MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA – January 14, 2020 – TVU Networks, the market and technology leader in IP-based live video solutions, today announced industry veteran Jared Timmins joined the company as senior vice president of solutions in late Dec. 2019. Based in the Atlanta area, he will lead the company’s Global Solutions Team, which will partner with TVU customers to help them quickly adapt to changes in consumer media consumption.

Prior to joining TVU, Timmins held several senior positions at Grass Valley. In his most recent role as vice president of advanced technology, Timmins worked closely with customers to help transform their business operations to digital and SaaS, as well as build cloud first systems. He also brings previous experience in solutions architecture as vice president of global sales engineering. Before joining Grass Valley, Timmins held senior strategic sales roles at Piksel and Miranda Technologies.

“We are very pleased to welcome Jared to TVU. He understands the challenges facing today’s changing production environment, and is experienced working with broadcasters to identify the proper solutions for operational success,” said Paul Shen, CEO of TVU Networks. “With Jared now on board, we are consolidating all of our solutions engineering resources globally under his leadership.”

Added Shen, “TVU has always been in the forefront of developing IP and cloud solutions designed to streamline and optimize production workflows. We continue to integrate more production tools into TVU MediaMind, our story-centric workflow platform. This will expand the platform’s ability to deliver the end-to-end needs of the broadcast Media Supply Chain, as well as allow for the mass content customization for a single audience essential for success in the Media 4.0 revolution.”

“I am excited to be leading global solutions at TVU during a time of rapid evolution in the media industry,” said Timmins. “In bringing a consultative approach to our customer relationships, the Global Solutions Team will focus on identifying opportunities for greater operational efficiencies and greater content monetization throughout our customer’s workflows. We will provide recommendations that utilize the next generation of media supply chain solutions and technologies, such as cloud enabled workflows.”

Media companies interested in learning more about TVU MediaMind or looking to streamline and optimize their production workflows can contact the TVU Global Solutions Team through the TVU website.

About TVU Networks®
TVU Networks has over 3,000 customers globally. The TVU Networks family of IP transmission and live production solutions gives broadcasters and organizations a powerful and reliable workflow to distribute live video content to broadcast, online and mobile platforms. TVU has become a critical part of the operations of many major media companies. The TVU Networks suite of solutions has been used to acquire, transmit, produce, manage and distribute professional-quality live IP HD footage as an integral part of news, sports and major global events. For more information about TVU Networks solutions, please visit www.tvunetworks.com.

AMSTERDAM—At the 2018 IBC Show, live IP video solutions provider TVU Networks will focus on TVU MediaMind platform, which uses artificial intelligence to drive how media content can be produced and consumed.

“At IBC we will be demonstrating solutions that deliver real ROI benefits today, as well as pointing towards an AI-led future for broadcast acquisition, production and distribution,” said Paul Shen, CEO of TVU Networks. “We look forward to demonstrating at IBC how our customers can embrace the exciting AI-driven changes that are about to revolutionize the media industry.”

Visitors to TVU’s IBC booth can also check out its TVU One field transmitter, which supports HEVC and utilizes TVU’s patented Inverse IS+ (StatMux Plus) transmission algorithm to transmit HD quality video with half-second latency

Also at the booth: the TVU MLink cellular 3G/4G LTE, satellite and microwave live video uplink transmitter’ the TVU Router, a portable broadband Internet access point that can provide over 200Mbps of secure, reliable, high-speed wireless Internet connectivity anywhere; and the TVU Anywhere mobile app, which provides turbo-boosted connectivity through bonding Wifi and cellular, enabling broadcasters to work anywhere.

TVU will also demo TVU Producer, a cloud-based live event production system that minimizes the complexity and cost of covering live video events from any location and the TVU Remote Production System, a cost-efficient solution capable of synchronizing up to 6 HD SDI signals over the standard internet without any OB vans, ideal for second and third football league tournaments.

TVU will also feature a section of its booth for attendees to learn more about how to stream, distribute and monetize video through the company’s TVU Grid marketplace. TVU Grid enables broadcasters to acquire live video from different sources and seamlessly distribute to thousands of Grid-enabled locations, as exemplified by major US broadcast networks such as CNN, which uses TVU Grid to make live video accessible to select TV station partners.

TVU will be in Stand 2.B28. For more information or to register, visit www.ibc.org.

One of the more intriguing storylines of this year’s NAB Show was the realization that the biggest impact that automated intelligence will have on the television industry is that AI will allow production to change its focus from a program-centric process to a story-centric process where content is automatically produced, targeted and distributed to the viewer. In short, using AI will allow broadcasters to identify and tailor video content to individual tastes, and moreso, allow content producers to better monetize their assets.

This concept—known as “Media 4.0” where AI is used to automate the production and distribution of media to any device on-demand—has been around for several years. Whereas Media 1.0-3.0 represented the evolution of media from film and theater to radio and television broadcasting and finally to the current IP-based landscape, 4.0 can best be illustrated by the music industry’s use of big data and the cloud to provide the personalization of media consumption down to a granular level, according to Paul Shen, founder of TVU Networks, a provider of IP-based media production and distribution tools. Using Spotify as an example, Shen noted that the music streaming services’ popularity is not necessarily because of the depth of its library, but by the ability of its sophisticated algorithms to learn consumer’s musical tastes, creating “personalized radio.”

“I have 90 days of music collections on iTunes and I don’t listen to it at all, I use Spotify,” Shen said. “The reason is easy. I don’t have to do the work. Spotify offers the content the way I want it. It uses artificial intelligence to create the playlist.”

TEN YEARS BEHIND

This use of AI has helped the music industry and IP-based video services like YouTube and Netflix to leapfrog 10 years ahead of broadcast, according to Shen, who believes that current production and distribution methods are bogged down by the human-driven assembly-like process that can be changed to an automated process by using AI and machine learning with the unlocked power of metadata. To overcome these hurdles, TVU introduced its MediaMind cloud platform at the 2018 NAB Show.

MediaMind puts the concept of Media 4.0 into practice by using AI, and object and speech recognition to maximize the use of media assets, particularly in live production. This “smart media factory” works within the existing video production workflow but enhances it by automating the ability to identify video content and push it to a variety of platforms.

Shen uses President Trump’s recent North Korean prisoner release ceremony as an example of how the MediaMind concept could be put into practice.

“There were a lot of cameras there that were recording for hours, waiting for the moment [prisoners debarked from the plane], but they didn’t know exactly when,” Shen said. Using AI-powered facial recognition technology enabled by MediaMind, the cameras and mics could be automated to just focus on particular shots of interest to individual viewers, for example.

This CAS (Contribution Automation Solution) is one part of TVU’s MediaMind concept, but another equally important concept is the automation of the entire planning, acquisition and routing process. It integrates with the news system, router, camera, transmission devices and alert system. Once a story is created, the system will help manage resources by sending an alert message to the corresponding reporters and crews as well as all of the connected devices, such as cameras, transmission devices, routers and recording devices. Once content arrives into MediaMind, it becomes instantly searchable via metadata that is tagged to the content from acquisition onward. This advanced search capability gives MediaMind the ability to push content to the producer, rather than the producer having to manually access it.

“A producer says ‘I want to write a story about the return of the three Americans from North Korea,’” Shen notes as an example,” the content will appear next to him rather than him having to go search for it.”

IN PRACTICE

The MediaMind API is already being integrated into the workflows of 4-5 of TVU’s approximately 2,500 TV station customers. Shen says customers can pick and choose which parts of MediaMind they want to integrate into their processes, which covers the production chain from acquisition, editing, processing and distribution.

In today’s live televised production environment, nearly 99 percent of the raw material goes unused and therefore, un-monetized, according to Shen. Current production processes are tedious and don’t meet the demands of today’s viewer, who is used to using social media to provide the type of feedback that allows content to automatically be “pushed” to them.

Shen thinks Media 4.0, illustrated by TVU’s MediaMind platform, represents the future of live production—an integration between production and consumption—where viewers’ tastes, rather than the producers’ whims, will drive a more “story-centric” workflow.

“Media 4.0 is going to fundamentally change what’s needed to make the TV industry meet the demand of the audiences,” Shen said. “That’s what this whole initiative is about.”