LONDON—Fremantle has announced it has selected Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build what the companies are calling "a future-proof, scalable, global content supply chain platform that adapts to the evolving demands of the industry."

In announcing the deal, Jens Richter, CEO of Commercial and International at Fremantle explained that “a robust content supply chain that will cater to the dynamic business requirements of monetizing content is paramount, and we look forward to working with PFT and AWS to see what we can achieve together. This collaboration will provide us with the agility, visibility, speed and scalability required across Commercial and International, Digital and Global channels to streamline our media supply chain and digital processes.”

The platform will seamlessly unify Fremantle’s operations across markets, provide real-time visibility into content workflows, and enable faster time-to-market and commercialization of assets.

The companies said that the platform, which is being built on AWS, will use the latest cloud technologies, and will benefit from the scalability, security, and flexibility enabled by cloud computing. Fremantle will also use PFT’s flagship solution, CLEAR Smart MAM, as part of the platform, which is also built on AWS. CLEAR’s agentic AI capabilities will help Fremantle enrich content with contextual metadata, streamline workflows, and enhance efficiencies across its content operations.

“Our offering is designed to meet the most demanding needs of global content studios like Fremantle,” explained Ramki Sankaranarayanan, founder and global CEO of Prime Focus Technologies. “We’re thrilled to partner with them on this transformative journey and enable their vision of a modern, AI-powered supply chain that fuels creativity and revenue.”

Andy Stephenson, head of broadcast, media, and sport, UK, at AWS added that: “We are proud to support Fremantle on its digital transformation journey. By harnessing technologies like cloud computing and AI, Fremantle will be able to drive innovation across its business, scale quickly, easily, and securely, and extract new value from its content.”

The project will be overseen by Thalia Crone, global head of Media Supply Chain Operations, Fremantle. Fremantle’s Commercial and International division is responsible for maximizing the commercial value of Fremantle content. From selling content to international broadcasters and platforms, selling Fremantle formats, publishing content to digital platforms, and setting up and managing all Fremantle direct-to-consumer channels.

Missed any of our recent product news? Here is TV Tech's weekly wrap-up of new products, services and deployments we published in our newsletter between August 12 to August 16. The stories are listed from the newest on Friday August 16, day by day back to our stories from Monday August 12.

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The DNEG Group has completed acquisition of Prime Focus Technologies. 

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. PFT was a subsidiary of DNEG’s parent company, Prime Focus Limited. It has offices located across North America, the United Kingdom and India. 

The acquisition, which was previously announced with the issue of a memorandum of understanding last year on April 13, 2023, boosts the DNEG Group’s technological capabilities with PFT’s media workflow and automation software suite, CLEAR, and CLEAR AI, a multi-modal Gen AI platform powered by patented ‘Machine Wisdom’ technologies. Purpose built for the M&E industry, CLEAR and CLEAR AI offer streaming platforms, studios, broadcasters, and brands transformational solutions to help manage content, video collaboration and automation in the content production and distribution process.

Acquiring the software-as-a-service business of PFT strengthens the DNEG Group’s status as an end-to-end solutions provider and will help it expand into media tech and distribution services, including fulfillment, localization, and marketing. 

The completion of the acquisition also follows the announcement last week of a $200 million investment in the DNEG Group by leading Abu Dhabi-based investor United Al Saqer Group. The investment accelerates the DNEG Group’s strategy of innovation and diversification, including the activation of a new division, Brahma, which is developing a comprehensive AI-powered, photo-real CGI creator which will democratize photo-real content creation in a wide range of applications.

“We are ushering in a new era with an AI-first approach across the content value chain,” said Ramki Sankaranarayanan, founder and Global CEO at PFT. “Over the years, our customers have experienced notable productivity enhancements from our AI models and applications, and our Gen AI initiatives are poised to transform their content to meet new revenue opportunities. Partnering with DNEG strengthens our capacity to innovate rapidly and deliver exceptional value to our clients.”

“Investment in our proprietary technology underpins everything that we do in the DNEG Group and ensures our continued and future success,” added DNEG chairman and CEO Namit Malhotra. “The acquisition of PFT and its market-leading technology and services adds another string to our bow, bringing further opportunities and advantages to our global partners and clients, and extending our capabilities across the entire content lifecycle. Our technology vision begins at home, and just like our new Brahma AI division, PFT’s CLEAR and CLEAR AI will also support our own teams as we invest in, develop, produce, shoot, finish, and deliver the highest-quality content across the world, including in our newly announced Abu Dhabi hub.”

With the completion of the deal, the DNEG Group describes its operations are follows: 

• DNEG - Academy Award winning visual effects, animation, and associated creative services to Hollywood and global visual entertainment creators. DNEG is known for its work on numerous high-profile movies and animations, such as Dune, Oppenheimer, Interstellar, Tenet and Blade Runner 2049, as well as the Harry Potter, James Bond, Fast and Furious, Mission: Impossible and Marvel Cinematic Universe franchises.
• Brahma - developing the industry’s leading AI-powered, photo-real CGI creator.
• Prime Focus Studios - content and IP investment and development across live-action, animation, and gaming. Prime Focus is currently co-producing a number of high-profile feature films, including Animal Friends, Indian epic Ramayana, and The Angry Birds Movie 3.
• Prime Focus Technologies, a leading provider of AI technology and media services powered by the Cloud.

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

The development and adoption of the SMPTE-based IMF (Interoperable Master Format) continues to thrive within the Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry. The reasons for this are many, but primarily because IMF more easily and readily facilitates the management and processing of multiple content versions that need to be created for distribution across global channels.

The file-based framework (SMPTE ST 2067-2) of IMF, derived from the DCP (Digital Cinema Package) packing standard, includes essence containers, audio and timed text essence formats, basic descriptive metadata and complex playlists. High definition, SDR images, and JPEG 2000 image coding is supported, making it ideal for studios, post production facilities, the manufacturing community and, as a delivery format to OTT services.

Each content version is embodied in a composition of finished work that is logically pieced together with localized audio/video/text elements to develop region-specific masters for video streaming service/linear broadcast platforms. For instance, an advertisement may require three different versions – one for television broadcast, one for airline showings, and a third in a different language. In each version, the composition playlist (CPL) defines its playback timeline. Standards like IMF additionally play a key role in ensuring that storage and networks are used optimally to allow a seamless workflow for these multi-versioned, often large audio and visual works.

COMPATIBLE TECHNOLOGY

Technology solutions that support the file-based format workflow also play a key role in IMF’s growing rate of adoption. Included among those are hybrid cloud architecture and IMF-compatible solutions such as media players. The player enables collaboration and decision making in the workflow without having to access the original IMF package each time a CPL is played back, thereby easing content transfer loads and optimizing storage consumption across streaming locations. Meanwhile, hybrid cloud architecture has been instrumental in offering cost savings (by decreasing capital expenses and shifting costs to lower operating expenses), auto-scalable storage, and end-to-end automation of media asset monetization workflows. A hybrid architecture also helps ensure security because the content resides on-premise, while the applications run on the cloud.

[Read: IMF: Unleashing The Benefits Of File-Based Content]

IMF packages may reside in the Cloud (i.e. Amazon/Azure), remote locations or customer premises and may be composed using any of the desktop CPL editing solutions such as Clipster, Color Font, Gray Meta, and Netflix CPL Editor, among others. IMF-compatible players can accommodate these many variations and provide the ability to preview, playback, review, and distribute a CPL with all its essences, including video, audio, and captions, over streaming proxies. IMF players can additionally ingest complete and supplemental IMF packages and perform functions including search, playback, upload and download complete or partial packages or updates, as well as perform distribution of IMF packages or rendered and transcoded output (video files rather than packages).

BEHIND THE SCENES

The vast richness that streaming offers comes with a complexity that requires added efficiency in the workflow, and M&E organizations are responding to this by transitioning their libraries to the IMF standard. Furthermore, with 4k and 8k fast becoming a reality, the need to improve the cost effectiveness of handling such large files becomes even more imperative.

An IMF based Cloud player is designed to solve many of these issues on several levels. For instance, IMF has the ability to define new masters by preparing a playlist using logical references of the underlying content. Since a number of downstream use cases are expected to be executed from the MAM, an IMF player supports these activities with preview/playback and review/distribute of the compositions playlists using streaming proxies. Playback is frame accurate with all the playlist elements (audio/video/subtitles/captions) over streaming proxies. Additionally, packaging and delivery of IMF compositions is generally supported in the distributed workflow capabilities of an Enterprise Resource Planner such as Prime Focus Technologies’ CLEAR Media ERP.

Other benefits realized when utilizing an IMF player in the workflow include fewer content copies; centralized streaming over CDNs (content distribution networks) by content owners; additional solutions to help monetize centrally streamed content, originating from several different video streaming service platforms; centralized rights management for video streaming serve platforms by content owners; and improved control over piracy.

The development of IMF players and their integration into Media Asset Management platforms will prove to be exceptionally valuable in the coming years – a true asset to content creators. 

CULVER CITY, CA – Prime Focus Technologies (PFT), the technology arm of Prime Focus has opened a new office in Sydney, Australia, to increase its local support for customers in the region.

The company also announced the appointment of Graeme Whineray to be the Director of Sales for ANZ region. Whineray will be based in the new office and brings more than 20 years of experience in the broadcast and post production industries across Australia and New Zealand.

Prior to joining Prime Focus Technologies, Whineray had a successful career delivering creative post environments, integrated news room solutions and asset management platforms for metro and regional broadcasters. He held positions at Amber Technology, Fairlight AU, GBG Technology, and most recently was Enterprise Sales Manager for Avid Technology covering Australia and New Zealand.

“We are delighted to be enhancing our presence in such a vibrant, creative part of the world. Graeme brings in a wealth of experience, and is a key value addition to PFT” said Ankur Jain, VP & Head, Sales - APAC, PFT. “Our Cloud-based media solutions are revolutionizing the business of content management throughout the media industry. It is important to us to support our customers locally as they transition their broadcast technology to take advantage of these powerful new tools.”