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

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

TVT: What will be your most important product news?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLAY MCCREERY: The growth in OTT live streaming and SVOD demand in the last year has been spectacular, grabbing many industry headlines. From Netflix’s continued subscriber growth, to Disney’s acquisition of MLBAM, to Apple’s and Amazon’s commitment to creating original content, the signs are that the OTT trend is on an exponential upward curve. While “multiplatform delivery” has been at the top of the IABM’s industry investment priority list for the last few years, we believe it has only been the beginning of this phase in the media and entertainment industry’s evolution. We have witnessed the rise of CDNs, online video players (OVPs), cloud services, and more automation of workflows to support the rise in demand for live and VOD content.

To support this business trend, the technology trend we believe will grab headlines at the 2018 NAB Show is massively scalable platforms that support the changing business model of the media industry. Cloud solutions have offered this for those happy to move their content to another location to store, transform and deliver. We see a hybrid approach combining on-prem and public cloud that is more cost-effective. Elastic video infrastructure, primarily in a hybrid private/public ecosystem, is how we see the industry evolving, and we think is the hot tech topic for the 2018 NAB Show.

TVT:What will be your most important product news?

MCCREERY: Concurrent has been investing for the last 20 years in next-generation solutions for storing, transforming, protecting and delivering content. Today we provide solutions to our customers that annually deliver billions of streams of video to more than 50 million consumers. From video-tuned object storage, to software transcoding, to containerized edge caching, Concurrent has its eye firmly on helping media businesses scale their content preparation and delivery processes. Whether our customers want to use public cloud services, keep everything on-prem, or have a hybrid model, we are there to support them with software-defined solutions.

Our most important product news at the show is focused on scaling content preparation processes so that content providers can manage the growth in SVOD and prepare for their own OTT services. Concurrent has launched a software-defined, highly scalable storage and transcoding solution that provides content providers with the best mix of flexibility, control and value for money. With the ability to scale-out storage and transcoding capacity easily, and to use and pay for transcoding capacity on-demand either on-prem or in the cloud, we are pleased to showcase this solution at the show.

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

MCCREERY: First, most of our peers in the industry offer either storage or transcoding. We offer both products and can guarantee the interoperability. This guarantee is, we believe, very important for media customers looking for robust, scalable solutions.

Second, for the storage element, we provide object storage, based on the extremely powerful open-source Ceph solution, using COTS hardware. By tuning Ceph for video use-cases we have created an easy-to-use storage solution, Aquari, that provides archive, nearline and online storage in a single platform. This simplifies storage infrastructure and makes it more resilient, with key features like erasure coding, proactive data quality assurance and support for object and file protocols.

Third, for the transcoding element, we have created a new software-transcoder, Zephyr, that supports live and file workflows in all major formats and codecs. Using a blade architecture to scale out capacity provides ultimate flexibility. The most important part is that it is a software-product, deployable on COTS hardware, across a mix of public cloud, private cloud or on-prem COTS hardware. Now our customers can choose where to deploy for best financial return.

Finally, Concurrent is also a CDN Solutions vendor. We know how to package and deliver content over any type of network. We are tuning the Aquari and Zephyr solutions to the video use cases that really help customers distribute their valuable content, to any device, anywhere.

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

MCCREERY: The NAB Show is the best event during the year to meet with hundreds of people in a short space of time. We are able to promote our message to the whole industry, build closer relationships with our sales and technology partners and meet new customers. The NAB Show is a big investment for each company that attends, and at Concurrent we believe it is a great opportunity for us to showcase what we do.

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

RALPH BACHOFEN: For broadcasters, the biggest trend is ATSC 3.0. The next-generation broadcast television system was approved in October 2017 and we are already seeing broadcast television stations successfully rolling out ATSC 3.0 broadcasts without disrupting service to existing TV viewers.

At the 2018 NAB Show, you can expect to see technologies that offer support for ATSC 3.0, allowing broadcasters to deliver innovative services, such as modernized service guides, emergency communication support, addressable content delivery, interactive program enhancements and data broadcast applications. Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that the transition to ATSC 3.0 will be gradual. Broadcasters should choose technologies that support both ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0.

TVT:What will be your most important product news?

BACHOFEN: A key highlight will be ournext-generation StreamScopeanalyzer—the StreamScope MT-60. The StreamScope MT-60 platform now supports a comprehensive toolkit for advanced RF input analysis. Using the MT-60, RF input performance characteristics can be assessed and verified in several new views, including 6 MHz single channel, 18 MHz adjacent channel and full 1 GHz spectrum. Critical RF measurements in these views allow users to quickly identify and isolate RF layer performance issues. What’s especially unique and advantageous about the MT-60 is that it can be upgraded to add ATSC 3.0 analysis capability with StreamScope XM MT software.

We will also demonstrate how the latest version of Triveni Digital’s GuideBuilder XM signaling and announcement generator, with support for ATSC 3.0 MMTP and ROUTE encoding protocols, is helping broadcasters with channel sharing and ATSC 3.0 preparations. GuideBuilderXM offers unified functionality per ATSC 3.0 standard, along with support for legacy standards such as ATSC 1.0 PSIP and DVB-SI. Using GuideBuilder XM, broadcasters can automatically ingest schedule updates from all popular listing services, apply them to any number of services and output program and service guide data to third-party multiplexers.

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

BACHOFEN: Triveni Digital is one of the only digital TV metadata management, content delivery and service quality assurance solutions providers offering full-fledged support for channel sharing, the repack and dual-standards broadcasting. As an established leader in the market, Triveni Digital offers reliable and cutting-edge metadata generation, transport stream analysis, monitoring and troubleshooting solutions, with an entire ecosystem of ATSC 3.0 partners.

What’s more, our solutions have successfully been deployed by broadcasters testing out ATSC 3.0, including Capitol Broadcasting Co., owner and operator of WRAL-TV, WRAZ-TV and WILM-TV in North Carolina, which broadcast the first live commercial ATSC 3.0 simulcast in the United States and WJW-TVin Cleveland. WJW-TV is using Triveni Digital’s GuideBuilder XM ATSC 3.0 signaling and announcement generator and StreamScope XM MT monitoring and analysis system to test interoperability and performance of ATSC 3.0 television operations.

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

BACHOFEN: The NAB Show is a great opportunity to meet with potential and existing customers, showcase our latest metadata management and service quality assurance innovations and demonstrate the fruits of our labor with technology partners. Getting face-to-face time with broadcasters is a learning experience, in terms of collecting feedback from our customer base. Listening to the needs of our customers is what has helped Triveni Digital be a leading technology provider to the broadcast market for more than 20 years.