with companies across the creative and digital sector including the BBC, ITV, and Lime Pictures. “Our student experience spans a broad range of technical expertise,” states Darcy O’Bree, Technical Resource Manager, Liverpool Screen School. “The diversity of our courses requires us to teach a range of different technical methods for realizing the student's creative vision. The students do conventional film production. They do television production, including live and thematic style TV. They’re even getting into things like projection mapping, event visuals, color management, and content quality control (QC).” O’Bree adds, “With increasing student numbers, we were about to hit a wall with capacity in the existing system. Also, the way the system was originally set up five years ago, it wasn’t integrated with the university’s main network, which limited access.”

Putting out an industry-wide call for information, the Liverpool Screen School reviewed submissions for a range of media storage and management solutions on the market. Ensuring students had full accessibility to the creative tools was the number one priority for the new upgrade. O’Bree explains, “With this upgrade, we want to increase accessibility to our post-production tools in general. The students use a variety of different editing applications. We’ve got Avid Media Composer, Apple’s Final Cut Pro, and the full Adobe Creative Cloud suite, with different courses using different combinations of applications. And this year, we are introducing students to advanced colour grading via Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve. This is why we opted for EditShare.” Darcy goes on, “Any student or staff doing any form of post-production can store their projects on EditShare. And not only on campus, but off campus as well. These buildings are not open around the clock, but students are working all sorts of hours and complete access was paramount.”

QScan Expands Student Skill Set

Providing Liverpool Screen School student interns a real-world experience is Lime Pictures, the British production house for blockbusters such as Hollyoaks, The Only Way is Essex, Geordie Shore, and Free Rein. Lime Pictures’ Alistair McMath, who oversees the infrastructure for Lime Pictures post-production and is connected with the student interns, elaborates on the evolution of technology-based learning and the importance of understanding quality assurance workflows coming out of university. “When I was at university, it was all theory-based learning. It wasn’t massively technical and I very quickly realized when I started working in the industry that the technology that I had learned was obsolete. Today it is different. Institutions like Liverpool Screen School give students access to the same editing and storage systems you find in world-class facilities like Lime Pictures. And it's great to see that they are further expanding the exposure to include QC. With the various delivery standards, it’s a real asset to have this knowledge, even if it's minimal.” Alistair explains, “In recent years, QC has moved from being a task performed just before broadcast to a task that can be done at almost any point across production and post-production. Whilst it’s not the most glamorous side of TV, it is incredibly important for students coming out of school to have a framework of what QC is. They need to understand that there is QC for photosensitive epilepsy as well as all of the technical standards. They need to know what levels are legal and be familiar with QC terminologies such as audio true peaking and audio loudness. I realize that this can be technically challenging to master, but the fact that the Liverpool Screen students will have been exposed to QC systems and processes gives them a step up when entering the real world.”

For more information on EditShare solutions, please visit www.editshare.com or to read the full case study on Liverpool Screen School, please visit editshare.com/case-studies/cs-liverpool.

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. All other trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

Press Contact

Alex Molina
Zazil Media Group
(e) alex@zazilmediagroup.com
(p) +1 (978) 866 7354

Basingstoke, UK — October 25, 2018 - EditShare a technology leader in intelligent shared storage and media management solutions, today announced that The University of the of West England (UWE Bristol) has upgraded the existing infrastructure of its new Arts, Creative Industries and Education media programs facility to a modern, end-to-end, file-based workflow powered by EditShare Flow media asset management (MAM); a 256TB scale-out, high availability no single point of failure XStream EFS 450 shared storage solution for the Film/Animation department, and a 128TB single node XStream EFS 300 shared storage solution and GEEVs ingest and playout server for the university’s Broadcast Journalism program. The advanced, high-performance infrastructure features extensive automation and provides seamless integration with the university’s third-party non-linear editing and graphics systems as well as multi-platform distribution of student-created programs.

Dick Allen, UWE Bristol Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries & Education Technical Resource Manager, Digital Media & Broadcast, selected EditShare to create an immersive infrastructure that connected systems, content, students, and staff. Dick states the importance of having a Media Asset Management workflow, “Managing several programs and hundreds of broadcast and film students requires a detailed level of asset tracking as well as automation capabilities to have an efficient operation. Implementing a media asset management layer is key to optimizing the infrastructure, enhancing collaboration between students and staff, and giving our students a real-world media experience using modern tools.”

At the heart of the new UWE Bristol facility is the EditShare XStream EFS 450 and 300 scale-out storage platforms and Flow media asset management facilitating content access and sharing across the university’s production studio, two large photography studios, animation stop-motion and CGI studios, sound recording and Foley studios, colour grading studios and editing suites which are all connected to the EditShare XStream EFS. The university’s news broadcast studio, which also leverages the EditShare XStream EFS and Flow solutions, is equipped with GEEVS for multi-channel playout to TV and Internet channels. The EditShare powered infrastructure offers an integrated workflow that is student-optimized, providing hands-on experience that mimics real-world workflows that are tightly integrated with the program’s expansive course content.

“EditShare creates an immersive learning environment by connecting systems, content, students and staff,” explains Tara Montford, Managing Director, EditShare. “Flow, XStream EFS and Geevs form the core solution that assists students, staff and research teams to find, reuse and store media assets. It enables collaboration of teams with seamless integration of media systems and embedded tools to retrieve and archive media from a central location. With metadata tracking and asset indexing, staff and students can easily locate and re-use content, increasing the value of asset use.”

UWE Bristol leverages real-world content creation applications including Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Avid Media Composer, ProTools and Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve to give students an experience-based curriculum with an intelligent media management layer that brings efficiency to the university’s expansive program. Flow organizes the massive amount of content created and exchanged, acting as a control layer across the EditShare XStream EFS scale-out, high availability shared storage platforms, which are designed to support 4K, 8K, UHD and beyond with near infinite scalability on a no single point of failure architecture. Flow automates media ingest, transcoding, content searches, online to offline movement of media to ensure students are using the correct format and that their content is copied to the right media space.

In addition to providing the core infrastructure housing all UWE Bristol media program assets, the XStream EFS 450 and EFS 300 shared storage solutions provide advanced project sharing capabilities including Avid-style bin-locking, project-sharing and multi-user write access to media spaces for its Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid Media Composer editing systems. At UWE, student project collaboration is a must, making the EditShare XStream EFS project sharing feature a critical component. Student media and projects can be stored in the same Media Space, or in separate Spaces with files are owned by the members of the Media Space –including media files, media database files, project settings and bins –and any user with permission can modify or delete the files.

For more information on EditShare solutions, please visit www.editshare.com or to read the full case study on UWE Bristol, please visit www.editshare.com/case-studies/cs-uwe

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, AQC, 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.

Press Contacts

Alex Molina
Zazil Media Group
(e) alex@zazilmediagroup.com
(p) +1 (978) 866 7354

LOS ANGELES—Artificial Intelligence for media has progressed remarkably in one year’s time –not simply in R&D labs, but also in the minds of creative and technical media professionals, at least if the SMPTE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition is any measure.

Last year, the AI and machine learning in media was the subject of the day-long SMPTE Symposium—a forum devoted to emerging technologies, not the day-in-day-out realities of working in television and motion pictures. This year, however, AI was a major tech conference theme, a clear sign the technology is in daily use for media.

HERE AND NOW

Jason Perr, media workflow specialist, at Workflow Intelligence Nexus, summed up the state of AI in media applications from the get-go during his presentation Oct. 23, the first in the AI conference track at this year.

“When will AI be here?” Perr asked, rhetorically. “The answer is today.” The time is right to “filter out the noise of marketing speak” and find the right AI tools for specific media workflows. “If you’re not already using it [AI], in a lot of respects, you could be falling behind.”

Focusing on media asset management, Perr explained AI offers better accessibility and visibility across large libraries of stored digital content. “It can be used as a simple process to be able to extract metadata, whereas in the past people have known this to be something that can be very painful…,” he said.

AI is seen as having great potential for MAM applications because it can learn from an existing library and use that information to analyze new content added to the system.

What is required to take advantage of AI for asset management is an open MAM system with “a robust, well-documented, automatically updated API,” which will give users the ability to draw on an extensive lineup of AI tools for use across their sizable content libraries, he said.

AI tools for MAM applications can be built into the system itself, or they can be added from outside sources, said Perr. The former includes tools like facial recognition, automated metadata tagging and being able to search across transcriptions.

However, these built-in AI tools are just the tip of the iceberg, he said. Other tools that can be added perform functions such as phonetic searching, keyword spotting, voice recognition, transcriptions, object recognition and audio fingerprinting to identify speakers.

Not only do these AI tools for MAM make content more easy to search, they unlock the value of older content by helping organizations remember what’s been stored that may have otherwise faded from memory.

Getting AI to perform for a specific organization comes down to finding the right integration and customization partner. Not only should that consultant know AI but also understand the media enterprise’s workflow “inside and out,” he said.

Perr also advised his audience to test AI tools being considered in their specific organization’s environment before buying so they get the results they desire.

IN THE EDITING SUITE

Norman Hollyn, an editor and professor at the University of Southern California, focused his presentation on how AI tools can assist editors in editing suites.

One use is in the hyperlocalization of content, he said. Drawing on AI’s visual recognition capabilities it is possible to identify and replace objects in a scene for a specific audience. To illustrate his point, Hollyn showed how AI tools from a new company called RYFF could identify one of several wine glasses on a tray and perform a live replacement of it with a bottle of wine.

“This increases the ability to localize our content to replace labels on bottles for different sponsors or an Arabic version of a Coke bottle instead of English or Spanish,” he said.

Now that AI visual recognition is available at the high end, it won’t be long till the technology becomes available to those with much lower budgets and begin to be used on independent films and low-budget web series, he added.

Other AI tools are assisting editors today and will evolve to become more helpful in the future. Hollyn pointed to AI script analysis, which today is used for shot and scene identification as well as identifying what characters exist in a film. It’s becoming possible to task AI with finding sentiment, gender and many other scene attributes, he said.

“This is huge for me in the final side of things, and it is even more important when we talk about the localization and distribution [of content],” said Hollyn.

There is even an aspect of AI script analysis that can help producers predict the box office value of a movie based on elements in the story, he added.

Hollyn also showed an example of work being done by Stanford University and Adobe on AI in editing. Using idiom-based editing, users can combine different editing idioms to define different editing styles.

A video clip showed how it is possible to use a basic idiom, such as the presence in an edit of performers while they are speaking, to sort clips. The system can then generate an edit based on that idiom, as well as others if desired, across an entire scene. However, the tool, which is in beta today, lacks any recognition of emotion. “It doesn’t really understand performance, at all, at this point,” said Hollyn.

However, by adding an understanding of emotion, AI can one day be used to streamline the editing process by producing a rough cut that can then be tweaked and reworked as needed by a human editor. “That’s huge for me,” he said.

IN THE BROADCAST FACILITY

Lior Berezinski, director, presales engineer at Prime Focus, devoted his presentation to AI in broadcast operations.

Berezinski discussed the use of AI in a variety of media operations, such as promo and highlight production, localization operations, compliance mastering and VOD operation.

Focusing on metadata, Berezinski pointed out that today AI can be used for content discovery by relying on tools, such as content analysis, to identify objects, faces, brands and profanity. However, Prime Focus is adding its own technology, called “Wisdom,” on top of AI, he said.

“With Wisdom, you can do more meaningful things for the media and entertainment industry,” said Berezinski. For example, Wisdom can detect contextual thumbnails from a piece of content as well as discover clips–not just frames, but scenes, color bars, blacks, slates and credits.

From a workflow point of view, AI with Wisdom can discover clips for a story brief, build a story timeline and share exported clips.

To help localize content with appropriate, Wisdom-assisted subtitle production supports speech-to-text and language translation, live transcription and creation of time-code driven subtitling to accommodate different reading speeds.

For these as applications as well as compliance mastering and VOD operations, the goal is that one day the people involved with media production and distribution will be focused on quality control and approval, he said.

The 2018 SMPTE conference continues through Thursday, Oct. 25. For more information, visitwww.smpte2018.org

TVU Networks, the global technology and innovation leader in live IP solutions, today announced the company showcased several breakthrough technologies for news production during NAB New York. Highlights in the booth included: TVU Producer for cloud-based multi-camera video production; newly established integration between TVU Networks and major media asset management (MAM) providers; and the TVU MediaMind set of solutions for AI-based automated video content management.

With TVU Producer, video content can be cost-effectively produced for different platforms or even audience groups completely in the cloud. Non-professionals can easily manipulate graphics, scoring and text overlays during production, thanks to its WYSIWYG interface. TVU Producer can handle multi-camera production from virtually any location. It supports simultaneously output directly to major social media platforms and virtually any CDN platform. SDI delivery is supported through a TVU transceiver. It also offers a multi-channel IP video switcher and slow-motion replay. 

The TVU Contribution Automation Solution (CAS), TVU AI Engine, TVU Real Time Search Engine, and TVU Workflow Engine comprise the TVU MediaMind platform. MediaMind simplifies and improves the process of transporting video to the studio, through the TVU Contribution Automation solution automating the planning, resource management, acquisition, transmission and routing as well featuring integrated metadata and contribution management.  

TVU CAS simplifies and helps efficiently manage the flow of media content from story creation to production. Featuring integration with leading MAM systems, TVU CAS allows broadcasters to easily search through metadata indexed content to allow for the creation of stories faster. CAS bypasses the need for inefficient and time-consuming search term logging done manually. 

At the heart of MediaMind is an AI real-time search engine, which from the start of the video production process, indexes all video. Using an entirely cloud-based model, complete with voice and object recognition, live and pre-produced video clips are located and indexed down to the exact frame and are instantly sharable. MediaMind automates the ability for different production groups to find the right content.  

“Since our first announcement of TVU MediaMind during April’s NAB show in Las Vegas, we’ve seen tremendous interest in MediaMind’s game-changing ability to automate and use AI to effectively create a story-centric workflow,” said Paul Shen, CEO, TVU Networks. “It turns the emphasis from the labor-intensive mechanics of production where one video is distributed to many into a customized story creation process where individualized versions of video are distributed automatically. 

“We’re thrilled to get another opportunity to showcase our MediaMind platform and other new solutions during NAB New York, which we always look forward to exhibiting,” Shen continued. “It gives us a chance to connect with our existing and prospective customers in the Northeast who were not able to attend NAB in Las Vegas or the IBC in Amsterdam. We can’t wait to demonstrate the synergy and power of our combined technologies for the NAB New York audience.”   

Aside from TVU MediaMind and TVU Producer, other innovations on display at NAB New York will be: 

- TVU RPS (Remote Production Solution) transmitter 

- TVU One mobile IP transmitter

- TVU Nano with Router ultra-compact, lightweight IP transmitter for high-speed network access

- TVU Grid IP-based video switching, routing and distribution solution

Paris, France – October 16, 2018 – , a leading provider of solutions and services for media organizations and content professionals, announced today that JKN Global Media PCL Thailand (JKN) has invested in the Dalet Galaxy five Media Asset Management (MAM) and Workflow Orchestration platform to optimize content production and delivery across traditional, OTT and social media distribution outlets. The installation enables a comprehensive workflow transformation, taking the Thai-based media organization from manually managing assets to automated processes that optimize production and delivery efficiencies across the entire media operation.

Headquartered in Nakhon Pathom, JKN Global Media, together with its subsidiaries, is a leading content distributor and licensing management business in Thailand. It is involved in the distribution of movies, TV series and documentaries for digital TV, cable satellite, home entertainment and OTT platforms. In addition to importing content from all over the world, JKN also produces original Thai-centric programming content for Discovery, History Channel and National Geographic. A large volume of JKN’s business is in the distribution of foreign language content to broadcasters, repackaging and dubbing this content into multiple languages in-house. It also plays out content to traditional and social platforms. With legacy workflows based on files and folders manually managed and exchanged from one group to the next, there was no integration, processes were time-consuming, and assets were left unenriched.

“JKN Global Media had the core goal to increase overall productivity, in terms of content, and boost distribution efficiency by adopting facility-wide migration policies, automated transcoding, and expansive metadata tagging and tracking,” states Cesar Camacho, general manager, Dalet Asia Pacific. “With Dalet, they have succeeded in doing this. They now have a platform, with which they can better serve content to viewers on any platform and evolve their business in reselling content. The agility of Dalet Galaxy five allows JKN to expand its capabilities without implementing an entirely new system. For example, they can easily add orchestration to take advantage of emerging technologies such as AI.”

With the goal of becoming more systemic and detail-accurate with regards to content management, JKN invested in Dalet Galaxy five. Moving from a legacy infrastructure that was characterized by pockets of content and asset management siloed across the facility, JKN has unified all of its systems and content repositories under one single platform with the flexibility to scale as business requires. Dalet Galaxy five provides browser-based access to content and assigns migration policies so content flows through a consistent process. All assets are centralized and detailed metadata tracking allows JKN to optimize the content use. Enriched metadata also means that it can pinpoint assets for production and delivery to all distribution outlets with far more efficiency.

The full implementation of Dalet Galaxy five at JKN Global Media includes: Dalet Webspace for browser-based search and retrieval; Dalet AmberFin for orchestrated, high-quality transcoding; and Dalet Xtend for seamless workflow collaboration between Dalet Galaxy five, Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid ProTools. There are further integrations with Aspera for accelerated file transfer and Vidchecker for QC. The Dalet platform integrates fluently with JKN’s business management and content management systems, with the organization’s playout system, and with all major social media platforms for frictionless online publishing.

Camacho adds, “Dalet’s entry into the Thai market comes hot on the heels of several key APAC customer expansions including ABS-CBN’s addition of Dalet at its Cebu news site in the Philippines and the enterprise rollout of the Dalet media asset management and workflow platform at Australia's Special Broadcasting Service. These diverse and large-scale implementations are a testament to Dalet’s ability to support broadcast networks transformation to faster, agile multiplatform content supply chains.”

About JKN Global Media PLC

JKN Global Media PLC is a successful company in content management and content distribution business in Thailand. Last year on November 30, 2017, JKN Global Media launched its first IPO at the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) among their business partners, broadcasters, investors and their Fan Clubs. Its headquarter is located at JKN Gallery Salaya, Nakhon Pathom province, which is a 30-minute drive from Bangkok. JKN Global Media, together with its subsidiaries, is a number one global content distributor and content management in Thailand. It is involved in the distribution of movies, series and documentaries to the local TV channels in all seven platforms; those are digital TV, Cable Satellite, Home Entertainment, Merchandise, Publishing, Over the Top (OTT) and Ancillary. JKN also produces original documentaries related to honorary HM, the King and Queen of Thailand to people around the world.

About Dalet Digital Media Systems

Dalet solutions and services enable media organisations to create, manage and distribute content faster and more efficiently, fully maximising the value of assets. Based on an agile foundation, Dalet offers rich collaborative tools empowering end-to-end workflows for news, sports, program preparation, post-production, archives and enterprise content management, radio, education, governments and institutions.

Dalet platforms are scalable and modular. They offer targeted applications with key capabilities to address critical functions of small to large media operations - such as planning, workflow orchestration, ingest, cataloguing, editing, chat & notifications, transcoding, play out automation, multi-platform distribution and analytics.

Dalet solutions and services are used around the world at hundreds of content producers and distributors, including public broadcasters (BBC, CBC, France TV, RAI, RFI, Russia Today, RT Malaysia, SBS Australia, VOA), commercial networks and operators (Canal+, FOX, MBC Dubai, Mediacorp, Mediaset, Orange, Charter Spectrum, Warner Bros, Sirius XM Radio) and government organisations (UK Parliament, NATO, United Nations, Veterans Affairs, NASA).

Dalet is traded on the NYSE-EURONEXT stock exchange (Eurolist C): ISIN: FR0011026749, Bloomberg DLT:FP, Reuters: .

Dalet® is a registered trademark of Dalet Digital Media Systems. All other products and trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

For more information on Dalet, visit .

Press Contact

Nick Govoni

Zazil Media Group

(e) nick@zazilmediagroup.com

(p) +1 (978) 866-7354

####

Basingstoke, UK — September 13, 2018 - EditShare a technology leader in intelligent scale-out storage, AQC and media management solutions, today announced that its new Flow software-defined media asset management (MAM) release will be available through a subscription-based model at the end of September. Showcased at the IBC2018 exhibition (stand 7.A35), the latest version of Flow has been completely re-engineered for non-EditShare storage environments including Avid NEXIS, StorageDNA and Amazon S3. Bringing its intelligent media management layer to existing storage pools, Flow opens up new possibilities for collaboration and production from remote locations.

“The days of everyone involved in a production being in the same building, at the same time, are long gone,” states James Richings, General Manager, EditShare. “Whether you’re a broadcaster, post facility, news agency, education establishment, or a corporate media department, this new version of Flow creates flexible ways for teams to make better use of their existing storage infrastructure. With unrivaled collaboration and remote workflows at a price that works for even the smallest of teams, Flow opens up new possibilities for those working in non-EditShare storage environments..”

Educational stalwart, Catapult Learning provides education solutions for students and schools around the world. With more than 5,000 educators on staff, the breadth and depth of its educational content are immense. In charge of producing both the company’s video-based curriculum and promos is production manager and videographer, Kevin Marchese, who was a beta tester for the new Flow release.

“Because the educators are not video producers in the traditional sense, we work closely with them to construct the right outflow of material as well as produce the polished piece,” explains Marchese. “With Flow’s simple-to-use tools, the educators can access video content from any location in the world and storyboard the learning narrative, notate changes and provide feedback. It’s incredibly powerful for collaborating on the video evolution.”

At any given time, Marchese can be working on between eight and 10 video learning projects using various freelancers to help pull together the packages. “We rely on a number of freelancers, whether it’s shooting or editing, to get projects done. And because we have a global footprint, content is stored in various storage pools and cloud pockets. Flow threads these pools together and gives me a holistic view of global assets with a way to collaborate with freelancers as I do with the educational producers. It’s a great approach to managing the vast amount of media for an incredibly low price.”

About EditShare Flow

EditShare Flow brings intelligent ingest, asset indexing, search and retrieve as well as tools to storyboard, annotate and collaborate on media projects. It also offers advanced automation and workflow design tools to automate complex processes such as transcoding and redundant media migrations including moving content from production to nearline to archive storage spaces. The new third-party system integration highlights include:

• AVID ISIS/NEXIS - Workspaces can be used natively by Flow for all the usual operations such as scanning, folder watching, proxy creation, copy/move, and transcode to/from.
• Amazon S3 - Archive and restore to and from S3 buckets of all storage classes including “General Purpose,” “Infrequent Access” and “Archive.” In addition, users can move or copy assets between these buckets and storage classes.
• Amazon Glacier - Archive to and restore from Amazon Glacier vaults.
• Generic S3 - Archive and restore to and from any generic S3 object storage, such as Object Matrix.
• Storage DNA - Archive and restore to and from StorageDNA defined Tape archives. Flow proxies can also be shared with the StorageDNA media browser.
• SGL FlashNet support.
• SMB/CIFS - Support for any SMB/CIFS storage platform.

Flow Pricing

EditShare Flow is available in three packages: Basic, Advanced and Enterprise. Subscription pricing starts from 19 GB/25 EUR /29 USD per user, per month (based on a 12-month commitment). Volume pricing is available. For more information, please contact sales@editshare.com or visit flow.editshare.com.

Attendees to IBC can book a private demo of the latest version of Flow and other EditShare innovations at www.editshare.com/ibc-2018.

For more information on EditShare at IBC2018, please visit editshare.com/ibc-2018. To book a private press briefing, please contact Nick Govoni at nick@zazilmediagroup.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.

Press Contacts

Nick Govoni
Zazil Media Group
(e) nick@zazilmediagroup.com
(p) +1 (978) 866 7354

Basingstoke, UK — September 12, 2018 - EditShare a technology leader in intelligent scale-out storage, AQC and media management solutions, today announced that post-production and creative facility Ka-Boom has invested in an end-to-end EditShare workflow solution that encompasses EditShare Flow and AirFlow media asset management (MAM), XStream EFS scale-out storage, EFS 40NL parking storage and EditShare Ark archiving solutions to support its growing media business. Located in the heart of Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ka-Boom’s busy facility is currently working on a wide range of documentary and entertainment programs including Channel 5 “Celebs on Solitary” by Stellify Media, the BBC NI Drama “Counsel” for Lacada Entertainment, and the BBC Network daytime series “Holding Back the Years” for BBC Studios, to name a selected few.

“We’ve just opened up a new facility with more offline suites and have greater expansion plans over the next six to 12 months, which is where EditShare comes in,” comments Zach Willis, Ka-Boom’s co-founder and producer. “With the facility and projects expanding, we had to scale our technology to meet the client needs as well as give our team a way to better collaborate.” Zach explains, “While our current building and new building are in the same location, there is a bit of a gap between them and we needed a technology solution that could span across multiple sites with ease. With EditShare, we can house the entire EditShare infrastructure platform in our main building and then easily connect to the content hub and to each other from the new building and anywhere else in the world via Flow and AirFlow so that it is all very seamless.” Ka-boom have six offline suites with another five coming online shortly, all of which are connected to the EditShare tiered storage infrastructure, which includes XStream EFS scale-out storage, 40NL parking storage, and Ark tape archiving. Seamlessly integrated, Flow and AirFlow provide the control layer for managing assets and automating migration policies across the EditShare tiered storage pools with simple-to-use production tools for producers and directors to review content, annotate notes, storyboard ideas and collaborate with teams across departments and beyond facility walls.

Zach elaborates, “With the capabilities of the Flow and AirFlow, producers and clients can be located anywhere in the world and review media, storyboards and collaborate with editors, colorists and other staff back at the facility. This setup far better suits with our expanding filmmaking workflow.” Within Flow, all assets and relative metadata are tracked, making searching and retrieving media fast and efficient, even for those assets stored on tapes. AirFlow provides team secured remote access to content with tools to facilitate editorial review and approval from anywhere. Zach adds, “We have quite a few projects that can be very quick turnarounds. There is typically lots of material where the edit producers and the execs along with their actors want to sit down to review the rushes or do rough assemblies and things like that. It’s not like a drama or a feature or scripted material, where you know what the story is and you have only two or three takes and that’s it. A lot of what we are doing is you have a story but you have no scripts. You’re working on the material that you’ve got and many times the team is dispersed in different locations, so the Flow and AirFlow product lends itself absolutely perfectly to what we do anywhere, and that type of flexibility is really our bread and butter of TV.”

With content indexed across the tiered EditShare storage environment, staff can use Flow to easily search and retrieve content, even with material shot years earlier. Willis explains the impact of this new capability, “Even when a project is finished, staff still have access to the proxies. They can search for that shot that they always wanted to use but didn’t because it would have taken them half a day to find it in all those drives we used to store content on. With Flow, they can find it in seconds and that’s been big. Our clients are going to love this.”

See Ka-Boom Workflow at IBC 2018

Attendees to the IBC2018 exhibition can see the Ka-Boom workflow on the EditShare stand (7.A35). For more information on EditShare at IBC2018, please visit editshare.com/ibc-2018. To book a private press briefing, please contact Nick Govoni at nick@zazilmediagroup.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, Automated QC, 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 Contacts

Nick Govoni
Zazil Media Group
(e) nick@zazilmediagroup.com
(p) +1 (978) 866 7354

Basingstoke, UK — August 30, 2018 - EditShare a technology leader in intelligent scale-out storage, AQC and media management solutions, announced today that Cape Town, South Africa-based Magnatude Facilities, a division of Okuhle Media Group, has selected an XStream EFS 300 scale out storage platform, EFS 40NL nearline storage nodes and Flow media asset management to overhaul their media entire workflow.

Prior to implementing EditShare workflow solutions, the team worked off an aging RAID setup that wasn’t equipped to support media intensive workflows, often slowing down with as few as three editors working on a project. In addition, there was no way to search for or retrieve existing assets. As a result the team would lose valuable time and money as a consequence of having to reshoot material they already knew they had- they just couldn’t find it.

“Implementing Flow has completely changed the way we interact with and search for existing footage,” says Ryan Sheraton, live director and post production supervisor at Okuhle. “For example, we’ve shot Table Mountain for nearly every single show that we’ve delivered and broadcast because we didn’t know where our existing iconic shots were. (Table Mountain is a prominent landmark overlooking the city of Cape Town in South Africa). Now with Flow, we can basically just type in ‘Table Mountain’ and the raw footage appears. It’s been an incredible time saver and we don’t waste time and money going out there to get that shot again.”

Faced with a major new project, Showville, a reality television talent show in the vein of America’s Got Talent!but focused on the smaller areas of South Africa, the facility’s existing storage infrastructure needed a major upgrade. With a production crew of 20 deployed to each location, the team knew that they needed a way to optimize their workflow in order to truly collaborate on this project and manage the huge amounts of incoming media.

“It’s one of the bigger shows that we have brought on as a client. There’s no way we could have taken it on with our old setup- it would have been a collaboration nightmare!” Sheraton continues, “With the EditShare systems in place we’re able to have four editors working on the show simultaneously. It’s a great achievement in terms of managing data and managing at least five cameras and four editors working in tandem.”

The production team shoots on location then the footage is couriered over to Magnatude Facilities on hard drives where it is ingested to the 40NL. The editors work with the raw footage off of the 40NL directly, easily accessing project files at the same time and collaborating to yield a final cut which is migrated to the production centric EFS 300.

“When we were working off our legacy RAID system, there was no way for us to share and work collaboratively on projects. As a result we literally had editors running up and down the halls asking people to close files, it was completely inefficient.” Sheraton adds, “Working on ‘Showville’ in this way would be impossible, the bottlenecks it would have created would have been a major blow and would introduce risk to on-time delivery. With the EFS 300 production platform coupled with the nearline storage 40NL system, everyone can open any project when they need it without compromising system performance, it’s awesome.”

Sheraton concludes, “EditShare solutions have given us the confidence to approach larger and more complex projects, we know these systems can take the heat. Going from what we called ‘Frankenstein’ to a reliable and robust storage and media management ecosystem has completely revolutionized how we approach our work. In addition, EditShare’s technical support team is incredible, they’ve always been available to us as an invaluable resource for troubleshooting and workarounds.”

“Successful post facilities like Okuhle need platforms that they can grow their business on,” comments Tara Montford, general manager, EditShare. “EditShare EFS allows facilities to step into an enterprise workflow with a ‘right sized’ infrastructure that maps back to their production needs, with the flexibility to expand on the fly. It's the best of both worlds. They invest in only what they need today with the freedom to grow the platform alongside the business.”

About the EditShare Workflow at Magnatude Facilities

EditShare XStream EFS is a powerful distributed scale-out video storage platform developed for the most intensive media workflows. It's designed from the ground up to support resilient large-scale workgroups and high-bandwidth, high-volume media ingest, transcoding, online collaborative editing and multiplatform distribution of HD, 4K, 8K and beyond. Administrators can easily add one or more XStream EFS 40NL nodes of cost-optimized storage to an existing XStream EFS storage cluster to create a nearline storage workflow like Magnatude Facilities or configure the EFS 40NL as an independent storage cluster for disaster recovery or media backup purpose, with each 4U storage node providing 240TB of raw capacity. EditShare Flow seamlessly integrates with EFS, providing a control layer that manages assets and metadata from ingest to playout with tools to search, retrieve and storyboard media, facilitating a collaborative post production workflow for Okuhle.

For more information on EditShare XStream EFS 300, EFS 40NL, and Flow media asset management, please visit: www.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 groundbreaking products improve efficiency and workflow collaboration every step of the way. They include video capture and playout servers, high-performance EFS central shared storage, AQC, archiving and backup software, media asset management, and Lightworks – the world’s first three-platform (Windows/OS X/Linux) professional non-linear video editing application.

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

Press Contact

Nick Govoni
Zazil Media Group
(e) nick@zazilmediagroup.com
(p) +1 (978) 866 7354

Basingstoke, UK — August 23, 2018 - EditShare a technology leader in intelligent scale-out storage, AQC and media management solutions, announced today that Montreal, Canada-based Pixcom International, the in-house technical arm of Pixcom Group servicing Pixcom Productions, has invested in a 420TB XStream EFS 450 scale-out shared storage cluster along with 800TB worth of EFS 40NL near-line storage nodes and Flow media asset management. This re-investment in EditShare workflow tools will increase the collaborative firepower across Pixcom Productions’ 22 Avid edit suites, 10 story edit stations, two DaVinci Resolve color grading rooms and two compositing/graphics stations.

Having previously employed earlier generation EditShare storage solutions at Pixcom International, the team was confident in their choice to re-invest in EditShare with the powerful EFS 450 and 40NL near-line storage nodes to support its incoming high-bandwidth, media-intensive projects and accompanying large workgroups.

“Most of the time we’ll have more than one editor on a project. On larger projects, it can go up to six or even 10 people working on it together. The EFS 450 in tandem with the 40NL nodes enable us to easily leverage multiple people on a project, without compromising system performance. It’s incredibly efficient,” says Charles Laflamme, technical director, Pixcom International.

One of the biggest markets for Pixcom Productions is documentaries, often working on projects for Discovery Canada. The team needed a way to manage the vast amount of media files that accompany such projects. First, all incoming footage from various shoots is ingested to the EFS 40NL nodes and then backed up to EditShare’s Ark Tape archiving solution. Then, the files are down-converted to a lower resolution to be hosted in the EFS 450 for screening in story edit rooms and offline editing. For easy access, the original footage is kept in the 40NL until the show is approved so editors can quickly access high-res files and relink them to their timeline. Once approved, the final show is archived to LTO 7 along with the original content. Content parked on the 40NL utilizes the EditShare Clean Sweep function, enabling system readiness for the next project.

Laflamme adds, “The EditShare EFS 40NL greatly simplifies our workflow by keeping all media in the EditShare ecosystem from start to finish. With the purpose-built security features and intuitive user interface designed for media workflows, we have been able to effortlessly streamline our processes. We no longer worry about losing files through round tripping and are able to collaborate more freely on projects.”

The Pixcom International team also makes extensive use of Flow media asset management as a part of their day-to-day workflow. Laflamme continues, “For high value footage that can be reused on other projects, we log as much metadata as possible in the Flow database so we can find the file easily when we need it again. With Flow Browse, we can screen proxies of files that are not on the EFS 40NL anymore without having to restore everything. The editors can choose exactly which files they want to work with and we can restore them right to their media space for integration into new projects. We can even use those proxies for offline work. One of the great features is if the client is off-premises, Airflow allows us to give them access to the files we need them to sign off on. Flow has become a critical time-saving element for us and it fosters a truly collaborative experience for clients and staff.”

Laflamme concludes, “With help from EditShare, we have expanded and simplified our workflow with the EFS 450, EFS 40NL and Flow. We’re now so much better equipped to handle the kinds of media-intensive projects we deal with. In addition, the EditShare team has proven to be a valuable partner in determining the best solutions for an uncompromising collaborative workflow.”

For more information on EditShare XStream EFS 450, EFS 40NL, and Flow media asset management, please visit: www.editshare.com.

About Pixcom

Founded in Montréal in 1987 by Jacquelin Bouchard, Pixcom has seen meteoric growth in their audiovisual and digital production, dubbing and postproduction. Well connected with local creatives, Pixcom works with a permanent team of more than 50 people and employs over 2,000 freelancers (artists, technicians, production teams) to meet every client’s needs.

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 groundbreaking products improve efficiency and workflow collaboration every step of the way. They include video capture and playout servers, high-performance EFS central shared storage, AQC, archiving and backup software, media asset management, and Lightworks – the world’s first three-platform (Windows/OS X/Linux) professional non-linear video editing application.

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

Press Contact

Nick Govoni
Zazil Media Group
(e) nick@zazilmediagroup.com
(p) +1 (978) 866 7354

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.

In today’s fast-paced media environments, more new content is being created than production teams can possibly manage without specialized tools. At the same time, the clock is ticking for digitizing historical content that exists in legacy, analog formats like tape before the original content degrades. It’s critical that all of these assets be logged and tagged so that they can be found easily, but teams have no time to do this essential work.

In addition, the current generation of media asset management tools has evolved in an environment where they have been starved of metadata. As a result, content teams’ options are limited to pulling technical metadata from media files or streams, extracting meaning from file and folder names, or manual logging.

UNLOCKING THE POTENTIAL

Artificial intelligence is beginning to change how media organizations meet these challenges. A new and emerging breed of AI platforms for media analysis, when paired with leading-edge media asset management tools, offers great potential for transforming media workflows and making it easier than ever for operations to access, manage, and archive tremendous volumes of content. Through powerful tools such as speech-to-text and automatic language translation, AI engines bring new power to the MAM task of logging and tagging content—with the ability to tag assets automatically based on attributes such as people, places, things, and even sentiment.

But hold on: a few caveats

It sounds almost too good to be true: suddenly you can unlock the potential of all of your content and make it immediately searchable, reusable, and monetizable. At last, you can get some traction on those digitization projects and get a better handle on all of the content in your existing library! But wait—while the potential exists to realize these benefits someday, the truth is that the technology needs to overcome some issues in order to become mainstream.

One area that needs improvement is accuracy. While AI analysis is getting better all the time, particularly with speech-to-text offerings from players such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM, fine-tuning is still needed. For instance, the engine might not be able to distinguish between U.K. or American English, and abbreviations and jargon are likely to generate mistakes. The industry is still working on easy methods to train the AI engine to recognize these language variations and correct mistakes. Also, for image or video analysis, the sophistication of AI tools varies considerably. Some platforms offer only very basic video analysis, meaning the best way to capture metadata for people, places, objects, and sentiments is to make a set of image sequences and analyse them manually.

AI aggregators can help users avoid some of the costs and complexities of setup by making it easier to choose the right AI engine for a specific task. But even so, picking the AI tool that’s best for a given activity is not trivial. At the same time, cost structures across the industry are far from transparent, making it difficult to work out the total expense of applying AI to a media library. It’s a multi-step process: first, you have to figure out how to get your content into the AI engine—which is often in the cloud. That might involve having to create a video proxy, separate the audio files, create an image sequence, and other steps, and then uploading the content and managing its lifecycle. Should you leave the content on the vendor platform or delete it to save on storage? Is it in the right format for the AI engines to understand? Which AI tool should you run, and is there a separate cost for each style of analysis? There might be different price tiers for different content formats; for instance, 4K assets might cost more. With each vendor having its own price list, it’s pretty difficult to compare apples to apples.

Also, the technology is advancing so quickly that any AI analysis done today may have to be refreshed later, as the tools improve. Managing these refreshed data sets, especially if they have been corrected or updated by a human after the original analysis, adds another layer of complexity. And of course security is a concern, especially if the data is uploaded to cloud providers.

THE AI-MAM CONNECTION

As these powerful AI technologies continue to mature, strong media asset management capabilities will become increasingly important. On the metadata side, tools that can store, search, and easily correct a huge volume of time-based metadata are crucial. Good metadata and user interface design are vital to keep the system from overloading users with too much information. And on the workflow and automation side, feeding the AI engines with the right data and automating the analysis, while keeping down costs, will separate the true enterprise offerings from the also-rans.

So what might an AI-powered MAM solution look like? One approach is to supercharge the MAM system’s logging, tagging, and search functions through integrations with leading AI vendors and aggregators, such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM. Integrations with best-of-breed AI platforms and cognitive engines could allow the MAM to leverage advanced AI-based speech recognition and video/image analysis, with the flexibility to be deployed either in the cloud or in hybrid on-premises/cloud environments.

Here are a few of the advanced capabilities that could result:

• Speech-to-text, to automatically create transcripts and time-based metadata

• Language translation

• Place analysis, including identification of buildings and locations without using GPS-tagged shots

• Object and scene detection (e.g. daytime shots or shots of specific animals)

• Sentiment analysis, for finding and retrieving all content that expresses a certain emotion or sentiment (e.g. “find me celebrations (in a sports event)”)

• Logo detection, to identify when certain brands appear in shots

• Text recognition, to enable text to be extracted from characters in video

• People recognition, for identifying people, including executives and celebrities

THE NEXT FRONTIER

Of course, these capabilities are just the start. The MAM system can also be a powerful tool to train and improve AI engines; e.g. content manually tagged in the MAM could perhaps be used to identify the executives in a corporation. The MAM could use this manual tagging to train AI engines to do a better job of logging and tagging new content.

The industry is being transformed by AI and the explosion in sometimes low-quality metadata. Only the most powerful, flexible, easy-to-integrate, secure, and scalable MAM platforms are embracing this challenge and will thrive.

In the right hands, AI becomes the key that unlocks the next generation of MAM technologies.

Dave Clack is CEO of Square Box Systems, makers of the CatDV media asset management solution.

MIAMI, Fla. — Primestream will demonstrate the next generation of its Dynamic Media Management platform at IBC2018. The platform features new solutions for IP video capture and delivery covering professional and consumer formats, a cloud-based review and approval system, robust 4K workflow, public APIs to integrate third-parties into the Xchange platform, and a new configuration framework for quick and easy installations. The next generation of Primestream’s Dynamic Media Management platform is built with features needed to manage sports, enterprise and broadcast workflows from capture through delivery.

[Read: Tata Communications, Primestream Partner On Cloud-Based MAM]

Primestream will highlight enterprise-grade Media Asset Management in the Cloud through a cloud-based version of its Xchange MAM solution in conjunction with Tata Communications’ cloud storage platform and high-performance Video Connect network. The service also features advanced file acceleration and an expandable object storage solution suitable for disaster recovery or content archiving.

Primestream will also demonstrate the latest in VR/360 asset management, an updated Adobe Premiere Pro extension panel that features a new project versioning system, improvements to archival workflow and lifecycle management with cloud and tape storage providers, in addition to “under the hood” improvements for better performance and reliability, according to the company.

Primestream will hold demonstrations in Stand 7.C18. The IBC2018 show is Sept. 13–18, in Amsterdam. For more information or to register, visit www.ibc.org.

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Most content owners would agree that manual tagging and cataloging of assets is a time consuming and expensive activity that can stymy the usefulness and profitability of media assets. Today however, audio-visual content can be transformed into dynamic assets using metadata enriched with a combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and manual processes.

Beyond basic tags that allow for different variations of the same word (e.g. singular and plural) or multiple tags for the same concept, automated AI technology offers more powerful and faster capabilities that can aid content discovery for easy re-use and greater productivity. For example, content can be auto-tagged using Object Recognition as well as Face/Location Recognition technology to further enrich metadata. AI metadata can also be used to discover specific areas where compliance issues have been spotted. Improvements in Speech-to-text and Image Recognition algorithms are further automating parts of the metadata process, making it increasingly useful for both new and legacy content use cases.

AI-ENABLED MEDIA ASSET MANAGEMENT

Here is an example of how AI technologies are already starting to become an integral part of commercially available products and services. AI functionality has recently been integrated into CLEAR, a cloud-based Media Asset Management (MAM) solution by Prime Focus Technologies. It helps Media & Entertainment (M&E) enterprises leverage both AI-generated and manually logged metadata to maximize content discovery. This makes it faster and easier for users to sort, locate, and re-use their assets for creating compelling stories from a vast content repository.

Importantly, CLEAR empowers users with the freedom to access the entire galaxy of AI/machine learning capabilities (AWS, Azure, Google, IBM Watson to name a few), as appropriate for their downstream use case.

Useful functions for AI-driven visual analysis include character identification as well as recognition of objects and actions. Ideally, AI video analysis should also recognize text within the image, such as street signs, advertisements, and products. The video AI functionality in CLEAR, for example, includes the capability to recognize human faces, their genders and approximate ages. It also recognizes brands and logos, along with well-known landmarks, and presently, to some degree, other objects at a level that includes phones, tables, vehicles, and animals, for example. Additionally, the system can also recognize basic interactions between these objects, such as a human running, dancing, or smoking as examples, and can detect the general facial emotions of people and events, such as being able to tell the difference between a festive party and an intense group discussion.

While all AI-based functionalities at present require human review and quality control, one of the key characteristics of AI is its ability to learn and improve over time, so we expect these functions to continue to evolve going forward.

METADATA IMPLICATIONS

If a collection of media assets could be compared to a file cabinet full of important papers, then metadata would be the labels on the folders. While it is true that the papers themselves are important and valuable, it is the labels that make it possible to locate the particular paper you presently need quickly and effectively.

In a similar way, as content is analyzed and then augmented with metadata, value is added because the ability to locate the desired content and understand important features of that content is enhanced. The value of metadata in our current time is even further enhanced because the quantity of content that already exists, along with what is now being created, is so extensive. If AI techniques can be used to help human evaluators review new or existing content and create valuable metadata, then it can help organizations unlock additional value in these assets.

There are several ways that using AI to improve metadata processes can help an organizational business case. Making the most of digital content often requires M&E enterprises to move beyond basic asset management and embrace new-age, Cloud-based MAM solutions. Such solutions, with extensive data models and built-in tools for cataloging and metadata tagging, help organize content in useful ways, make it easily accessible, and open up new avenues to monetize assets. Ultimately, they streamline and improve the overall efficiency of digital content creation, boost monetization, and drive creative enablement.

Here is a recent example of how more detailed and accurate metadata gave some content providers an advantage when broadcast content regulations changed. Whenever such regulations change, there is a time consuming and stressful burden placed on the M&E industry to quickly come into compliance. In this case, it was legislated in India that all smoking scenes must be prefaced with a warning message about the hazards of smoking. When this regulation came into effect, detailed and accurate metadata let some content providers quickly identify every scene that included smoking. Armed with this information, broadcasters could then choose to either remove the scene, or add the required warning message.

Looking at content from another angle, content creators can also depend on the use of metadata to locate existing materials for new projects. Documentary film makers, news organizations, and investigative reporters are just a few of the kinds of content creators in this category that frequently look for content relating to specific themes, public figures, locations, and similar categories. When a famous or influential person passes, or a current event warrants a special report, detailed and accurate metadata describing existing footage and media about the topic can make the search for this material far faster and more effective.

CONCLUSION

The integration of MAM solutions with metadata management tools, extensive data models and AI-based functionalities, hand-in-hand with human quality control and judgment, will help organizations achieve the effective labeling of vast quantities of existing and new content. And, the improved accuracy and efficiency will deliver, in turn, improved business efficiencies and results across cataloging, editing and mastering operations. By making it possible to find content faster, easier, and more accurately, AI-enhanced systems will create new revenue opportunities.

T Shobhana is Vice President and Head of Global Marketing & Communications for Prime Focus Technologies.

Boston, MA – May 10, 2018–EditShare, a technology leader in intelligent shared storage and media management solutions, will be exhibiting at the BroadcastAsia 2018, held in Singapore from June 26-28 on stand 6J4-04. Headlining the showcase are EditShare’s new XStream EFS scale-out, high-availability shared storage, QScan automated quality assurance and new Flow software defined media asset management solutions. “In terms of content, the Asia creative market is generating world-class programmes and films that rank among the most watched on the planet,”comments Peter Lambert, sales director, EditShare. “The facilities behind these global blockbusters are employing advanced workflows and EditShare is here to support those requiring more comprehensive content protection and quality assurance to meet the international delivery demands for their popular content.” India-based Red Chillies recently invested in EditShare scale-out shared storage to support its upcoming “Zero” production starring Shah Rukh Khan. Lambert adds, “When you are supporting productions withmega starslike Shah Rukh Khan, you have to have the very best production infrastructure in place. Zero compromises and this is what EditShare delivers for its customers.” EditShare will be showcasing a number of new advancements across security, compliance and remote workflows including:

Scale-Out Storage with Industry Best Practice-Compliant Content Security Capabilities
The new EditShare XStream EFS storage is the first media purpose-built storage solution that supports comprehensive File Auditing. The new XStream EFS File Auditing platform allows users to collect and analyze shared storage user activity. In addition to forensic purposes, data can be used to assure clients that their content is stored according to MPAA best practices, meeting security audit protocols and procedures. Detailed reports pinpoint which user carried out an action, what files or directories were affected, and exactly when these actions took place. Unlike other auditing approaches, EFS Auditing does not impact real-time operations or system performance. EFS Auditing data is easily exported to third parties and other auditing applications.

Ensuring Delivery Compliance Through Automated Quality Assurance
Powered by the award-winning QUALES QC engine, the new file-based video and audio AQC QScan product line simplifies compliance and delivery requirements with robust quality check capabilities that leverage a patent-pending QScan Single-Pass Analysis process, which can be applied at any point during the workflow. Certified by DPP and AMWA, all EditShare QScan models support DPP compliance, including PSE and IMF testing. Models include:

• QScan One – A robust full-featured entry-level AQC solution that processes one file at a time. Ideal for small post facilities requiring the facility to check the integrity of files on an on-going basis but that don't need to check large volumes of media concurrently.
• QScan Pro – A full-featured professional AQC solution that processes four files at a time. Designed for mid-sized post facilities, with different departments such as audio, grading, VFX and editing. Each department can set up parameters to test their files, with up to four files being tested simultaneously.
• QScan Max – A fully scalable multi-node enterprise AQC solution with each node allowing for processing four concurrent files at a time. Ideal for VOD, OTT and Telco companies, the Max revision has limitless scalability, allowing a large operator to test hundreds of files concurrently.

Software Defined Flow Media Asset Management Powers Remote Workflows
Designed for non-EditShare storage environments such as Avid NEXIS, storageDNA and Amazon S3. As a fully software-defined MAM platform, Flow has been completely re-engineered to maximize the value of customers’ existing storage infrastructure by adding an intelligent media management layer that can manage millions of assets across multiple storage tiers in different locations. At the core of Flow lie several workflow engines that enable collaboration through Ingest, Search, Review, Logging, Editing and Delivery, alongside a powerful workflow automation engine for automating tasks such as transcoding and delivery. Flow’s award-winning remote workflow features also provide the ability to review content remotely, as well as edit content on a timeline with voice-over and effects from anywhere in the world.

Along with over 500 software updates, this new version of Flow features a redesigned UI, unifying the user experience across web-based and desktop apps. Flow Story and AirFlow now have a similar look and feel, making it easier to switch between them in different scenarios. Flow has also introduced new capabilities to remotely view Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere edits in a web browser using AirFlow; Range Markers for enhanced Logging and Review capabilities; new software licensing with a customer portal and license management tools; and seamless integration with EditShare’s new QScan AQC software, making AQC available at any stage of the post-production workflow.

The demand for remote workflows has also increased over the past year, as more people work outside of the traditional post-production environment. Out of the box, Flow caters for this increasing trend by enabling full remote access to content, as well as seamless integration with leading NLEs such as Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere.

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 groundbreaking 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 three-platform (Windows/OS X/Linux) professional non-linear video editing application.

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

Press Contact
Nick Govoni
Zazil Media Group
Email: nick@zazilmediagroup.com
Tel: +1 (978) 866 7354

MIAMI & MUMBAI, INDIA—Tata Communications, a digital infrastructure provider based in India, and Primestream, a provider of dynamic media management, have joined forces to launch an enterprise-grade Media Asset Management (MAM) solution in the cloud that enables broadcasters, content owners and enterprises to capture, produce, manage and deliver media content.

Since it combines a cloud-based version of Primestream’s Xchange MAM solution, with Tata Communications’ cloud storage and high-performance Video Connect network, the companies claim the new media management platform enhances metadata-driven workflows—including video production, file sharing, editing and publishing—while supporting seamless global collaboration. It also enables advanced file acceleration and an expandable object storage solution, which permit disaster recovery or content archiving.

[Read: NAB Show Exhibitor Viewpoint—David Schleifer, COO, Primestream]

“Sports, entertainment and news organizations are under pressure to bring their global audiences more and more content, live, 24/7, across different digital platforms, and in new formats, such as UHD and live 360-degrees,” said Brian Morris, Vice President and General Manager, Media & Entertainment, Tata Communications.

“In this high-pressure environment, it’s no longer viable for production teams to work in silos, with files scattered around on different hard drives across geographies. Our joint offering with Primestream unifies and simplifies Media Asset Management from capture to distribution, helping to meet audiences’ insatiable appetite for new video content, and more powerful viewing experiences.” 

LAS VEGAS—At the 2018 NAB Show Dalet introduced Dalet Galaxy five, a new version of the company’s media asset management and workflow orchestration platform that adds new frameworks for AI and social media, plus hybrid workflow and collaboration enhancements.

For artificial intelligence, Dalet Galaxy five connects, orchestrates and fine-tunes purpose-driven combinations of AI models, enabling media organizations to build intelligent workflows that assist users with recommendations, facilitate collaboration with smart matching, and use predictive analytics for better provisioning and automated decision-making. Dalet Content Discovery, the first application to leverage this new AI framework uses data generated by cognitive services, combined with existing metadata, to build smart content recommendations for editorial and creative teams. Deployed as part of the Dalet Unified News Operations and Sports Production solution, Dalet Content Discovery leverages automatic content tagging, topic extraction and key phrase searches, orchestrating a combination of Auto Indexing and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology.

The Dalet Social Media framework enables newsrooms to treat social media as an integrated part of their overall news operation. Journalists can harvest, analyze, produce and deliver fast-paced news on social media platforms alongside traditional outlets. The story-centric workflow offers familiar indicators such as number of views, likes, shares, as well as audience comments and threads. Visual engagement data lets journalists know how their posts are performing with their audience and discover new angles audiences are expecting. With analytical tools and dynamic content at their fingertips, journalists can quickly evolve posts into deeper stories or segue into a new angle. New capabilities include social media popularity indicators, Twitter harvester, scheduling and approval of social posts, expanded emoji library, contextual graphics and subtitles.

For hybrid workflows and operations, Dalet Galaxy five introduces new integrations with AWS infrastructure services, enabling hybrid scalable architectures that help minimize content handling costs and introduce more mobility in the user experience while enhancing the security of content. Hybrid workflow capabilities include Archive in the Cloud, External Content Review, Multi-Site Federation & Content Sharing, and Disaster Recovery.

The new version of the Dalet Workflow Engine included in Dalet Galaxy five offers enhanced task management, high availability and new API services that simplify the integration with third-party systems. Recently added capabilities include top-down view of group tasks and shared task lists as well as task time tracking and data aggregation for reporting and analysis.

Dalet Galaxy five adds component workflows that eliminates intermediate processes in the media supply chain, allowing users to produce, manage and distribute content at the component level, which helps facilitate complex and mass content volume workflows such as multiplatform news production and international programs preparation, localization and versioning.

[Read: Quantum Xcellis Scale-Out NAS Now Compatible For Dalet MAM]

The model is particularly adapted to new families of standards such as the Interoperable Mastering Format or IMF. Dalet Galaxy five’s Dalet Webspace manage end-to-end component-based IMF workflows from acquisition to production, versioning, packaging and distribution. This includes receiving IMF packages, referencing IMF assets in a central repository, leveraging IMF metadata, both technical and editorial, to search on all assets and data; generating proxies for preview of track files and CPLs in Dalet WebSpace; visualizing assets relationships (track files and CPLs, CPLs and OPLs), automating the creation of new versions, connecting CPLs using EIDR (Entertainment Identifier Registry) and ISAN (International Standard Audiovisual Number) ids.

New collaborative enhancements for Dalet five include Media Bins that for flexible media sharing; Dalet On-the-Go, which brings programs management tools to mobile devices, and new Dalet Chat capabilities that allow users to work by thread and embed assets such as graphics, audio and video files. For editing Dalet Webspace features a story-boarder for cut editing anywhere; the Dalet OneCut built-in desktop editor has new editing tracks, new transitions and effects, and the Dalet Xtend integration with Adobe Premiere Pro CC expands to support Adobe Projects as well as the Dalet CG-on-the-Timeline model.

Expanding production control automation capabilities, Dalet Galaxy five offers a new version of Dalet On-Air, featuring new automation events macros for control of studio devices such as lighting, audio and camera position but also deep integration of these automation events with the full orchestration layer of the platform.

For business intelligence, a new version of the Dalet Report Center features new set of data extractions and data model that supports analysis and reporting on a new set of business indicators. 

Dalet, a leading provider of solutions and services for broadcasters and content professionals, extends the Interoperable Master Format (IMF) capabilities and collaborative workflows within the new Dalet Galaxy five solution. Shown at NAB 2018 on booth SL8010, the Dalet Galaxy five component-based approach to IMF provides an exceptional user experience for maximum efficiency – simplifying IMF production and delivery workflows with visually intuitive graphical tools and automation.

“The overall change in moving from traditional workflow to Dalet’s IMF component-based approach is more than a technical uplift, it's a change in the business value model,” states Matthieu Fasani, product manager, Dalet. “All too often a facility can be perceived as a provider of tapes and files that satisfy individual creative projects, but the real goal here is to move into a position of being able to fulfil a continuous business need by providing a technical back office and, potentially, a store-front for fulfilling the national and international distribution requirements. Dalet enables this by demystifying the complexity of IMF, industrializing the process with a component-based approach that is incredibly flexible and quick to adopt across organizations.”

Dalet has been pioneering component-based workflows and the IMF workflow industrialization with Dalet Galaxy, its flagship MAM and Workflow Orchestration platform, creating real business opportunities for global distribution. “In a traditional workflow you need to re-render your entire project several times throughout its lifecycle including every version you need to distribute,” explains Arnaud Elnecave, vice president, marketing, Dalet. “The Dalet Galaxy five data model and toolset supports comprehensive component-based workflows. This means you never render, you change only the specific elements that need to be modified or added supplements within a project or collection, eliminating the need to duplicate media files. This is a much more flexible approach that offers significant savings on time and resources for production and delivery. This will become more and more critical for efficient program versioning and distribution workflows where various essences are produced, transformed, arranged, packaged and exchanged repeatedly between media properties.”

NAB attendees can book a private briefing here to learn more about Dalet Galaxy five IMF and other component-based workflows.

New IMF Workflow Features of Dalet Galaxy five

New features, introduced with Dalet Galaxy five and shown at NAB 2018, include native IMF support and a Video Timeline view to speed approvals and production:

• Native support for IMF assets, such as the Composition Play List (CPL) and the Output Profile List (OPL), comes as default alongside objects like video, audio or images when you open Dalet Galaxy
  
• Generating proxies for preview of track files and CPLs in Dalet WebSpace
  
• Visualizing asset relationships (between track files and CPLs, CPLs and OPLs, and between CPLs belonging to the same title)
  
• Automating the creation of new versions by leveraging the Workflow Orchestration platform capabilities
  
• Automatically connecting CPLs using EIDR (Entertainment Identifier Registry) and ISAN (International Standard Audiovisual Number) identifiers
  
• Orchestrating the rendering of compositions and the generation of new IMPs manually or automatically based on configurable business rules

A Great User Experience

“The IMF standard brings huge benefits at several key steps of the media supply and distribution chain but at the cost of some complexity. In order for users to leverage all of its benefits, IMF workflows need to be intuitive and easy to manage,” adds Fasani. “That’s exactly what Dalet Galaxy five is introducing. The way the Dalet user experience exposes IMF assets for manipulation is so unique, it will change the way people perceive and understand IMF. In just one or two days you can set up sophisticated workflows to receive IMF packages, review the content, trigger export to Netflix or any distributor you wish, and simplify end-to-end IMF workflows for all of your team. We are replacing complexity with usability.”

Dalet Galaxy five introduces a new set of tools within Dalet WebSpace specifically designed for preview, review and approval of all objects of an IMF package, including the CPL, with a glance at the Video Timeline available on any web client. There is no need for an extensive mastering tool. Simply import the package content into Galaxy, automatically generate proxies and extend collaborative review and approval workflows.

The Bundle Object groups all the components that belong to the same title under one umbrella. Inside the Bundle Editor, users will find the lifecycle of component-based workflows presented in a simple, visual layout:

• The Media Tab lists all the component track files (video, audio, subtitles/captions
  
• The Production Tab lists all the CPLs/OPLs, which describe how components have been assembled and should be transformed to an output deliverable
  
• The Version Tab exposes the renderings of CPLs/OPLs into final deliverables for consumption by end-users (AS-11 for linear playout, HLS/DASH for OTT distribution)
  
• The Packages Tab tracks how individual components have been received/delivered and allows to generate new packages by simple drag-and-drop operations.
  

Extensive Third-Party Integration

Dalet works with the IMF eco-system of vendors (mastering tools from Marquise Technologies, Rohde & Schwarz and ColorFront; QC tools from Netflix Photon, Interra Systems and IRT) to ensure robust end-to-end IMF workflows, including receiving IMF packages, referencing IMF assets in a central repository and leveraging IMF metadata, both technical and editorial, to automate processes at scale and expose the relevant information to the appropriate users.

Learn more about IMF and Dalet Component-Based Workflows

Click here to visit the dedicated webpage.

Learn More About IMF and Dalet component-based workflows at Dalet Pulse

Join 250+ media and technology executives at Dalet Pulse to discover latest innovations from Dalet and technology partners. Dalet Pulse will take place on April 8th at the SLS Hotel in Las Vegas. To register, please click here.

Schedule a Private Press Briefing with Dalet at NAB 2018

Members of the NAB registered press are invited to request a private press briefing with Dalet at NAB 2018. For more information, please contact Alex Molina at alex@zazilmediagroup.com.

About Dalet Digital Media Systems

Dalet solutions and services enable media organizations to create, manage and distribute content faster and more efficiently, fully maximizing the value of assets. Dalet products are built on three distinct platforms that, when combined, form versatile business solutions that power end-to-end workflows for news, sports, program preparation, production, archive and radio. Individually, Dalet platforms and products offer targeted applications with key capabilities to address critical media workflow functions such as ingest, QC, edit, transcode and multiplatform distribution.

The foundation for Dalet productivity-enhancing workflow solutions, Dalet Galaxy is the enterprise Media Asset Management (MAM) & Orchestration platform that unifies the content chain by managing assets, metadata, workflows and processes across multiple and diverse production and distribution systems. Specially tailored for news and media workflows, this unique technology platform helps broadcasters and media professionals increase productivity while providing operational and business visibility.

Dalet AmberFin is the high-quality, scalable transcoding platform with fully integrated ingest, mastering, QC and review functionalities, enabling facilities to make great pictures in a scalable, reliable and interoperable way. Addressing the demanding needs of studio production, multi-camera ingest, sports logging and highlights production, the innovative Dalet Brio video server platform combines density and cost-effectiveness with high reliability. Adopted by leading broadcasters, Dalet Cube is a suite of applications to create, manage and deliver graphics in a newsroom scenario.

Dalet supports customers from the initial planning stages to well beyond project execution. Our global presence includes 17 offices strategically located throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, North America and South America, and a network of more than 60 professional partners serving 87 countries worldwide. This collective experience and knowledge enables our customers to realize potential increases in productivity, efficiency and value of their assets.

The comprehensive Dalet Care program ensures deployments remain up and running with 24/7 support 365 days a year.

Dalet systems are used around the world by many thousands of individual users at hundreds of TV and Radio content producers, including public broadcasters (ABS-CBN, BBC, CBC, DR, FMM, France TV, RAI, RFI, Russia Today, RT Malaysia, VOA), commercial networks and operators (Canal+, FOX, eTV, MBC Dubai, MediaCorp, Mediaset, Orange, Time Warner Cable, Warner Bros, Sirius XM Radio), and government organizations (Canadian House of Commons, Australian Parliament and UK Parliament).

Dalet is traded on the NYSE-EURONEXT stock exchange (Eurolist C): ISIN: FR0011026749, Bloomberg DLT:FP, Reuters: DALE.PA.

Dalet® is a registered trademark of Dalet Digital Media Systems. All other products and trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

Dalet, a leading provider of solutions and services for broadcasters and content professionals, today announced the introduction of Dalet Content Discovery, a new module of the Dalet Galaxy five Workflow Orchestration and MAM platform that leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to build smart content recommendations for editorial and creative teams. First brought to market as part of the Dalet Unified News Operations solution, Dalet Discovery Board presents to journalists intelligent and contextual suggestions, providing greater content visibility and utilization across the newsroom.

Dalet Content Discovery leverages automatic content tagging, topic extraction and key phrase searches, orchestrating a combination of Auto Indexing and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology. “Dalet Content Discovery aims to aid and enhance newsroom research efforts, surfacing what’s relevant for a given topic and storyline from the pool of exponentially increasing sources and inventory of content,” Kevin Savina, director of product strategy, Dalet. “The first of a new generation of powerful assistants for journalism, Dalet Content Discovery combines the power of AI and ML technology with the advanced data model, the orchestration capability and a new AI integration framework of the Dalet Galaxy platform in order to not only tag and index, but also align, relate and suggest content in a contextual and meaningful way.”

Reducing the time-consuming process of manually searching for news story assets, Dalet Content Discovery intelligently sources and serves content, providing editorial resources relevant material including clips, videos, stories, pitches, wires and multimedia content as the journalist develops their story. The expanded detail enriches the news narrative with new insights and angles.

“The augmented media workflow starts automatically in the background with Dalet Galaxy orchestrating several types of cognitive services. Scripts and media assets are automatically enriched, generating tags that the platform then uses for smart contextual recommendations to the users, as well as for automated data-driven processes.” Savina continues, “The journalist launches Dalet Content Discovery Board, which displays suggested content that matches his/her assignments orworkin progress. The suggestions automatically refresh when new relevant assets are entered into the system. Presented suggestions can include production assets, archived assets, studio guests, assets in use for other news stories as well as other similar topic stories that may be scheduled or have already been broadcasted.”

The intuitively designed Discovery Board gives journalists a snapshot of similar news stories that are in motion. This naturally invites journalists to collaborate with their colleagues on similar story topics. Savina comments, “Collaboration across departments is a common challenge especially among large, multisite news organizations. With Dalet Content Discovery, journalists covering similar story beats, whether it be for TV, online or even radio, can easily connect on topicsthat require collaboration while still keeping controlled access to sensitive stories.” The visual snapshot of newsroom activity on any given topic also lets news directors easily view various story angles across different departments, allowing them to better balance the overall news lineup.

NAB 2018 attendees can see Dalet Content Discovery in action on booth SL8010.

Learn More About Dalet Content Discovery

Click here to visit the Dalet Content Discovery page.

Attend Dalet Pulse

Join 250+ media and technology executives at Dalet Pulse to discover latest innovations from Dalet and technology partners. Dalet Pulse will take place on April 8th at the SLS Hotel in Las Vegas. To register, please click here.

Schedule a Private Press Briefing with Dalet at NAB 2018

Members of the NAB registered press are invited to request a private press briefing with Dalet at NAB 2018. For more information, please contact Alex Molina at alex@zazilmediagroup.com.

About Dalet Digital Media Systems

Dalet solutions and services enable media organizations to create, manage and distribute content faster and more efficiently, fully maximizing the value of assets. Dalet products are built on three distinct platforms that, when combined, form versatile business solutions that power end-to-end workflows for news, sports, program preparation, production, archive and radio. Individually, Dalet platforms and products offer targeted applications with key capabilities to address critical media workflow functions such as ingest, QC, edit, transcode and multiplatform distribution.

The foundation for Dalet productivity-enhancing workflow solutions, Dalet Galaxy is the enterprise Media Asset Management (MAM) & Orchestration platform that unifies the content chain by managing assets, metadata, workflows and processes across multiple and diverse production and distribution systems. Specially tailored for news and media workflows, this unique technology platform helps broadcasters and media professionals increase productivity while providing operational and business visibility.

Dalet AmberFin is the high-quality, scalable transcoding platform with fully integrated ingest, mastering, QC and review functionalities, enabling facilities to make great pictures in a scalable, reliable and interoperable way. Addressing the demanding needs of studio production, multi-camera ingest, sports logging and highlights production, the innovative Dalet Brio video server platform combines density and cost-effectiveness with high reliability. Adopted by leading broadcasters, Dalet Cube is a suite of applications to create, manage and deliver graphics in a newsroom scenario.

Dalet supports customers from the initial planning stages to well beyond project execution. Our global presence includes 17 offices strategically located throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, North America and South America, and a network of more than 60 professional partners serving 87 countries worldwide. This collective experience and knowledge enables our customers to realize potential increases in productivity, efficiency and value of their assets.

The comprehensive Dalet Care program ensures deployments remain up and running with 24/7 support 365 days a year.

Dalet systems are used around the world by many thousands of individual users at hundreds of TV and Radio content producers, including public broadcasters (ABS-CBN, BBC, CBC, DR, FMM, France TV, RAI, RFI, Russia Today, RT Malaysia, VOA), commercial networks and operators (Canal+, FOX, eTV, MBC Dubai, MediaCorp, Mediaset, Orange, Time Warner Cable, Warner Bros, Sirius XM Radio), and government organizations (Canadian House of Commons, Australian Parliament and UK Parliament).

Dalet is traded on the NYSE-EURONEXT stock exchange (Eurolist C): ISIN: FR0011026749, Bloomberg DLT:FP, Reuters: DALE.PA.

Dalet® is a registered trademark of Dalet Digital Media Systems. All other products and trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

Dalet, a leading provider of solutions and services for broadcasters and content professionals, today announced that it will unveil Dalet Galaxy five at NAB 2018. The new version of the award-winning media asset management and workflow orchestration platform brings a number of important functional enhancements and three major technology innovations that augment media operations and enable new forward-thinking business models. The first enables broadcasters and media organizations to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) across the workflow, the second leverages hybrid infrastructures with on-premises and Cloud deployments, the third puts social media at the core of the operations.

“Dalet Galaxy five converges new media frameworks and leading-edge technology that enable true business and operational transformation,” states Arnaud Elnecave, vice president of marketing, Dalet. “At NAB, we will show how this new version delivers more value with practical applications of new AI integrations, hybrid operationsandsocial media workflows, along with the many enhancements across editing, show automation, multiplatform production, workflow orchestration and collaboration.”

NAB 2018 attendees can book a private demonstration or workflow consultation with a Dalet expert to learn more about the following Dalet Galaxy five feature highlights:

Artificial Intelligence Framework

The new Dalet Galaxy five AI framework connects, orchestrates and fine-tunes purpose-driven combinations of AI models, enabling media organizations to build intelligent workflows that assist users with recommendations, facilitate collaboration with smart matching, and use predictive analytics for better provisioning and automated decision-making. Elnecave elaborates on the key aspects of the new framework, “For media operations to get full business value from AI, it requires the right method and the appropriate platform. The new AI framework is designed to orchestrate combinations of cognitive services, fine-tune the models, version the data sets, align them with customers’ taxonomies, and eventually surface the results at various levels of the Dalet application stack to provide actionable insights and real business value to the users and to the organization.”

Dalet Content Discovery, the first application to leverage this new AI framework, will be showcased at NAB 2018. The new module uses data generated by cognitive services, combined with existing metadata, to build smart content recommendations for editorial and creative teams. Deployed as part of the Dalet Unified News Operations and Sports Production solution, Dalet Content Discovery leverages automatic content tagging, topic extraction and key phrase searches, orchestrating a combination of Auto Indexing and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology.

Social Media Framework

The Dalet Social Media framework enables newsrooms to treat social media as an integrated part of their overall news operation. Journalists can harvest, analyze, produce and deliver fast-paced news on social media platforms alongside traditional outlets. The story-centric workflow offers familiar indicators such as number of views, likes, shares, as well as audience comments and threads. Visual engagement data lets journalists know how their posts are performing with their audience and discover new angles audiences are expecting. With analytical tools and dynamic content at their fingertips, journalists can quickly evolve posts into deeper stories or segue into a new angle. New capabilities include social media popularity indicators, Twitter harvester, scheduling and approval of social posts, expanded emoji library, contextual graphics and subtitles.

Hybrid Workflows and Operations

Dalet Galaxy five introduces new integrations with AWS infrastructure services, enabling hybrid scalable architectures that help minimize content handling costs and introduce more mobility in the user experience while enhancing the security of content. Elnecave elaborates, “Dalet is offering a tight and seamless integration with AWS. Two examples, which will be shown on the stand, are the auto-scalability capability to save on infrastructure costs and the native support of S3 and Glacier. The latter provides a seamless user experience; for instance, content served to our web-based and mobile app clients Dalet WebSpace and Dalet On-the-Go respectively can be hosted on and streamed directly from S3.” The new hybrid capabilities will be illustrated at NAB 2018 with four distinct Dalet Galaxy five workflows – Archive in the Cloud, External Content Review, Multi-Site Federation & Content Sharing, and Disaster Recovery.

Enhanced Workflow Orchestration

The new version of the Dalet Workflow Engine included in Dalet Galaxy five offers enhanced task management, high availability and new API services that simplify the integration with third-party systems. Recently added capabilities shown at NAB 2018 include top-down view of group tasks and shared task lists as well as task time tracking and data aggregation for reporting and analysis.

Component-Based Workflows Power Multiplatform Productions

Dalet Galaxy five disintermediates the media supply chain, allowing users to produce, manage and distribute content at the component level, a much more efficient and flexible way to facilitate complex and mass content volume workflows such as multiplatform news production and international programs preparation, localization and versioning. Elnecave explains, “In a traditional workflow you need to re-render your entire project several times throughout its lifecycle including every version you need to distribute. The Dalet Galaxy five data model and toolset allow comprehensive component-based workflows. A much more flexible approach that de-duplicates media and offers significant savings on production time and delivery, both critical for managing complex international versioning workflows.”

The model is particularly adapted to new families of standards such as the Interoperable Mastering Format or IMF. Dalet Galaxy five features a comprehensive set of tools within Dalet Webspace to manage end-to-end component-based IMF workflows from acquisition to production, versioning, packaging and distribution. This includes receiving IMF packages, referencing IMF assets in a central repository, leveraging IMF metadata, both technical and editorial, to search on all assets and data; generating proxies for preview of track files and CPLs in Dalet WebSpace; visualizing assets relationships (track files and CPLs, CPLs and OPLs), automating the creation of new versions, connecting CPLs using EIDR (Entertainment Identifier Registry) and ISAN (International Standard Audiovisual Number) ids.

Enhanced Collaboration

Beyond media management, Dalet Galaxy five is a full communication and collaboration platform for connected teams. New collaboration enhancements include Media Bins that provide the ultimate in media sharing flexibility; Dalet On-the-Go brings programs management tools to your phone and tablet; the updated Dalet Chat capabilities allow users to work by thread and embed assets such as graphics, audio and video files to provide a more comprehensive communication stream.

Comprehensive Editing Experience

Dalet Galaxy five offers a more comprehensive and collaborative editing experience to fit any workflow and editor's needs. Dalet Webspace features a story-boarder for cut editing anywhere; the Dalet OneCut built-in desktop editor gets richer with more editing tracks, new transitions and effects; the Dalet Xtend integration with Adobe Premiere Pro CC expands to support Adobe Projects as well as the Dalet CG-on-the-Timeline model.

Enhanced Show Automation

Expanding production control automation capabilities, Dalet Galaxy five offers a new version of Dalet On-Air, featuring new automation events macros for control of studio devices such as lighting, audio and camera position but also deep integration of these automation events with the full orchestration layer of the platform.

Business Intelligence

The new version of the Dalet Report Center features new set of data extractions and data model that supports analysis and reporting on a new set of business indicators. At NAB 2018, Dalet will illustrate this with some first business reports focused on a typical news operation and its contents.

Learn More About Dalet Galaxy five at Dalet Pulse

Join 250+ media and technology executives at Dalet Pulse to discover latest innovations from Dalet and technology partners. Dalet Pulse will take place on April 8th at the SLS Hotel in Las Vegas. To register, please visit: http://createsend.com/t/r-8CC34E99D2F084F42540EF23F30FEDED.

Dalet Press Briefings at NAB Show 2018

To schedule a press briefing with Dalet, please contact Alex Molina at alex@zazilmediagroup.com.

About Dalet Digital Media Systems

Dalet solutions and services enable media organizations to create, manage and distribute content faster and more efficiently, fully maximizing the value of assets. Dalet products are built on three distinct platforms that, when combined, form versatile business solutions that power end-to-end workflows for news, sports, program preparation, production, archive and radio. Individually, Dalet platforms and products offer targeted applications with key capabilities to address critical media workflow functions such as ingest, QC, edit, transcode and multiplatform distribution.

The foundation for Dalet productivity-enhancing workflow solutions, Dalet Galaxy is the enterprise Media Asset Management (MAM) & Orchestration platform that unifies the content chain by managing assets, metadata, workflows and processes across multiple and diverse production and distribution systems. Specially tailored for news and media workflows, this unique technology platform helps broadcasters and media professionals increase productivity while providing operational and business visibility.

Dalet AmberFin is the high-quality, scalable transcoding platform with fully integrated ingest, mastering, QC and review functionalities, enabling facilities to make great pictures in a scalable, reliable and interoperable way. Addressing the demanding needs of studio production, multi-camera ingest, sports logging and highlights production, the innovative Dalet Brio video server platform combines density and cost-effectiveness with high reliability. Adopted by leading broadcasters, Dalet Cube is a suite of applications to create, manage and deliver graphics in a newsroom scenario.

Dalet supports customers from the initial planning stages to well beyond project execution. Our global presence includes 17 offices strategically located throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, North America and South America, and a network of more than 60 professional partners serving 87 countries worldwide. This collective experience and knowledge enables our customers to realize potential increases in productivity, efficiency and value of their assets.

The comprehensive Dalet Care program ensures deployments remain up and running with 24/7 support 365 days a year.

Dalet systems are used around the world by many thousands of individual users at hundreds of TV and Radio content producers, including public broadcasters (ABS-CBN, BBC, CBC, DR, FMM, France TV, RAI, RFI, Russia Today, RT Malaysia, VOA), commercial networks and operators (Canal+, FOX, eTV, MBC Dubai, MediaCorp, Mediaset, Orange, Time Warner Cable, Warner Bros, Sirius XM Radio), and government organizations (Canadian House of Commons, Australian Parliament and UK Parliament).

Dalet is traded on the NYSE-EURONEXT stock exchange (Eurolist C): ISIN: FR0011026749, Bloomberg DLT:FP, Reuters: DALE.PA.

Dalet® is a registered trademark of Dalet Digital Media Systems. All other products and trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

Boston, MA — April 4, 2018 - EditShare a technology leader in intelligent shared storage and media management solutions, today announced a brand new standalone version of its Flow MAM software, designed for non-EditShare storage environments such as Avid NEXIS, Storage DNA and Amazon S3. As a fully software defined MAM platform, Flow has been completely re-engineered to maximize the value of customers’ existing storage infrastructure by adding an intelligent media management layer that can manage millions of assets across multiple storage tiers in different locations. At the core of Flow lie several workflow engines that enable collaboration through Ingest, Search, Review, Logging, Editing and Delivery, alongside a powerful workflow automation engine for automating tasks such as transcoding and delivery. Flow’s award-winning remote workflow features also provide the ability to review content remotely, as well as edit content on a timeline with voice-over and effects from anywhere in the world.

With a comprehensive suite of apps, Flow helps users manage content and associated metadata from ingest through to archive, offering unmatched collaborative features for fast, efficient workflows. “The power of our Flow MAM software is that it provides a unified view of all your assets, no matter where they are stored. On premise, in tape archives or in the cloud, Flow tracks and manages your content, making it available to use instantly and freeing up valuable time to focus on the more creative aspects of a production. And with this new standalone version of Flow, we are making these same great features and workflows available for your existing storage infrastructure,” comments James Richings, managing director, EditShare.

Along with over 500 software updates, this new version of Flow features a redesigned UI, unifying the user experience across web-based and desktop apps. Flow Story and AirFlow now have a similar look and feel, making it easier to switch between them in different scenarios. Flow has also introduced new capabilities to remotely view Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere edits in a web browser using AirFlow; Range Markers for enhanced Logging and Review capabilities; new software licensing with a customer portal and license management tools; and seamless integration with EditShare’s new QScan AQC software, making AQC available at any stage of the post-production workflow.

“This latest version of Flow offers a wealth of features for any storage environment. As shooting ratios increase and budgets decrease, managing your media assets becomes a critical part of any production, large or small,” comments Richings. “We are excited to release this new version of Flow and help users manage and monetize their assets regardless of their storage platform.”

The demand for remote workflows has also increased over the past year, as more people work outside of the traditional post-production environment. Out of the box, Flow caters to this increasing trend by enabling full remote access to content, as well as seamless integration with leading NLEs such as Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere. “We are seeing a huge demand from users to interact and collaborate with each other from different locations. The ability to work from anywhere without incurring the time and cost of physically moving content around is becoming much more desirable. Flow not only makes this possible, it also eliminates the complexity. With a simple setup, Flow helps you track your assets, automate workflows and collaborate from anywhere in the world... it really couldn’t be any easier. We are also introducing a new pay-as-you-go model, making asset management affordable for even the smallest of teams.”

Pricing and Availability

Flow will be available through worldwide authorized sales partners and distributors on the 30th of May 2018. Pricing starts from as little as USD $19 per user, per month and will be available through month, year and multi-year subscriptions as well as outright licenses. Existing Flow users with EditShare storage will be able to upgrade in Q3 2018.

Attendees to the 2018 NAB Show can book a private demonstration with an EditShare expert to discuss their workflow needs and how EditShare Flow 2019 can help at: editshare.com/book-demo-nab-2018.

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 Contacts

Nick Govoni
Zazil Media Group
(e) nick@zazilmediagroup.com
(p) +1 (978) 866 7354

Boston, MA — March 8, 2018 - EditShare a technology leader in intelligent shared storage and media management solutions, today announced that it will be showcasing new capabilities across its award-winning XStream EFS scale out storage, Flow media asset management, QUALES automated quality check and file verification, and XStream EFS 40NL nearline storage solutions at NAB 2018 (booth SL8620). Attendees to the EditShare booth will see first hand how the new XStream EFS Auditing Dashboard mitigates potential hacking and content theft, as well as how XStream EFS 40NL enhances tiered storage workflows. EditShare media experts will also demonstrate QUALES AQC capabilities as integrated with Flow Media Asset Management, revealing new workflows that lower costs and meet the demands of evolving delivery requirements for popular OTT platforms. Finally, EditShare will be showcasing for the first time how the brand new, software-defined Flow media asset management platform expands remote workflow opportunities and collaboration.

“You can be producing outstanding work, but if your content is not secure and your delivery methodology is spotty, you are putting your business at risk,” says James Richings, Managing Director, EditShare. “With the expansion of IT into media workflows and the growing popularity of OTT platforms, the time is now to ensure your facility has the right security layers and delivery methodology in place to minimize the risk of stolen content and bad file format deliveries. EditShare’s NAB showcase presents new storage auditing, media asset management and quality assurance solutions that address workflow weaknesses with best practice solutions that align with industry standards that will soon become table stakes for doing business.”

Attendees to the 2018 NAB Show can book a private demonstration with an EditShare expert to discuss their workflow needs and how EditShare solutions can help at: editshare.com/book-demo-nab-2018.

XStream EFS File Auditing Capabilities

At IBC2017, EditShare unveiled EFS XStream Auditing - the industry’s first purpose-built scale out storage solution with auditing designed for the media and entertainment market. This revolutionary product provides comprehensive auditing and reporting of all file system activity, including file creation, deletion, modification, opens and reads as well as general media space access. EditShare auditing capabilities are designed to deter cyber criminals by providing system administrators with a complete digital footprint of all file interactions.

Unique to this solution is the intuitive XStream EFS Auditing Dashboard that provides administrators a high-level view of activity with the ability to drill down to individual users and files.

EditShare EFS 40NL Nearline Storage for EFS Tiered Storage

The XStream EFS 40NL delivers the performance and economics of traditional nearline storage with the scalability, fault-tolerance and ease of use of the proven EditShare EFS shared storage solution. Administrators can easily add one or more EFS 40NL nodes of cost-optimized storage to an existing XStream EFS storage cluster as well as configure the EFS 40NL as an independent storage cluster for disaster recovery or media backup purposes.

QUALES Automated Quality Check & File Verification

Now AMWA-compliant for AS-11 UK DPP, the EditShare team is paving the way for easy compliance at the the click of a button. The unique QUALES user interface is designed for the creative, giving an instant visual presentation of the quality-checked file. Flow users, which include producers, post supervisors, editors and other non-engineer staff, will have an intuitive visual aid to spot-check content. With QC offered as a core capability within the EditShare Flow media asset management platform, users will be able to systematically QC content at any point across the workflow saving countless hours of production and post-production time.

Stay tuned for a massive QC product lineup launch on the NAB Show floor.

Flow: Independent Software-Defined Media Asset Management Platform

Announced at IBC2017, Flow will be available as a storage-agnostic software solution and will work with industry-standard storage solutions, providing a layer of content creation, media management and workflow automation that optimizes the entire production workflow. Search, find and retrieve valuable assets quickly and efficiently, while getting content directly into your favorite NLE, whether it’s Adobe Premiere, Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro or Lightworks.

In addition to the new solutions, EditShare will have its full lineup of products on hand including all scale out shared storage models XStream EFS 450, EFS 200 and EFS 300 scale out storage; and GEEVS multi-channel ingest and playout server.

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.

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Press Contacts

Nick Govoni
Zazil Media Group
(e) nick@zazilmediagroup.com
(p) +1 (978) 866 7354

BOSTON—WGBH Television and Radio of Boston has installed Xytech’s MediaPulse Sky for facilities and asset management.

According to Erik Nordin, WGBH’s technical project manager, the PBS station decided it was time to take the next step in streamlining their facilities management capabilities, and chose to implement Xytech’s Media Pulse. As long-time Xytech Enterprise clients, they were particularly drawn to the software’s web-based Media Pulse Sky user interface, which offers a focus on mobile, with zero-touch deployment and no client installation, among other features.

WGBH also chose to deploy MediaPulse in its Creative department, an area requiring some of the same scheduling and billing needs, and worked with Xytech’s Director of Product Integration and Workflow Automation, Tanmay Goel, to customize the solution to their unique needs.

[Read: Xytech Powers Scheduling Logistics For NBC Olympics]

Using the MediaPulse Development Platform, Goel created a custom-configured front-end that allowed WGBH’s Creative users to raise requests that are automatically converted to MediaPulse Work Orders so the staff could schedule quickly and easily. The scheduled events are then seamlessly processed into invoices, significantly reducing the latency period.

“You can contemplate about your work, you can schedule it, you can create the items and deliver the invoices all at the user level,” Nordin said. “This enables us to move more quickly and efficiently as a business. We are also excited about completing development on the API and even more, including further linking it with our financial systems.” WGBH will use the MediaPulse Development Platform to take invoices and other financial transactions and post them into their station’s general ledger system.

At the 2018 NAB show, Xytech will be in booth SL4305 demonstrating its latest facilities management products, including its DASH subscription service, which is based on the Azure cloud platform. 

TORONTO—Sinclair Broadcast Group has announced it has acquired a number of Masstech’s Masstech for News systems to create a centralized hub for sharing content among all of its news-producing stations. Masstech for News is a newsroom sharing, media management and archiving system that will simplify movement of video and stories between Sinclair locations and archives.

Masstech for News

A number of Sinclair stations already featured Masstech for News, but the new installation raise the number of stations by more than 50 percent. The system offers these stations automated local archive management; drag-and-drop sharing workflows; and access to content in the archives of other similarly-equipped Sinclair locations.

Additional features offered through the Masstech for News system are the Masstech Media Wires feature, which enables journalists to push selected stories and videos to other stations across the group; and the Video-Follows-Text technology, which ensures all text, metadata and media are transferred together with a drag-and-drop option.

Sinclair Broadcast Group owns and operates 163 TV stations in 79 markets.

Masstech is a provider of software for the management of digital media content and related information. The company is based in Toronto.