OUTtv is a Canadian broadcaster that has successfully evolved into a leading LGBTQ+ multi-platform entertainment brand, spanning direct-to-consumer apps and partnerships with major platforms like Apple, Amazon, Roku, and YouTube. Today, OUTtv distributes content, including original productions, licensed series, films, and documentaries across 14 countries and five continents, continually expanding into new territories and platforms like FAST channels.

Samantha Amaral, OUTtv’s Manager of Broadcast and OTT Operations, oversees the network’s entire technical workflow—from ingesting masters and managing archives to delivering to global partners. Her team is the backbone of broadcast and digital distribution, tasked with ensuring high-value content moves quickly, securely, and reliably across a growing operational footprint.

The Business Weight of Inefficiency

OUTtv’s expanding global reach quickly exposed the limitations of its legacy file transfer methods. Initially, the team relied on a mix of office hard drives for archiving and consumer-grade tools like Dropbox, WeTransfer, and Google Drive for transfers. This system quickly became unsustainable as file sizes increased and workflows became more complex.

A typical delivery package for OUTtv is comprehensive, requiring a ProRes master (HQ422 or 444), texted and textless files, split-track audio, marketing materials, closed captions, and metadata. When relying on legacy FTP, downloading these large packages could take two to three days, severely bogging down workstations and creating significant bottlenecks in the workflow. In addition, a substantial part of their archived library remained on local hard drives, creating a risk of content loss. With shrinking timelines and a growing need for a professional-grade, reliable solution, a change was critical.

How OUTtv Found Its Flow

The initial driver for a new solution was the need to modernize archives. This quickly expanded into a full-scale delivery and ingest solution after OUTtv learned about Signiant through a streaming platform partner.

After evaluating various options, Signiant was chosen for three key factors:

• Acceleration to support growing 4K workloads and meet aggressive delivery deadlines.
• Security that satisfied strict legal and partner requirements for high-value content.
• Simplicity for easy producer onboarding and minimal delivery errors.

Since implementing Signiant, the most dramatic impact has been the reduction in content submission and transfer times. What once stretched into days for a typical delivery package now only takes hours. This efficiency has eliminated major bottlenecks, giving Amaral’s seven-person team the confidence to scale operations, take on more partners, and expand to new locations without compromising timelines or requiring additional headcount. Even for re-deliveries, the turnaround is now a couple of hours instead of a couple of days.

Protecting Every Frame

While speed was the priority, security was an equally critical component of OUTtv’s decision, especially for content with stringent legal terms and compliance requirements. Signiant’s secure transfer protocols provided the enterprise-grade protection needed to keep sensitive, high-value content safe at every step of the workflow.

This combination of features has been transformative. Signiant utilizes proprietary acceleration technology to move content up to 100x faster than standard internet transmission speeds used by legacy tools like FTP. Simultaneously, its intuitive, user-friendly interface allows producers of all experience levels to easily deliver content through OUTtv branded portals.

Amaral states, “Signiant brings a professional level of file transfer that you don’t get with the other consumer-based tools. It’s leveled us up to a different league with file management.” This shift has provided the operations team with peace of mind, allowing them to focus on high-value tasks instead of troubleshooting transfers or worrying about unnecessary risk exposure.

The Foundation of Growth

The transition to Signiant has given OUTtv a stable foundation for the future. By smoothing out the delivery process from third-party producers and establishing a clear delivery path, the company has eliminated complexity and built a system that easily scales.

“It speaks volumes of what we can do now because we are not tied up in our processes and are continually changing as we grow,” Amaral explained. What started as a simple solution for faster transfers has snowballed into the operational infrastructure supporting OUTtv’s continued global expansion. With Signiant at the core of its operations, OUTtv is positioned to keep innovating and championing LGBTQ+ storytelling on a global stage, making a return to hard drives or FTP unimaginable.

LEXINGTON, Mass.—Signiant has launched its Customer Advisory Board (CAB), bringing together a select group of customers to collaborate on product strategy, workflows and the evolving demands of media supply chains.

The Signiant Customer Advisory Board is designed to provide a structured, ongoing forum where the company’s customers operate at scale. The forum will allow them to share practical insight into these challenges and help guide how accelerated content flow is achieved across increasingly complex ecosystems, Signiant said.

The Customer Advisory Board creates a two-way exchange of insight. Participating customers gain early visibility into Signiant’s strategic direction, opportunities to explore new approaches to accelerating access and decision-making across their environments and the ability to learn from peers facing similar technical and operational pressures.

In parallel, Signiant benefits from direct, candid input from technical leaders and operations teams—insight that informs product innovation and long-term roadmap decisions.

“The Signiant Customer Advisory Board creates a structured forum where we can learn directly from the teams pushing our platform the hardest, while giving them confidence that their feedback is shaping how Signiant evolves as a long-term strategic partner,” said Sebastian Vos, CEO of Signiant.

More information is available on the company’s website.

LEXINGTON, Mass.—Signiant has announced that it has joined the MovieLabs Industry Forum, a collaborative initiative established by MovieLabs to tackle industry challenges and accelerate innovation in media production and distribution.

MovieLabs was founded by major Hollywood studios to advance cutting-edge technologies and promote next-generation solutions that improve the speed, security, and reliability of content creation. Through the MovieLabs Industry Forum, members collaborate on defining common industry goals and developing new standards to drive greater efficiency and agility in media workflows, the group said.

A central focus of the forum is the MovieLabs 2030 Vision, which outlines key principles for transforming the media production landscape, including secure cloud-based workflows, automation, and flexible software-defined architectures.

“Signiant is pleased to join the MovieLabs Industry Forum. While it might seem counterintuitive that a leader in intelligent file transfer would support a vision where assets are ingested straight into the cloud and do not need to be moved, as a SaaS pioneer in the media industry, Signiant has been implementing many of the core principles of this vision for years,” said Ian Hamilton, Signiant’s CTO. “Securely Internet-connecting customer storage, facilitating collaboration and data exchange, is fundamental to our SaaS platform. Newer platform innovations enable seamless ‘like local’ interaction with globally distributed media assets, without duplicating files. While we support the 2030 Vision, we also have our own point of view and commentary informed by our production and post-production supply chain experience, which we’ve shared in a newly published paper.”

The paper on the MovieLabs 2030 Vision can be found here.

“We are pleased that Signiant is joining the MovieLabs Industry Forum to help drive the future of media creation,” said Richard Berger, CEO MovieLabs. “We look forward to collaborating with Signiant as we continue to establish common, interoperable solutions that enable the industry to meet the challenges of tomorrow."

LEXINGTON, Mass.—Tech-focused investment firm Battery Ventures has made a majority growth investment in Signiant to enable continued growth in its video production software-as-a-service (SaaS) business. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

Signiant’s technology allows large media files to move quickly and securely through the media supply chain regardless of where they are stored.

“Signiant’s solutions, including its Media Shuttle product—which uses a proprietary protocol to move files over any IP network, between both public cloud and on-premises storage locations—are high-quality and extremely sticky among its customers,” Battery Ventures principal Roland Anderson said. “We’re excited to work with the company to fuel further growth, both organic and through potential acquisitions.”

Some of the world’s largest media and entertainment companies in sectors such as postproduction, professional sports, gaming and broadcast/cable TV rely on the company’s products. Among its customers are NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, Ubisoft and the NHL, it said.

The company is now expanding the functionality of its file-transfer SaaS platform in pursuit of adjacent media service customers. Signiant will use the investment from Battery to fund product development and go-to-market activities, as well as potential future acquisitions in the media technology space, it said.

“We are thrilled to partner with Battery, a firm with a long history of scaling enterprise SaaS businesses, to begin writing the next chapter of the Signiant story,” Signiant CEO Margaret Craig said. “Both the company and the media industry are at inflection points. We feel our solutions are uniquely suited to meet the current moment in media and entertainment, which demands the type of efficiency and fast time-to-value that only a modern multitenant SaaS platform can deliver.”

Battery Ventures partner Dave Tabors said Signiant has successfully developed technology to assist media companies move large files. “In our view, Signiant has cracked the code on how to tackle this problem, building a robust SaaS business to facilitate the transfer of these files in a secure way. And we see the opportunity to grow the company’s market even more,” he said.

Both Anderson and Tabors will join Signiant’s board, the company said.

Pharus served as exclusive adviser to Signiant on the transaction with Mintz Levin acting as counsel.

More information is available on the company’s website.

In advance of the 2024 IBC Show, Sept. 13-17 at the RAI Amsterdam, TV Tech spoke with Jon Finegold, CMO for Signiant, who will be exhibiting in the show's "Content Everywhere" Zone.

TV Tech: Why did you choose to exhibit in the Content Everywhere Zone this year?
Jon Finegold: The Signiant Platform connects more than 50,000 businesses and more than 1 MM end users from every corner of the globe. Our platform enables creators to collaborate anywhere and distribute everywhere. It is the perfect place for Signiant to exhibit.

TVT: What will you be highlighting at your exhibit?
JF: We will be highlighting many new capabilities on the Signiant Platform with a lot of emphasis on our Media Engine services which enables customers to find, preview and interact with media assets across their diverse and distributed storage. Specific use cases include partial file restore from both cloud and on-prem storage, federated search across storage the ability to play a wide variety of professional media formats without having to pre-generate and store proxy files along with many new enhancements on our core file transfer products.

We will also be highlighting our partnership with TMT Insights – a collaboration which enables intelligent ingest of content from diverse partners directly into your title hierarchy preventing costly errors, reducing manual processes and providing a single pane of glass across all ingest operations.

TVT: Which trends do you expect will be most important at the show this year?
JF: While content creation is coming back from a slow 2023, content consumption is at an all-time high. We expect to see a lot of customers continuing to find ways to monetize their content libraries across a huge array of distribution platforms.

TVT: What brings you back to IBC every year?
JF: Signiant is a global company, and our platform connects the global media supply chain. IBC is a great opportunity to meet face to face with our customers, new prospects, thought leaders and media technology partners.

For more information, visit https://show.ibc.org/content-everywhere.

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.

Prime Focus Technologies to Debut CLEAR AI Agents at IBC 2024

The CLEAR AI Agents are designed to assist & co-work with professionals to execute specific tasks across content management, post-production, and marketing.

Leader and Phabrix to Show T&M Solutions at IBC 2024

They will be showcasing test and measurement solutions for the complete manufacturing & broadcast production chain.

RTL Deutschland Expands FAST Channel Offering

The new FAST channels are powered by Harmonic; netorium integrated the news FAST channels into RTL’s operations.

MRMC To Unveil Studiobot LT, Cinebot At IBC 2024

Studiobot LT is well-suited for box cameras with a studio lens and supports a wide envelope of motion.

Florida Panthers Launch New DTC Streaming Service

For the new season, every locally-produced game will stream live on new apps and air on broadcast over-the-air.

Cineverse Partners with Wurl on FAST Channels

The agreement will bring new channels to viewers, while also enhancing Cineverse’s monetization and discovery capabilities.

EvertzAV Brings Cutting-Edge AVoIP Solutions to IBC 2024

These IP routable products and solutions deliver high quality and high reliability to AV professionals working across numerous disciplines.

Marshall Brings Auto Tracking To IBC 2024 with New CV612 PTZ Camera

The system automatically tracks, follows and frames presenters using AI facial learning for accurate and smooth self-adjusting maneuvers.

ESPN Inks Deal with Genius Sports to Expand Data Capabilities for Basketball Coverage

The deal will expand ESPN's data-driven storytelling in its coverage of NCAA basketball, NBA and WNBA.

Harmonic Launches New SaaS Version of Its Distribution Management System

Running on the public cloud, Harmonic's DMS X SaaS brings playout control capabilities to its XOS advanced media processor.

Horizon Media Taps Comscore as Preferred Contextual Intelligence Provider

Clients of the largest U.S. media agency will be able to use Proximic by Comscore's AI-powered contextual technology.

ATSC To Exhibit 3.0 Developments At Brazil’s SET Expo 2024

ATSC will exhibit at the SET Expo 2024 at the Distrito Anhembi Convention Center in San Paulo, Brazil, Aug. 19-22, on the heels of the SBTVD Forum recommending adoption of the ATSC 3.0 physical layer to the Brazilian government for its TV 3.0 next-generation terrestrial broadcast standard.

Veritone Makes AI M&E Solutions Available in AWS Marketplace

Among the AI software in the marketplace are Veritone Digital Media Hub, Discovery and Attribute.

CommScope Announces First Major Sale of Newly Acquired Casa vCCAP Solution

vCCAP will be used to support significant distributed access architecture deployment in Hungary.

BNS Partners with NPAW to Enhance Video Analytics Reporting in North America

The partnership will help NPAW expand its footprint in North America.

Elation Delivers Dynamic PULSE For First-Ever Live Broadcast from Sphere

Lighting designer Tom Kenny debuted PULSE PANEL FX for the NHL Draft in Las Vegas.

Signiant to Highlight Latest Innovations, Partnership at IBC 2024

Among the partnerships is the company’s new collaboration with TMT Insights.

DVEO to Introduce Brutus Cloud Video Distribution Platform at IBC 2024

Brutus Cloud provides high-performance, flexible transcoding and streaming for IPTV, OTT and FAST TV.

Globo Shows Off TV 2.5 Enhancements on Hisense TVs During Paris Olympics

The broadcaster demoed Advanced HDR by Technicolor and Fraunhofer’s MPEG-H Audio.

Historic Billy Joel Concert Captured On ARRI Cameras For Multi-Cam Production

To capture Billy Joel’s 100th consecutive performance of his residency at Madison Square Garden, show producers turned to ARRI’s ALEXA 35 and Mini LF cameras.

LEXINGTON, Mass.—Signiant will showcase its latest product innovations as well as partnerships, such as the recently announced collaboration with TMT Insights at IBC 2024, Sept. 13-16, at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center.

The partnership has led to the creation of an Intelligent Ingest solution designed to simplify large-scale media ingest. Users can save time and money through the Intelligent Ingest solution, which enables the planning and tracking of both proactive and reactive inbound content from greenlight through receipt, the company said.

The solution streamlines the inbound flow of media files from a large and diverse set of partners and instantly validates when components for a given content version are received against its established title hierarchy. The combination of the Signiant Platform alongside TMT Insights’ Polaris operational user interface provides key benefits such as centralized visibility and control, error reduction, ecosystem agility and flexibility, leading to a faster time-to-market, it said.

Attendees also can experience hands-on demos of the way top media companies are automating content exchange with their partners, discover and interact with media assets across distributed storage sites and give remote teams fast, seamless access to media assets via a single unified platform, the company said.

See Signiant at IBC 2024 Stand 5.C74.

More information is available on the company’s website.

LEXINGTON, Mass.—Signiant has announced that it has joined the Trusted Partner Network (TPN) and successfully completed a TPN App and Cloud Gold Shield assessment. 

The TPN is part of a broader Motion Picture Association (MPA) initiative to raise security capabilities throughout the industry, while generating efficiencies for participants to counter ongoing security threats and keep content secure.

Signiant’s TPN Gold assessment was conducted by Independent Security Evaluators (ISE), a TPN-accredited assessor with a long track record as a respected independent third-party technology evaluator in the media industry. Third-party assessment by a certified assessor is differentiated via a gold shield vs. self-assessment represented by a blue shield. The resulting security report is now available to TPN Studio members.

“Signiant has long been the trusted broker of content exchange across complex media supply chains that include Hollywood studios, broadcasters, streaming services and more,” said Ian Hamilton, CTO for Signiant. “While prior to Feb 2023 the TPN only managed site assessments, we saw a great opportunity as a SaaS vendor to leverage the new TPN App and Cloud assessment. TPN Studio members can now view the results of our security assessment through the TPN+ platform in a standard format thereby creating efficiencies for us and our customers. Signiant has been working with ISE to conduct independent third-party security evaluations for over ten years. With ISE’s recent accreditation as a TPN App and Cloud assessor, we saw this as a logical point to add the TPN to the list of security initiatives we participate in.”

“We’re excited to have Signiant, a SaaS innovator in our industry, join the TPN membership. Secure content exchange is mission-critical to the media supply chain and we applaud Signiant’s efforts to ensure their products are as secure as possible and meet or exceed the high standards outlined by the MPA,” said Terri Davies, president of the TPN. “Through the TPN and participating companies like Signiant, content creators have a centralized and recognized source of security measures included in any listed product. This saves precious time and resources for producers who conduct independent security audits because it's centralized and coordinated through the TPN.”

LEXINGTON, Mass.—Signiant and TMT Insights today announced a strategic partnership to develop a new workflow automation solution codenamed “MediaFactory” that combines Signiant’s SaaS-based content management and distribution platform with TMT’s Polaris operational management system to help M&E companies optimize their content supply chains. 

Signiant’s widely deployed SaaS platform provides fast, reliable global access to media assets, regardless of storage type or location, serving as the trusted mechanism for securely exchanging content within and between media entities, according to the company. 

Aided by talent and technology from recent acquisitions, Signiant is developing modern media-centric capabilities that leverage the platform’s multi-tenant architecture and the existing footprint of Signiant-connected content repositories. For example, the platform now indexes connected storage and enables users to search, play, and clip media assets. These tools pave the way for the next major building block: a highly scalable and cost-effective next-generation workflow automation solution  the two companies have codenamed “Media Factory.” 

TMT Insights is a professional services and software development company, providing consulting and hands-on implementation services to help customers navigate the transition to high-volume, multiplatform content lifecycles. 

With a particular focus on looking holistically at the operational side of the equation, TMT’s operational management platform, Polaris, provides an all-encompassing “single pane of glass” view, sitting on top of “Media Factory” and integrating with third-party technologies to surface actionable insights and grant operational users visibility and granular control over jobs and tasks, both manual and automated. Streamlining the user experience for both individuals and teams, Polaris delivers business benefits at multiple levels, enabling media companies to efficiently leverage the disparate tools and vast amounts of data that operational users must navigate to deliver results.

Commenting on the partnership, Margaret Craig, CEO of Signiant, notes the complementary nature of the companies’ charters. “With Media Factory, we will deliver a productized, multi-tenant workflow core that codifies standard media preparation and delivery processes. Off-the-shelf functionality that delivers very fast ‘time to value’ is central to our strategy, but we also know that many media companies require the kinds of consultative professional services and bespoke interfaces that TMT provides. Through this partnership, customers can have the best of both worlds.”

As Signiant’s workflow offering matures, TMT will serve as an implementation partner to assist customers with a range of deployment and customization initiatives. In the near term, the companies plan to jointly deliver an early adopter bundle that includes a headless, API-only implementation of the Signiant workflow offering working in conjunction with a lightweight version of the TMT Polaris interface. 

According to Andy Shenkler, CEO of TMT Insights, the time is right for this new partnership. “The TMT team has deep domain knowledge and real-world expertise in implementing and operating cloud-based media supply chains. We recognize the limitations of first-generation implementations. They are generally far too complex, and they lack the scalability and resiliency that are required for reliable and cost-effective fulfillment operations. Signiant is addressing these issues by building a reusable workflow core, and TMT can deliver services and software outside the product boundary to make it fit perfectly into any customer environment.” 

Shenkler further notes that the companies share a number of key customers who see the partnership as highly compelling. “With media industry business models under severe pressure, there’s a growing understanding of the need for new ways of thinking about both the media technology stack and the operational processes that surround it. We’re excited to work with Signiant to lead the way into the next era.”

Reality TV pioneer Bunim Murray Productions is one of the major production companies working in the genre and produces anywhere between four and ten seasons of television simultaneously at remote locations across the globe. One of its biggest shows shoots across different countries and continents and is appropriately enough called “The Challenge”, which certainly describes the process of transferring terabytes of raw footage from remote locations back to the editorial team in LA.

Facing the constant pressures of shorter schedules, tighter deadlines and ever-decreasing budgets, “The Challenge” team trialed Signiant Media Shuttle to accelerate secure file delivery. So successful was Media Shuttle in the workflow that Bunim Murray has now rolled it out across every one of its remote productions, mandating Media Shuttle connectivity as a future requirement when choosing shooting locations and successfully implementing a 24-hour turnaround goal on key footage.

It’s after midnight on location in Thailand…

After several grueling days of shooting the hit reality TV series, “The Challenge,” a courier for Bunim Murray Productions hand carries terabytes of video content from two dozen cameras on a 17-hour flight to Los Angeles, where the entire editorial team waits. Pressure to produce more content faster pushed Bunim Murray to seek a fundamentally different way to move fresh content — from babysitting drives on international flights every three days to having the footage in their L.A. edit suites in 8 hours directly over the internet.

For Bunim Murray Productions, moving content from remote locations across the globe to editors in Los Angeles used to cost lots of time and money. “The Challenge,” one of their biggest shows in 2023, might be shooting in South Africa for one week, Thailand the next, and Europe after that. That’s just one show. During peak times, up to 250 employees work on 4-10 shows simultaneously from locations scattered around the world. 

Transferring terabytes of multicamera footage to editors in L.A. for editing as fast as possible every day is mission critical. With shrinking budgets, shorter schedules, and tighter deadlines, time is precious. In 2010, XDCAM discs carried by runners through airports to L.A. took at least a week. By 2018, hard drives shipped via FedEx outposts saved a day or two. Still, a 24-hour turnaround goal wasn.t possible.

After experimenting with other file transfer solutions, Bunim Murray turned to Signiant Media Shuttle. It works flawlessly, creating a consistent, 24-hour turnaround of key files, and the number of hours gained back makes it pay for itself. 

“The time we saved, the number of hours we can gain back, would make sense for us financially,” said Dan Shott, Director, Post Technologies for Bunim Murray. “it worked flawlessly; it worked great. After a 30-minute training session, we were confident enough to build out for five different shows. The things that we would've had to rely on high-level tech support to do with other solutions, we could do ourselves in five minutes with Media Shuttle.

On a typical shoot, content from camera cards offloads onto two local storage pools. As many as three DITs working around the clock collect around 3TBs of footage daily, load it onto local storage wherever they can find sufficient bandwidth, from the shoot site or the hotel. The raw footage is then sent via Media Shuttle into Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. From there, the editorial team uses Shuttle to pull down the content they need into local Avid Nexis storage in L.A. A typical day can include two to three terabytes of data.

“We found it much more of a reliable solution for our production teams, which were already scattered and running super long shifts. We didn't want to put any potential downtime or hiccups on them,” says Shott. “We loved that once we switched to Media Shuttle, we could put that [Wasabi] cloud destination in the middle and know that it was always going to be there, ready for them to go whenever they wanted to do a transfer.” 

Shott continues, “Once others heard how well it worked, everyone asked, ‘Hey, can I use it?’ Now, when a show is scouting for a location, available bandwidth is always the factor. We're looking for that from day one knowing that we're going to be using this workflow. Once we installed it, we started finding other use cases for it. We're happiest when we're not talking about it because it's just working in the background.”

SAN FRANCISCO—It’s a technology that continues to prove its worth and defy its detractors, boasting of speed and touting reliability as a high-capacity storage vault, a means of disaster recovery and a way to share content. 

And now, as archiving in the cloud continues to mature, the technology continues to win over large broadcasters and small production houses alike. It has proven to be secure, the capacity to handle massive amounts of data, and support for collaboration between geographic locales separated by continents. 

The next steps: Driving long-term value, improving search functions, meeting the needs of different types of customers and addressing thorny issues like cost of egress and long-term adaptability.

Not Just a Simple Migration
“People have become much more comfortable with the reliability, security and affordability of the cloud for content archives,” said Geoff Stedman, chief marketing officer of SDVI. “But what people are also realizing is that simply lifting and shifting an archive to the cloud is not [always] the right approach.”

While the explosion of SVOD, AVOD and FAST channels offers new opportunities to monetize content, that scenario only works if the content can be found, accessed and transported through a media supply chain and then prepared for a distribution partner, Stedman said. “[Migration to a cloud archive] presents an opportunity to standardize and normalize content file formats, clean up and enrich metadata and create an archive of golden masters that can be monetized across many different distribution outlets.”

In addition, it’s not just important how you migrate your content into the cloud, but rather if you have visibility into cloud—and the ability easily retrieve it. 

“An organization’s cloud environment can be a bit nebulous,” said Brett Beers, vice president of technology for TMT Insights, a professional services and software development company. “I predict there will need to be more of a focus on investing in productivity and operational tools that will widen the net in terms of the user type that can both interact and manage cloud technology.” 

Plus, customers moving their archives to the cloud are not just looking to migrate a tape library; they are looking to derive more long-term value from their assets by applying meaningful metadata during the ingest process, said Evan Statton, senior principal architect of M&E for Amazon Web Services. 

“When cloud archiving first came on the scene, simply moving massive amounts of content to and across clouds was the clear challenge,” said Jon Finegold, chief marketing officer for Signiant. “The tools provided by those early cloud systems simply weren’t cut out for massive media archives.”

Today’s software can now effectively move petabytes of content into and out of cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure and Wasabi.

Migration Trends 
Across the content creation marketplace, there is new, significant interest for companies of varying sizes to consider migration to the cloud. For some, a lift-and-shift approach might be the right step, particularly for an organization new to the technology. For others, designing a digital supply chain from scratch is a more valuable approach. 

“Regardless of the path you pick, the first step is visibility,” said Beers. “What do you have, and then the next step is action: what am I going to do with it?”

TMT Insights faced such a scenario when working with a post house in Burbank, Calif., that was moving from a fully on-premise operation to a 100% cloud-native digital supply chain. “For this engagement, they were able to decrease the time to market and enable rapid innovation by not having the challenges that come with having reliance or integration [with] their legacy systems,” Beers said.

The next challenge: How to help customers easily find and access content archived in the cloud. Several companies, including Signiant, have solutions that automatically index assets and create preview files so customers can perform simple searches across their archives—whether those be on-prem or cloud—without having to move the assets. “Archives need to be actionable,” Finegold said about the company’s Media Engine software. “Accessing them must be quick, easy and cost-effective. When asked for a clip, users need to be able to search, preview and send those assets anywhere, fast.”

TMT Insights also sees increased demand for this type of functionality. The company’s Polaris operational management platform allows users to manage their end-to-end cloud-based media supply chains via a file manager module within Polaris. That module enables enhanced visibility and gives users controls to manage their ingest and prequalification workflows. By providing users access to the cloud in a purposeful way, one of TMT Insight’s clients was able to increase their on-time delivery from an average of 65 percent to 99 percent, Beers said.

Mining Your Value
Another key trend in the cloud movement: Ensuring customers derive additional long-term value from their assets by applying meaningful metadata during ingest. AWS helped Formula One (F1) achieve this using the AWS Media2Cloud solution when it migrated more than 4 petabytes of archived video content to Amazon S3 and now uses artificial intelligence/machine learning services to reduce the time it takes to catalog content. 

“Additionally, we’ve learned from our customers that ‘one size does not fit all’ for archive retrieval patterns,” Statton said, referring to the Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class and Flexible Retrieval storage class, which are designed to help customers fine-tune retrieval performance based on the needs of archive usage.

The cloud is proving attractive to organizations of all sizes. Giving small creative groups the ability to easily access the cloud was the impetus behind a new release from Quantum that integrates a media asset management module and shared storage software. The goal was to remove the complexity that can often hamper a smaller creative group when it comes to configuring separate devices and setting up separate production workflows.

Quantum’s H4000 Essential provides a standard set of features—automatic context indexing, shared storage—but doesn’t require specialized IT skills to support. That was the case for the creative agency Switch, which works on multiple projects simultaneously via the StorNext collaborative shared storage system and the Quantum cloud-based analytics software. 

The benefit: A small creative company can quickly deploy production-ready shared storage in the cloud, allowing for collaborative, remote video editing in the cloud.

SDVI is seeing this as well, as companies of all sizes realize they can become more efficient and agile when they take advantage of cloud technologies, Stedman said. “Moving their archives and media processing to the cloud, even at a relatively smaller scale, frees them up to focus on their core creative business because they no longer have to spend time procuring, deploying and managing on-premise infrastructure.” 

AWS is seeing demand from all types of customers, from TV stations to larger broadcasters looking to migrate hundreds of linear channels to AWS. The company was recently awarded an Engineering Excellence Award from the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) for its “Color in the Cloud” cloud-based remote service that enables customers of all sizes to perform high-fidelity color grading in
the cloud.

Egress Costs
Challenges remain, however. While the cloud has proven its mettle at handling shared content with speed and reliability, there are instances where a cloud gateway linked to a high-capacity storage infrastructure may be a better fit. As veteran media and entertainment tech companies have long known, storage on LTO data tape can be lower in cost per terabyte than primary disk storage.

And in some instances, the best archiving solution is a combination of the old and the new. Software from companies like XenData can be used to create a hybrid archive that links together on-premise storage with the cloud so that file-based applications can write to and read from cloud storage. Using a XenData S3 Server interface with a XenData LTO archive creates a private cloud storage solution allows an organization to keep the attractive aspects of LTO storage onsite. In this scenario, files can be remotely downloaded free of any egress charges.

And that’s another lingering issue for archiving in the cloud to address: The cost
of egress. 

Though the industry is moving in that direction, workflows requiring heavy visual effects and editing work are still not fully realized within the cloud to run at scale. So files sometimes must be pulled down and worked on outside of the cloud, with a heavy price tag to boot.

Understanding those types of cloud economics continues to be a key challenge for customers when it comes to archiving in the cloud. “Customers are capturing so much more content and want to preserve all of it,” Finegold said. “But for how long? How much content will be retrieved? When will it impact things like egress costs? These and other questions make predicting costs a real challenge.”

Others say the cost of egress is generally not an issue for content companies moving their archives to the cloud since content deals can be struck between content owners and cloud-based streaming services that are fulfilled without content ever leaving the cloud—with a majority of local, on-premise editing accomplished using proxy files that are a fraction the size of the original master in the cloud. 

The most important priorities in an archiving system will be familiar to anyone navigating the modern content creation space: Agility. Adaptability. Visibility. Ideally, as Beers from TMT Insights put it, “Our goal is to make the shift to the cloud less intimidating, to show clients the way and give them the tools they need to navigate that path themselves.” 

Remote media production is not new but the increasing use of IP technology and the cloud has made its use far more widespread and accessible. In our latest guide, we bring you the commentary and insight from the professionals on the front lines of M&E technology development and implementation driving this phenomenon.

Access the ebook here. 

Located in the picturesque capital city of Ljubljana, national public broadcaster, and Olympics broadcast television rights holder from 2016-2022, RTV Slovenia provided news, entertainment, and sports programming for more than 60 years. 

For the first 30 years, it was part of RTV Yugoslav Radio Television (JRT). RTV Slovenia produces programs for three national TV channels, two regional TV channels, two TV channels for the Italian and Hungarian national communities, three national radio channels, regional radio programs and a radio program for foreign citizens. 

Like many countries, the Olympic Games generate national interest and is one of RTV’s most watched events. RTV provides access to local, national and international coverage to roughly two million people for the duration of the Games. 

At the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, the Slovenian men’s basketball team led by NBA superstar Luka Dončić, barely missed advancing to the gold medal match. At the Winter Olympics in Beijing 2022, Slovenians took home seven medals including two golds won by ski jumpers making Slovenia’s medal count per capita one of the highest of any nation. With such a successful showing from this small country, national interest is strong in local programming.

As recently as 2016 in Brazil and 2018 in Korea, RTV relied on satellite feeds to transfer content from the host country to their central broadcast station at home. This practice would radically change and improve by 2022.

The Old Way — Reliable but Expensive and Limiting
For the 2016 and 2018 cycle, RTV recorded and edited segments as video files on site at the International Broadcast Centre (IBC). Files then played out over one of the ten expensive satellite links RTV had secured. Video segments would be re-recorded as new files in Ljubljana using different codecs. 

Video quality would suffer as a result during the transcoding process and the workflow was very slow. Highlights and packages had to wait until live satellite time was done.

New Ways, New Speed Bumps
For the pandemic-delayed event in Tokyo, RTV began replacing satellite feeds with private IP networks and using FTP to move the files. With improved long-distance internet speeds, this new approach looked to offer great cost savings, faster turnaround times, higher quality and much more flexibility — some of the many reasons why broadcasters around the world have turned to terrestrial IP networks.

Matjaz Fajdiga, RTV Head of TV Engineering explains the experience, “At Tokyo, we used an FTP service. It was not just a little, but quite problematic because of the delays, which happen between the routers. We used our network link for multiple applications like file transfers, office network or VoIP at the same time.

"As a result, we had a few technical problems,” he continued, “We needed to implement hard bandwidth limits to avoid technical problems. Without setting up some usage limits, one ‘aggressive application’ can consume more bandwidth that makes other services unreliable. Using FTP you’re thinking, will it arrive on time?”

Because of FTP’s limitations, RTV editors quite often needed to wait for new content. This created moments of panic throughout the production. 

“FTP is simply unreliable, especially for such important workflows and long distances,” Fajdiga said.

Like Night & Day
Working with CS Computers, RTV’s trusted systems integrator and long-term Signiant partner in Zagreb, Croatia, Fajdiga and his team began experimenting with Signiant Jet and Media Shuttle products to transfer content from their U.S. bureau in Washington, D.C. to Ljubljana. They immediately saw how they could solve their FTP problems for the upcoming 2022 winter games in Beijing.

Prior to Beijing, Fajdiga outlined his need for bandwidth management and faster, more predictable transfer speeds. Signiant’s software allowed them to control the bandwidth which helped RTV to protect the other local traffic on the link such as the live feature streams or VOIP applications.

“We had the same pipe for Tokyo and Beijing,” said Fajdiga. “We spent a lot of time overcoming FTP issues in Tokyo. Jet and Media Shuttle solved those problems in Beijing. Simple as that. Now we just throw the file into the right watch folder, and that's it. It will very quickly appear in Ljubljana where our team can use it for different purposes. Everyone said it was like night and day."

In Beijing, RTV had two workflows — sending content field packages to the IBC or sending content automatically from the IBC back to Ljubljana. That involved playout and post-production workflows. Production crews shooting in the field could edit and send files by Media Shuttle directly to Ljubljana. Often raw materials were sent directly from the field to the IBC in Beijing to be edited and then sent via Jet to Ljubljana.

The national broadcast center was based in Ljubljana where a studio for guests and analysts was set up. Feeds from Beijing were streamed to Ljubljana, the first time satellite links were not used. Events could be live streamed while parallel feeds could be recorded at the same time for later broadcast. RTV operated three channels, sometimes broadcasting parallel events over two channels, in addition to their online platform.

“During this event, we didn't have any complaints about slowness, or missing files, or whatever. This is very important. It is ‘no news is good news.’ Where so many files are being sent in both directions, mostly from Beijing to Ljubljana, if nothing goes wrong, this is fantastic,” Fajdiga noted. “It's the peace of mind you get with Signiant. You get reliability, and you get security because of the encryption. The whole team was saying, ‘This is way better than FTP. We should've been doing this all along. What else can it do for us?’” 

Post-Beijing Reliability and Security with Jet and Media Shuttle
After RTV began subscribing to the Signiant service to get files transferred reliably between Beijing and Ljubljana, they began finding other uses for it, solving other problems RTV didn't know could be solved using this service. 

RTV uses Signiant’s service to get content from foreign offices, like Washington, London, Brussels, and Moscow, back into RTV. 

“If you're using FTP, sometimes the transmission gets cut. The file doesn't show up. Somebody must be notified. They must resend the file starting from the beginning. Whereas, if you're using Signiant, there's Checkpoint Restart. If there's a disconnect with the file, it gets reconnected, and it picks up where it left off. You can monitor that and understand better where the file is and when it's going to arrive,” Matjaz Fajdiga, RTV’s Head of Engineering said.

Media Shuttle and Jet are also used in day-by-day connections between Ljubljana and two regional centers, Maribor and Koper, 150 kilometers away. Once an editor finishes a show or segment, it gets sent to Ljubljana. When it arrives, it is confirmed by Signiant’s email notifications.

Fajdiga appreciates this capability which adds to Signiant’s reliability. “I remember phone calls at five, six o’clock saying, ‘Where is the file? You sent it at three. It will be broadcast at eight.’ Nobody knows where it is, or why it hasn't transferred, and there's panic,” he remembers. "With Signiant, if we lose the physical link during a transfer, we don't need to transfer the whole file from scratch. We just continue where we stopped. It's a cool feature and a real lifesaver during big events.”

Conclusion — Seeing is Believing
RTV understands the value of what Signiant provides and what that means to the organization. Before, getting content delivered in country and across time zones and oceans was a nerve-wracking and tense experience for many. Now, with Signiant, there is a deeper sense of calm, trust and value.

Fajdiga concluded, “Now, we have results. When you first use the Signiant software and see how it works, we are convinced that this is good, invested money. It is a service that is reliable, there all the time, and without an interruption, like AC power. You just throw a file somewhere in some folder and forget it, certain it will arrive at the destination, defined by the folder you choose. People expect a 100% reliable, secure, and quick service like email, that it will arrive at the right place.” 

Broadcasters are looking for more effective ways to increase viewer choices through new services and expanding to new markets. In TV Tech's July TV Tech Talk, Moderator Wes Simpson will lead a discussion in how the M&E industry is optimizing its content management strategies.

Click here to register for this free webcast. 

LEXINGTON, Mass. —Signiant Inc., the provider of intelligent file transfer software, has announced Media Engine, a modern media management service built into The Signiant Platform. 

Media Engine allows Signiant’s SaaS customers to easily search, preview and take action on media assets across all their Signiant-connected storage, from anywhere in the world, Signiant reported. 

Using the Media Engine service, customers can perform federated searches across multiple content repositories, both on-premises and in the cloud. Results are immediately actionable via the powerful services available on the platform anchored by Signiant’s fast file transfer technologies.

Media Engine will be included with every Signiant SaaS subscription, expanding the value of its products ⎯ Media Shuttle, Jet, and Flight Deck ⎯ well beyond file transfer, Signiant said. 

This expansion of the core Signiant platform also provides additional tools to help media companies create workflow efficiencies and streamline operations.

“Our customers need to easily access their widely distributed content and Media Engine makes that functionality available to any-size business,” commented Rick Clarkson, Signiant’s chief product officer. “Media Engine is a nimble, lightweight service built on the Signiant Platform, which is already widely deployed across the media supply chain thanks to its foundation of fast file transfer. The platform’s unique architecture enables us to bring a variety of powerful new services to market for our SaaS customers with a very disruptive approach — Media Engine is the first of those services.”

Within the intuitive Media Engine interface, users will also be able to mark in and out points to select a specific portion of a video asset ⎯ and then move only the clip of interest, commonly known as Partial File Restore. 

In addition, Media Engine's proxy and metadata framework will make it easy for users to bring the power of cloud AI services to media operations. Today’s announcement is only the beginning.

“It was just over a year ago that Signiant acquired Lesspain to help enhance the capabilities of the Signiant Platform,” says Margaret Craig, Chief Executive Officer of Signiant. “Media Engine is the result of many months of hard work by our internal development team and our new Lesspain colleagues. We think the results will delight the millions of media professionals who use our software in their everyday work, and our plan is to continue to release other platform services in the future that further address our customers' pain points.”

Media Engine is immediately available to select Signiant customers. General availability is currently scheduled for July 2022.

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

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

TVT: What will be your most important product news?

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

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

Additional NAB highlights include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEXINGTON, Mass.—NBC Sports is leveraging Signiant software for intelligent file transfer of petabytes of HDR and 4K footage upon capture from Beijing to its Stamford, Conn., headquarters for its ongoing production of the XXIV Olympic Winter Games.

Signiant’s acceleration technology is enabling seamless transfer of footage over standard IP networks, eliminating latency and packet loss. NBC Sports editors in Stamford can begin creating highlights almost immediately as the action is happening, the company said.

The software is also used to transfer content quickly back to the International Broadcast Center in Beijing. The fast, easy and secure transfers help to make it possible for NBC Sports to leverage its talent and equipment in Stamford, enabling heightened efficiency, it said.

“The foundation and first partnership with Signiant during last Summer’s Tokyo Olympics were a precursor to an expansive strategy of file movement and workflow orchestration,” said Darryl Jefferson, vice president of post-production and digital workflow for NBC Sports and Olympics. “Now handling even more productions at remote locations, our efforts depend on real time collaboration, file synchronization and raw speed. Signiant delivers each of those, and we look forward to continued partnership at the Olympic Winter Games.”

More information is available on the Signiant website. 

LEXINGTON, Mass.—Signiant today announced integration of its Media Shuttle and Signiant Jet cloud-native software as a service solutions (SaaS) products into Amazon Web Services’ (AWS’s) Media2Cloud.

With Media2Cloud, frame-level metadata is generated using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) from Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Comprehend. Media2Cloud application protocol interfaces (APIs) make it easy to integrate this metadata into other systems, it said.

With this integration, users can take advantage of Signiant’s SaaS products to transfer content directly into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) with speed, reliability and security. Once the content is in the Amazon S3 bucket, Media2Cloud begins the content analysis and post-processing.

Signiant software ensures the fast, secure movement of large data sets over any IP network, in any hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment.

Media Shuttle and Signiant Jet connect more than 50,000 organizations around the world. Every month, the software moves petabytes of content to and from AWS.

“This is another example of our continued innovation to make sure our products work seamlessly with the media technologies our customers use. Given the central role Signiant plays in moving media assets to and from the cloud, working with Media2Cloud was a perfect fit,” said Mike Flathers, Signiant’s chief solutions officer. “Customers can easily move media assets into the cloud and use Media2Cloud AI/ML workflows to gain deeper insights to the content.”

More information is available on the Signiant website.

LEXINGTON, Mass.—Signiant has acquired Levels Beyond, developer of the Reach Engine media workflow software suite, Signiant said today. Financial details of the purchase were not immediately available.

Signiant will extend the functionality of its SaaS platform with Levels Beyond’s technology, adding new capabilities to simplify and modernize workflows, it said.

"By virtue of our underlying acceleration technology and broad-based role in the global flow of media, Signiant can provide customers with a foundation that addresses multiple supply chain challenges efficiently and at scale,” said Signiant CEO Margaret Craig. “Our SaaS platform has critical mass, it serves as the core of the B-to-B media ecosystem, and it is the ideal anchor point for adjacent media-centric functionality."

The acquisition follows Signiant’s purchase earlier this year of Lesspain Software, which offered solutions to facilitate organizing, finding and interacting with media assets. Together with the newly acquired capabilities of Levels Beyond, Signiant’s offerings will include a range of configurable workflow building blocks, Signiant said.

Key members of the Levels Beyond team will continue to be based in Denver, where Signiant will operate a development center, it said. 

“We're excited to become part of a high-growth, customer-centric software company that is committed to the media industry,” said Levels Beyond founder Art Raymond. “Signiant's cloud-native SaaS experience is unparalleled, and the Levels Beyond team brings complementary skills that include deep media workflow experience and extensive knowledge of third-party integrations. The combination will be unstoppable."

More information is available on the Signiant website.

ATLANTA—When I started my company, I knew there were some core technologies needed to make our new post-production house, Blackwater Digital Services, successful.

Based in Atlanta, Blackwater specializes in quality control, mastering, conversion and transcoding, deliverables, asset management, and worldwide digital delivery. Basically, we help with anything needed to properly exploit a film domestically and internationally, following post-production. We like to say we’re ready to help with that “last mile” of a film’s journey, bridging the gap between post-production and distribution.

As with most of the media and entertainment industry, file movement is critical to our business. We are under considerable pressure to deliver more content, to more destinations, in a shorter amount of time—and those file sizes can be very large.

Because of this, Signiant Media Shuttle was one of the first things I spent money on. I had prior experience with Media Shuttle using it with various companies and knew it was fast, reliable, and user friendly. Regardless, we still did our due diligence before acquiring a subscription for Blackwater Digital Services, considering many alternative high-end solutions. Media Shuttle met all our requirements for speed, storage flexibility, security, and reliability.

FTP WAS NOT AN OPTION

First, standard FTP was not an option. FTP-based solutions can be impractically slow and unreliable when moving anything more than about 500 MB. FTP is prone to data loss and corruption, not to mention well-known security holes; that’s why many larger companies have effectively banned FTP. We receive and deliver many very large feature-length 4K ProRes files, which can be 800 GB each. Media Shuttle not only allows us to deliver over the internet, but it is also incredibly fast, especially for assets that large.

Blackwater relies on Media Shuttle’s multicloud, hybrid cloud flexibility to move content from various storage locations and types used in today’s modern production environment. Signiant Media Shuttle supports on-premises file and object storage, public cloud storage including AWS S3, Microsoft Azure, Backblaze B2, and Google Cloud Storage, and hybrid storage architectures where both on-premises and cloud storage are in play. We aren’t limited by our tools when changing storage types and adapting to situations.

Because of our broad, global client base, we regularly work with clients who have notoriously slow and unstable internet connections. It is not uncommon to be hindered by high latency, interrupted connections, and very little bandwidth.

ACCELERATION TECH

Signiant’s acceleration technology and Checkpoint Restart address those exact issues for us. I can’t tell you how many times a connection has dropped around 80% for a client overseas uploading a huge file to us. The ability to restart where that file transfer dropped has saved the day on multiple occasions. We don’t need to babysit the transfer, a feature our teams appreciate with late-night deliveries. On top of that, Signiant improves on standard internet transmission speeds up to 200-fold and is increasingly impactful with longer distanced clients or congested networks.

Post-production is a long process, with lots of files moving all the time, like a well-oiled machine. All those files, along with ancillary data, need to move quickly and reliably, or the entire machine breaks down. Media Shuttle meets our production and business demands admirably, better positioning us to take advantage of new opportunities and business. With Media Shuttle’s unique SaaS architecture, we get the best of both worlds: fast, reliable file acceleration, along with complete control over storage type and location. Additionally, Signiant’s tech support, on the rare occasion we need it, is fast, friendly, and knowledgeable.

More information on Media Shuttle can be found at www.signiant.com. 

LEXINGTON, Mass.—NEP has selected Signiant Media Shuttle to accelerate file-based operations across its fleet of OB trucks, studios and flypacks, the company said today.

Media Shuttle will enable NEP clients to move media assets and associated metadata quickly and easily to and from venues. The solution will offer NEP customers fast, secure content exchange globally to any size production via any IP network without additional hardware on the truck, it said.

Sports workflows in recent years have become more complex, and the data payloads involved have grown dramatically. As more cameras are added with higher resolution, file sizes grow. There is also a larger number of distribution partners in the mix.

As a result, optimizing file flow to and from the venue before, during and after a live event is a necessity. Prior to a game, trucks must be loaded with graphics and pre-recorded segments. After the event, there is a rush to ensure all valuable content is safely sent home, the company said.

However, it is during the event that NEP clients and production partners may reap the greatest rewards from the new toolset, it said.

With Media Shuttle it will be easy for NEP to move content off its trucks fast during an event and ingest it to the desired storage or cloud-based platform, including NEP’s own Mediabank media asset management platform. Once in Mediabank, content can be distributed to global partners quickly, it said.

This content flow model aligns well with the live production trends that surfaced during the pandemic in which fewer people were on-site, the company said.

Media Shuttle offers NEP several advantages, including fast, secure, reliable movement of any size file over any IP network; no requirement for additional hardware on production trucks; preservation of structural metadata, including real-time time code, file names and the ability to add descriptive metadata on the fly; movement of content into and out of any type of storage; integration with NEP’s platform for virtual editing and asset management; web-based administration; and modern APIs for easy integration with Media Shuttle and other systems.

More information is available on the company’s website.

STAMFORD, Conn.—NBC Olympics is deploying Signiant intelligent file transfer software for its production of the Games of the XXXII Olympiad, reported Darryl Jefferson, vice president of post production and digital workflow, at NBC Sports and Olympics, and Margaret Craig, CEO of Signiant.

Signiant’s software will allow NBC Olympics to leverage their talent and equipment back home in Stamford with remote production techniques, enabling them to provide enhanced viewing experiences to their audience much more efficiently, the companies reported. 

NBC will use Signiant’s software to move petabytes of footage from Tokyo back to its International Broadcast Center in Stamford immediately after it is captured. 

Signiant’s network optimization technology also allows for seamless transfer of the footage over standard IP networks, eliminating latency and packet loss, so that editors in Stamford can begin creating highlights almost immediately while the action is happening thousands of miles away. 

In addition, the software will be used to transfer content, including advanced graphics work and pre-recorded footage, quickly and securely back to the broadcast center in Tokyo.

“Signiant is excited to partner with NBC Olympics for the production of the Tokyo Games this summer,” said Craig. “Fan expectations for more immersive viewing experiences are growing and with NBC Olympics’ remote production operations, they will be sure to delight their audiences with amazing coverage. We’re proud that Signiant’s software will play such a central role in enabling NBC Olympics to seamlessly leverage their talent and technology located halfway around the world.”

Jefferson added that NBC Olympics will be using Signiant’s Managers and Agents solution. 

“File movement is central to all of our remote workflows both in Tokyo as well as in our broadcast center in Stamford,” Jefferson explained. “We are excited to see how it optimizes our transfers and provides greater resiliency across our domestic and international transfers. Signiant is enabling us to scale up to handle our Tokyo Olympics workload and our increased file sizes due to our HDR and 4K production efforts.”

LEXINGTON, Mass.—Signiant Inc. has appointed Dan Marshall to the newly created role of chief revenue officer. He will report directly to CEO Margaret Craig, and be responsible for driving the company's global sales activities.

In a press statement Craig said, "I'm thrilled to welcome him to the leadership team and the timing is perfect. Signiant's market momentum continues to accelerate, driven by SaaS products that solve mission-critical problems today while laying the groundwork for a much broader platform vision going forward. As a trusted advisor to media executives around the world, Dan will jumpstart our ability to deliver the Signiant message and engage with the industry at a strategic level.”

Marshall joins Signiant from Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he led teams involved in implementing media workflows in the cloud. He joined AWS in 2015 via its acquisition of Elemental Technologies where he led the sales organization. Prior to Elemental he managed sales and other customer-facing functions for Omneon. 

Commenting on his move to Signiant, Marshall points to the highly differentiated nature of Signiant's cloud-native SaaS platform. "During my time at AWS I was deeply involved in conceptualizing and implementing the next-generation media supply chain, and I want to continue to play an active role in supporting customers on that journey.”

LEXINGTON, Mass.—Signiant has announced the acquisition of Lesspain Software, a German-based provider of embedded media processing software. Signiant is bringing in Lesspain’s talent and technology to help it expand the functionality of its Software Defined Content Exchange (SDCX) SaaS platform, adding tools for interaction with media assets.

The SDCX platform is designed to provide connective fabric between globally distributed content repositories, both within and between media companies. This includes providing access to media assets from anywhere as well as managing information about the assets.

Core members of the Lesspain team will remain in Germany, where Signiant has plans to grow its development organization.

Signiant CEO Margaret Craig says this acquisition is part of the company’s strategy to target software companies with complementary functionality that can be transformed into cloud-native SaaS.

“We’re operating the industry’s preeminent SaaS platform at scale, and we have built SaaS-centric operational infrastructure across every functional area of the company,” said Craig. “Through adjacent acquisitions, these investments can now be leveraged to deliver the media-centric capabilities that our customers are clamoring for—all on a unified software platform.”

“We’re excited about the opportunity to become part of an innovative, customer-centric organization that is committed to the media industry,” said Lesspain’s Robert Krüger. “Our deep experience with content processing and management will enable meaningful contributions as the company continues to advance the SDCX platform vision beyond file transfer.”

No financial terms were disclosed.

For more information, visit www.signiant.com.  

LOS ANGELES—While DigitalFilm Tree (DFT) has served the media and entertainment community since 1999, 2020 has been a critical year in terms of showcasing our remote and collaborative innovations. I joined the team eight years ago, but DFT has evolved several times over since then. I’m the director of content & data security, a role that didn’t yet exist on the team, but as our technology and services expanded, so have many of our abilities as a group of interdisciplinary creatives.

DFT has a history of pioneering solutions and workflows across both production and post, and the pandemic has magnified just how much time and effort we’ve put into defining “what’s next.” Our intentional focus on television and independent features—solving for their specific, time-sensitive and budget critical challenges—has given us our greatest ideas and market changing solutions. It’s our clients’ obstacles that have driven us.

Media Shuttle, and our partnership with Signiant, has been fundamental to our evolution and innovations.

AGILE AND WORKFLOW-AGNOSTIC

Well before COVID-19 sent many of us off the lot and into our homes, Media Shuttle was integral to our workflows. DFT is wildly unique in that we make choices and investments based on a balance of future thinking, like developing our own software, and partnerships with formidable authorities like Signiant for immediate needs. This hybrid has allowed us to remain agile, workflow-agnostic, and ready to solve client challenges while avoiding trendy or untested platforms that often encumber others.

For example, Amazon Prime recently released its second season of “The Boys” and DigitalFilm Tree was brought on to work on its companion content, “The Boys After Show,” which was filmed across nine different locations around the globe and delivered, in some cases, more than 35 hours of 4K content or 15-plus TB of media. The turnaround time on this show was accelerated due to the short window between filming and episode release dates, so the speed and the efficiency of our infrastructure was imperative during both dailies and finishing.

Our Media Shuttle usage skyrocketed at this time. DFT staged transfers of the completed footage at night so the producers would receive it via their home internet, waking up to all the necessary files for review. By 10 a.m., they were ready to go into a live remote review session with us. This smooth flow of content and collaboration was largely a result of Signiant’s reliability. Every file we work with is mission-critical, so speed, visibility and security are imperative. These values are tantamount in our industry, and Media Shuttle has them covered in spades.

Using multiple ISPs, working across several storage solutions, and focusing on our own software development to drive meaningful innovation has ensured our ability to get content where it needs to go on time. Where other facilities couldn’t pivot during the initial rush into individual homes, Signiant’s platform gave us the freedom and immediate ability to push massive amounts of data quickly without interruption or the fear of giant hidden penalties. Other file transfer software can limit bandwidth, restrict storage, charge “fine print” fees or fumble important content, but Media Shuttle has none of those obstacles.

With the current climate, our number one goal is helping others get back to work; be it from home or shortening their physical time needed on set by better leveraging the cloud, we’re committed to getting our community up and running again. Having a partner like Signiant has allowed us to show people in real time just how meaningful, reliable and immediately available these workflows are to everyone.

Erin White has been pioneering secure, data focused M&E workflows for 20 years, eight of them on team DigitalFilm Tree. She can be reached at erin@digitalfilmtree.com.

For more information, visit www.signiant.com.

LEXINGTON, Mass.—Signiant has appointed Mike Flathers to the company’s newly created role of chief solutions officer. Flathers will be a member of Signiant’s senior leadership team, reporting directly to CEO Margaret Craig.

Among Flathers’ responsibilities will be to support customer demand for deep engagement on how to employ the Signiant SDCX (Software Defined Content Exchange) SaaS platform to address emerging technical and operational challenges. The ideas that come from this engagement will then be utilized by Signiant’s product development organization.

“As Signiant’s offerings evolve beyond fast file movement, the mission-critical role we play within media companies continues to expand in very interesting ways,” said Craig. “Mike’s knowledge of the industry and his technical skills will be huge assets as we rise to the challenge of working ever more closely with our customers as a strategic partner.”

Flathers joins Signiant having most recently served as IBM Aspera CTO and an IBM Distinguished Engineer. He also previously held positions at Novell and Sorenson Media.

For more information, visit www.signiant.com.  

CARDIFF, U.K.—Signiant and Object Matrix have announced a new collaboration that integrates Signiant Media Shuttle with Object Matrix’s MatrixStore to assist users with the transfer of large files and data.

Signiant Media Shuttle is an SaaS system for sending, sharing and accessing any-size files from anywhere, all from a secure, intuitive web interface. MatrixStore, meanwhile, is a media-focused private and hybrid cloud platform built on object storage technology to keep content secure while allowing for easy access.

In integrating these two platforms, a MatrixStore secure vault acts as a Signiant landing zone to ensure DMZ security without additional storage systems. MatrixStore vaults can be configured to restrict access, ensure data is immutable and audit each management and data operation, ensuring content can be transferred between locations.

In addition, Media Shuttle can use SMB, S3 or MXFS (MatrixStore File System) to access MatrixStore object storage. By using MXFS, users can automatically mount MatrixStore vaults as local drives to directly access content delivered to the facility.

For more information, visit www.signiant.com.  

LONDON & LEXINGTON, Ky.—Remote working is the new normal across the media industry, and DPP and Signiant want to find out how the industry feels about it. The two are teaming up on a four-month research project that looks at how companies adapted and operated remotely during the coronavirus pandemic, and how this time will impact the industry post-coronavirus.

Each month there will be a survey of 20 questions to be completed by companies around the world and across the supply chain about how they have been impacted by the pandemic and how they have adapted to it, DPP and Signiant say. This will include weekly “flash surveys” of about five questions on the emotional temperature of respondents.

Research analysis is also being undertaken as to the state of the wider media industry, charting developments over time to provide background context to the work.

Halfway through the research, DPP is scheduled to hold a virtual version of its “DPP At Home” event strand that will look at some of the emerging themes and provide a short interim report.

A full report is expected to be published in July.

PLUS: So, You're Anchoring the News from Home...

“We’re living through a key moment in world history, and we know nothing will ever quite be the same again,” said Mark Harrison, DPP managing director. “It’s important that we capture in real-time how this crisis is changing the way we work. Research such as this will give us unique insights that will enable us to gain wisdom from an otherwise traumatic event.”

To participate, DPP instructs companies to email Anh Mao at anh@thedpp.com. 

For more information, visit www.thedpp.com. 

LEXINGTON, Mass.—Signiant has made a handful of changes to its sales organization, specifically focusing on its SaaS platform, with the company officially announcing hires and promotions of Mike DeBenedictis, Brian Chavez, Greg Hoskin and Matt Gaede.

DeBenedictis joins Signiant as the senior vice president of sales for the Americas, where he will report to CEO Maragaret Craig. DeBenedictis most recently worked for Progress Software working with their SaaS sales team.

Chavez comes on board as the vice president of business development, reporting to DeBenedictis. His past experience includes time at SDVI, Ericsson and Elemental.

Internally, Signiant has promoted Hoskin to the role of managing director, EMEA and APAC. He has also had a trio of additions to his team, including Xavier Gentric, who will be based in France and serving Western Europe; Jens Fischer, responsible for the DACH, Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Middle East region from her base in Germany; and Garry Thompson, who will manage U.K. and Ireland accounts from London.

Another internal move is the promotion of Gaede to director of inside sales.

For more information on Signiant, visit www.signiant.com.

OTTAWA—Artificial intelligence (AI; which includes the subset known as machine learning) is making its way into next-generation media supply chains; speeding up outcomes while reducing workloads for human operators. Here’s a snapshot of what’s being done today, and a look at how close AI actually is to supplanting humans in supply chain management.

SPEED UP SEARCH

Sifting through footage is one of the biggest time-wasters for video editors, but it’s a task many face as they try to serve content to many platforms; be they broadcast, web or mobile.

TVU Networks has harnessed AI to speed up this process through its Media-Mind Service, a smart media supply chain platform that works with an on-premises MediaMind appliance, using facial and speech recognition AI engines to create time-based metadata. Reporters, editors, and producers are able to automatically discover the relevant clips in their video production system through the integration of MediaMind’s API or TVU Search web portal based on the story they are working on.

“In the old way of doing things, editors could spend up to two hours searching through footage to create 10 second clips for mobile phone viewers,” said Paul Shen, TVU Networks’ founder/CEO. “With time-based indexing and real time searching technology, MediaMind can reduce production time of these clips down to just five minutes. This has actually been achieved by one of our customers using our AI.”

FASTER DISTRIBUTION

Signiant’s SaaS (Software as a Service) platform, which underpins the company’s Media Shuttle and Jet products, is currently being used by more than 500,000 users around the globe to move petabytes of high value video content every month, according to the company’s Chief Marketing Officer Jon Finegold.

“We have recently added machine learning (ML) capabilities to our underlying transport architecture to analyze historical and current information about network conditions, to select the most optimal mechanism for transmitting content over IP networks,” he said.

Signiant Jet, its newest SaaS product, incorporates this ML-aided transport capability. Jet provides automated system-to-system content file transfers; whether one-to-one or one-to-many locations. Basically, Signiant Jet is using ML/AI to make optimal routing decisions at extremely high speeds; adjusting these decisions on the fly as it monitors changing network traffic conditions. It is akin to having human operator constantly watching the progress of available distribution channels; constantly switching feeds to the ones that are flowing best.

THROUGHOUT THE PRODUCTION

Incorporating AI throughout the entire media production chain is at the core of Dalet’s Galaxy five media asset management and workflow orchestration platform. In this instance, AI is meant to provide media organizations with an agile supply chain that can help them respond quickly to fast-moving production needs; whether it’s in the fast launch of a new online channel, refreshing news clips on a fast-moving story, or repurposing archived content on new platforms.

“There are many ways in which Dalet Galaxy five’s AI-augmented Dalet Media Cortex can help,” said Luc Comeau, Dalet’s market director for MAM. “Dalet Media Cortex can recommend video and audio clips as the user creates new content. It can also automate creating searchable references to the content; automating closed captions/subtitling, and even translating this text into other languages.” As well, Dalet Media Cortex can help a user map out their production process from beginning to end, and aid with distribution once the content is done.

“Our AI can support the timely distribution of multiple content streams, in line with their deadlines and destinations,” said Comeau. “I liken it to managing trains, where you have limited tracks and different trains needing to arrive at different times, on time—and all must be dispatched on schedule.”

AI’S ‘APPROPRIATE ROLE’

The examples above illustrate how AI/ML is being used today to enhance media supply chains. But not everyone is convinced that AI belongs in this process; or, at least, the quality of AI that exists today.

Brick Eksten, CTO, Playout & Networking for Imagine Communications describes AI in its current development in the media supply chain at “Level Zero.”

“We’re trying to get software to emulate the human thought process when we humans don’t even really understand how the human thought process works,” Eksten said.

To outline his point, Eksten pointed to the current state of self-driving cars. “They’re teaching a car how to drive by measuring everything in the world. That’s ridiculous. I drive by classifying rules against observations. I don’t need to know that a tree is two meters away. I just need to know that a tree is big and I probably shouldn’t run into it.”

In saying this, Eksten has no issue with AI being used to speed up mundane tasks and provide human operators with options: “This is AI’s appropriate role.” But he questions AI replacing humans in any kind of decision-making role; including selecting video clips and possible narratives.

“The point is that AI in its current form lacks the forward looking insight and creativity required to emulate human intuition.” Eksten said.

For many companies, Signiant has become an important abstraction layer, allowing IT to choose different storage types for different use cases, while giving creative professionals and partners a means to access and transfer content without having to think about where files are stored.

Read the eGuide to learn:

• What storage independence is and why it matters
• Three cases where file acceleration software should support different storage types
• How software that supports storage choice provides your business the flexibility it needs to grow

Download Now!

MIAMI—Mediapro is an independent production company in Europe’s audiovisual market. Offering a full slate of technical and creative services, our portfolio includes everything from content production, post production, media and digital asset management, to the acquisition of sports TV rights and the distribution and broadcast of television channels. We currently have 58 offices spread across 36 countries on four continents.

File transfer that is fast, reliable and secure is essential to the success of our operations. Whether we are producing and distributing live coverage of top-tier sporting events, like the Pan American Games, or creating award-winning cinema and television, our geographically-distributed employees and customers overwhelmingly send files digitally. Production and postproduction services regularly send AVC, Apple ProRes and XDCAM files in bundles that exceed 300 GB in size. We also broadcast from 17 television channels that all count on the timely delivery of content via file transfer.

GETTING ON THE SHUTTLE

Signiant’s Media Shuttle provides an ideal SaaS solution for Mediapro’s business needs. Media Shuttle’s Send, Share and Submit portals are accessible on any web browser—providing a simple means for thousands of our professionals and clients to access and deliver content from anywhere in the internet-connected world. Media Shuttle’s accessible and intuitive portals allow us to send files of all kinds to technicians, marketing personnel, production assistants, etc., and there is never a problem in understanding how the system works.

Not only is Media Shuttle simple to learn and use, the application also eases the burden on our IT staff by allowing them to delegate portal administration rights to another user. This designated portal administrator can add and remove users, monitor content flow, enable features, and change the portal design. This ensures that our IT department maintains control of network and storage settings while removing the need for them to spend time managing portals. Using Media Shuttle, it’s easy to manage transfers, configure portals, upload and download material—always independently of the IT guys.

Before moving to Media Shuttle, we distributed content by FTP. That protocol’s limitations made long transfer time lapses and interruptions a constant issue of concern in our day-to-day operations. In comparison, Signiant’s acceleration maintains a consistent level of performance when transferring large files, even over great distances. The software’s high-speed, intelligent transport mechanism and network optimization allows for the use of all available bandwidth, and its checkpoint restart capability ensures that files transmit reliably when connection is restored after a network interruption.

INSTILLING CONFIDENCE

At Mediapro, we also recognize Signiant’s responsiveness to concerns we may have. We particularly appreciate Signiant always working on improving the system and updating us on any new developments. It shows foresight, competitiveness and ambition. They care about us and anticipate our needs.

Media Shuttle and its portal system have helped our clients feel confident about the delivery and arrival of their content. We never have to cancel a show due to a transfer problem. Media Shuttle’s speed and reliability ensure that Mediapro can keep fans cheering.

Marc Andreu Valls is director of Media Services at Mediapro—his department is in charge of the digital ingest and delivery. They provide services to 17 on-air channels, receive the content, files, do the QC, cut and edit the files and send the programs to the Master Control, and different VOD and OTT platforms. He can be reached at info. us@mediapro.tv.

For more information, visitwww.signiant.com.

AMSTERDAM—Signiant will introduce new capabilities for its Software-Defined Content Exchange (SDCX) software-as-a-service platform that simplify secure content exchange between companies at IBC 2019, Sept. 13-17, at the RAI Amsterdam.

The capabilities, first to appear in the Signiant Jet product, make it easy to automate and accelerate transfers of large files between geographically dispersed locations, the company said.

First introduced at the 2019 NAB Show, Jet leverages Signiant’s SDCX SaaS platform, also used in Signiant’s Media Shuttle solution used by a half million people to transfer and share large files. This large footprint means the platform is already connected to thousands of on-premise and cloud storage endpoints, it said.

The new Jet features to be unveiled at IBC 2019 include new content exchange capabilities with a mechanism for a secure cloud handshake to simplify intercompany transfers. The new capabilities allow Jet users to make storage endpoints private, discoverable or discoverable only to select partners in their supply chain, Signiant said.

Companies use a simple, secure web interface to request connection with a partner. Once accepted, specific jobs can be configured and mutually approved, making possible secure, automatic transfers between companies.

With simple, predictable pricing, companies of all sizes have access to Jet. The pricing model also makes it easy to cost share for intercompany exchanges.

See Signiant at IBC 2019 stand 14.B23. For more information on Signiant Jet visit the company’s website.

LAS VEGAS—As the NAB Show approaches, here’s a sharper focus on some of the products that will be on display.

Broadcast Pix

Commander allows remote switching on mobile devices using Chrome, Safari, Firefox or other web browsers. The touchscreen control platform for BPswitch integrated production switchers, Commander now offers full-motion viewing of all cameras and production elements, as well as access to all workflow tools, through a standard internet connection.

The Commander platform allows BPswitch customers to switch live productions from any location using a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Ideal for corporate, government, religious and educational facilities, Commander allows live productions to be switched from a seat in the audience, office across town or even a satellite facility across the country.

The control-over-IP option offers low latency and is accessed through the BPNet IP ecosystem, which is powered through the ioGates cloud-based media management platform.

With its streamlined user interface, Commander makes it easy to execute sophisticated productions. An integrated PTZ camera control overlay is well suited for touch interfaces.

www.broadcastpix.com
Booth: SL4210

Embrionix

The emFUSION-6 SDI-IP gateway features support for HD, 3G and SMPTE ST2110 UHD. The software-defined gateway is ideal for remote broadcast production—a simple, cost-effective way to ensure smooth interconnection of baseband equipment, and supporting all resolutions from SD to UHD-IP.

For remote production, one of the emFUSION’s 4x ports can be configured with a 1GE Ethernet connectivity, which is embedded in the 25GE or both. Signal return is then carried out over just one fiber link, reducing extensive cabling and streamlining costs. Hitless redundancy (ST2022-7) is provided through dual network connectivity, while an optional frame synchronization on encapsulation eliminates the need for genlocking cameras. Easy control is achieved through Ember+, RESTful or NMOS protocols.

www.embrionix.com
Booth: N2508

Kino Flo Lighting Systems

Video media product reviews are calling the new Diva-Lite 21 “the Swiss army knife of pro lighting,” “the number one, all-in-one,” and “the go-to interview light.” By any name, the Diva-Lite 21 LED softlight marries award-winning light quality with advanced design features.

Like Kino Flo’s cinema production lights, the electronic field production Diva-Lite comes loaded with camera LUT software that syncs the light to HD cameras for a nearly 100 percent CRI match. (The default setting is already at CRI >95/TLCI 98.). The Diva-Lite 21 operates on batteries and house power, and includes a 90-degree focusing louver, white, RGB, lighting effects and other firmware modes. It weighs in at 10 pounds (5 Kg), displays 30FC at 10 feet and has center mount for location work, and yoke and pole-op yoke versions for studio lighting.

www.kinoflo.com
Booth: C5344

Signiant

Signiant Jet is a brand-new SaaS solution for automated, reliable, system-to-system transfers of large data sets between locations around the globe. Built on Signiant’s unique and proven SaaS platform, Jet brings powerful, lights-out, enterprise-grade capabilities—previously only available to the largest media companies—to small and mid-size organizations with multiple locations, or that regularly exchange large data sets with partners, customers and suppliers.

Capable of multi-Gbps transfer speeds, Jet employs a new patent-pending, intelligent, self-learning mechanism that optimizes recurring, time-critical, long-distance transfers. Jet’s unprecedented speed and intuitive visual interface make the process of automating and monitoring file transfers fast and easy, while its simple pricing model scales to the needs and budget of any size company.

Offering the industry’s highest security and performance standards, including Signiant’s fastest transport mechanism yet, Jet enables the next evolution of automated, global workflows.

www.signiant.com
Booth: SL10216

VidOvation Corp.

Turner Sports recently used the AVIWEST HE4000 HEVC encoder to transport 20 live camera feeds from Paris to Atlanta for the Ryder Cup. Designed for the distribution and contribution of content over unmanaged networks such as the public internet and cellular, the HE4000 uses AVIWEST’s Safestreams transport protocol to cuts costs in multicamera, live-action REMI and at-home productions.

The HE4000 is a reliable and more cost-effective alternative to satellite, fiber and telecom. The challenge is maintaining perfect video genlock and lip sync across multiple cameras. AVIWEST’s HE4000 4K UHD & HD HEVC live encoder and PRO Series bonded cellular transmitter with SafeStreams technology can do just that. Bonded cellular capability can be added to the HE4000 using the optional QUAD CellLink active antenna.

www.vidovation.com
Booth: C3205

The 2019 NAB Show takes place in Las Vegas from April 6-11. To register for the NAB Show, visit www.nabshow.com.

LEXINGTON, MASS.—Signiant has announced the appointment of Kevin Scott to the newly created position of Chief Business Development Officer.

In this role, Scott will lead strategic relationships with partners and customers and support the company’s efforts to extend its cloud-native SaaS platform to satisfy emerging market needs.

Scott comes to Signiant with an extensive leadership track record in media, including roles at DIRECTV and Deluxe. Most recently he served as an advisor to major M&E companies on technology strategy.

“Kevin is the ideal person to engage with media executives…. (H)e understands the industry both at the C-Suite level as well as at the hands-on implementation level,” said Signiant CEO Margaret Craig.

More information is available on the Signiant website.

Today, broadcasters, production companies, post-houses and others involved in the creative process are adopting cloud and SaaS in droves as new technology assuages content security concerns and speeds file transfers. Recent articles from TV Technology authors Al Kovalick, Peter Suciu, and Signiant cloud and SaaS experts Rick Clarkson and Megan Cater are proof of what M&E businesses have discovered.

This informative ebook on the cloud and SaaS for M&E workflows examines:

• The role virtualization is playing in the evolution of media infrastructure
• Flexible ways to move and manage media files
• The state of SaaS as measured against the demands of broadcasters
• Considerations in choosing a SaaS partner
• The outlook for media apps and processes running in the cloud

Click here to download the full eBook.

Sending files with Media Shuttle is as simple as dragging and dropping them onto a web page. 

Unlike FTP, Media Shuttle never requires training and you can be up and running in hours. Without relying on IT, portal administrators can track file movement, easily add or remove users, and create and customize unlimited portals.

 A simple user-based pricing model makes Media Shuttle cost-effective for any sized business. With Media Shuttle you don’t have to worry about shipping hard drives, compressing files or breaking them into smaller files. 

Media Shuttle makes it easy to send any size file, anywhere, fast. 

Learn more at  www.signiant.com/media-shuttle.

LEXINGTON, Mass.—Signiant Inc. announced the return of Rick Clarkson, the company’s former vice president of product management and a key player in the launch of Media Shuttle, a file-sharing solution, and Signiant’s transition to SaaS. Clarkson will fill the new position of chief strategy officer to steer new services and growth in the media and entertainment space.

[Read: NAB Show Exhibitor Viewpoint — Jon Finegold, Chief Marketing Officer, Signiant]

Clarkson first joined Signiant in 2007 and was elevated to vice president of product management in 2011. His vision of using cloud technology to build a simple file transfer solution led to the development of Media Shuttle, which now has more than 300,000 users worldwide, from 25,000+ companies in more than 200 countries.

“We’re delighted to welcome Rick back to the Signiant team,” said Margaret Craig, CEO of Signiant. “The company has huge momentum right now. ... His understanding of our technology and creative energy make Rick uniquely suited to navigate through this phase of high growth and increasingly strategic customer relationships.”

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In TV Technology's latest guide to sports production, we profile the new Luxor Esports Arena Las Vegas, a 30,000 square-foot multilevel venue that can host every form of competitive gaming. The facility is fairly unique in that it was built for eSports, which means it was built for broadcast and video production. We also take a look back at NBC's coverage of this year's Kentucky Derby and preview the latest technology going into the new MLS D.C. United stadium.

To check out the digital edition of The 2018 Guide to Sports Production, click here.

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.

LEXINGTON, MASS.—Signiant isn’t heading out to Palm Desert just to get some R&R, the company will be there to take part in the 2018 HPA Tech Retreat and showcase updates to its SaaS platform designed for media and entertainment companies.

Ian Hamilton

Signiant will take up a spot at HPA’s Innovation Zone, where it will demonstrate technology enhancements to its SaaS platform that allows professional media assets to be viewed in an adaptive bitrate format without generating a proxy in advance of the play request. Using transfer acceleration technology and cloud-native design, the technology aims to ensure a responsive end user experience without additional customer-deployed hardware or software.

Ian Hamilton, Signiant’s CTO, will be present at the HPA Tech Retreat to demonstrate these technological advancments, as well as talk about Signiant’s entire product line.

The 2018 HPA Tech Retreat will take place from Feb. 19-23 at the JW Marriott Desert Resort & Spa in Palm Desert, Calif.

We are living in the video era—the staggering statistics on video growth make that abundantly clear. According to Cisco’s “Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology 2016–2021,” video will make up 82 percent of all consumer internet traffic by 2021, an increase from 73 percent in 2016. To put this in perspective, “it would take an individual more than five million years to watch the amount of video that will be crossing global IP networks each month in 2021.”

This video era has also given rise to the “golden age of television,” thanks to the proliferation of high-quality scripted dramas available to the video consumer. Linear television is no longer the only place (or even the main place) where people watch this content, but the major broadcast and cable networks remain key drivers in its creation and distribution.

THE CURRENT STATE OF PLAY

This new media landscape for distributing video has created huge challenges—as well as opportunities—for the media and entertainment industry.

Ten years ago, the big technological transformations affecting the television supply chain were primarily the move to end-to-end file-based workflows and the migration to HD. Today both transitions are largely complete—from acquisition all the way through distribution.

But changes keep coming, including the move to larger sized file formats and a whole array of completely new categories—360-degree video, VR, AR, MR, HDR, WCG.

Supporting new distribution platforms and adapting to new video formats are only part of the story. For example, content producers and aggregators increasingly look to IP technology for data transport within their facilities. More broadly, the evolution of the cloud has had a massive impact on how media companies of all types operate today. Big data analytics and AI provide deeper insights into customers’ viewing habits. And data security has become an important aspect of almost all technology decisions.

All these, combined with the ever more globalized content supply chains, have radically altered how media companies approach content creation and distribution—specifically the infrastructure and processes needed to support them.

OPERATIONAL SPEED—THE KEY TO SUCCESS

A decade ago, most large video content providers deployed monolithic, complex, on-premises systems designed to process large amounts of media content targeted at a single distribution platform: typically traditional linear television. End-to-end file-based workflows were just becoming mainstream. Although the promise of eliminating the use of videotape was compelling, file-based infrastructure was far from a panacea.

Such systems required large financial investments (tens of millions of dollars for the largest). Due to their complexity, the systems typically needed many months, sometimes years, to fully implement. In addition, these systems required significant ongoing maintenance and management, frustrated users, frequently relied on custom and often inflexible integrations, and accommodated peak anticipated future load, resulting in costly low utilization.

So long as the volume of content processed by these systems did not substantially change—and so long as the target platforms and associated deliverables, timelines, and process requirements remained largely unaltered—they worked great, for the most part.

The problem?

These solutions are fundamentally ill-suited to meet the complex, fragmented demands of today's content providers and the radically transformed media landscape in which we all live.

SO WHERE TO FROM HERE?

The cloud has enabled massive changes on the demand side of the media equation, but it has also enabled completely new approaches on the supply side.

As consumers embrace newer service models for accessing content, so too do M&E companies see significant advantages in buying technology as services that can be quickly spun up as required, and then taken back down again when no longer needed.

“Quickly” is the operative word. And that's exactly what these cloud-based services offer.

Faster deployment, simplicity, flexibility, pay-as-you-go OPEX economics, and scalability all make this an attractive model for an increasing number of use cases.

The Digital Production Partnership (DPP) industry group summed up today’s realities for M&E companies in their NAB 2017 “The Need for Speed” report: “There are strong creative, financial and operational arguments for the move to IP production and cloud services. But the most compelling reason of all may simply be that audience behaviors will now require any content provider to be able to turn on a dime.”

TURNING ON A DIME IS THE NEW REALITY

With so much competition for the attention of consumers, video content needs to be produced using systems flexible and simple enough to support whatever new distribution platforms or markets gain audience traction. The ability of content companies to operate and adapt at speed has become key to survival and success in this consumer-driven and cloud-enabled media landscape.

Operational speed in this context covers a wide range of needs and capabilities. These include the ability to do the following, at speed:

· Create, process, and deliver more content across multiple supply chains under tight deadlines.

· Purchase and deploy solutions that enable fast content creation and distribution.

· Maintain and manage critical infrastructure for evolving workflows.

· Leverage cloud storage and other services where appropriate, but also support on-premises tools and infrastructure.

· Easily onboard and train users on tools for content creation and management.

· Support new use cases and global workflows.

· Scale out systems to meet peak demand and scale them back again as demand drops.

· Adapt to new formats, markets, and distribution platforms as these emerge.

· Support the seamless addition of new customers, partners, suppliers, projects, and locations as needed.

· Take advantage of automation where applicable.

Collectively, such capabilities provide media businesses with the speed and flexibility they need to rapidly deliver on existing content commitments, as well as pursue new opportunities.

“TURN ON A DIME” WITH NEXT-GENERATION FILE TRANSFER

Speed takes many forms. At Signiant, our ability to accelerate the transfer of large files over IP networks is core to all our products. But for our M&E customers, the ability to “turn on a dime” covers many other aspects of their overall media operations. Speed, in all its aspects, is always on our minds as we innovate and enhance our products so that they address as many of these needs for operational speed as possible. I invite you to learn Signiant Media Shuttle, a SaaS accelerated file transfer solution that might just satisfy some of your need for speed.

About the Author

Mike Nash, Director of Product Management, Media Shuttle, Signiant. With more than twenty years of experience guiding the software development process, Mike Nash is adept at agile development practices for cloud-based software. At Signiant, he helped pioneer hybrid SaaS solutions for the accelerated transfer of large unstructured data sets over public and private IP networks, and has managed the development of Media Shuttle from inception. His goal is to both delight users and give businesses the technology they need to define the future of their industry. He thrives on talking with customers and is always accessible no matter how trivial the question. Besides managing product development, Mike also manages a four-horse farm at his home, a short bike ride from the Signiant office in Ottawa.

VIRGINIA BEACH, VA.—The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) is one of the world’s oldest and largest providers of faith-based television programming, delivering content to roughly 200 countries throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Its international department is responsible for delivering programming to all foreign CBN affiliates and subsidiaries. Programs include the 3D animation series “Superbook,” which is broadcast in approximately 50 languages in more than 90 countries, and other CBN content, such as the international edition of “The 700 Club” (one of the longest-running programs in broadcast history) and “Turning Point,” a testimonial-oriented show.

CBN recently adopted Signiant’s Media Shuttle to accelerate file transfer and ensure the seamless delivery of content to multiple countries. Before Media Shuttle, a team headed up by Michael Trauffer, senior video editor & post production system administrator at the Christian Broadcasting Network, used FTP to deliver HD files overseas. But FTP was too slow, especially when dealing with large files, long distances and customers' variable bandwidths. One example Trauffer gave was a producer in the Philippines needing to wait overnight for an 18GB file download from the FTP server—a task that now takes less than an hour with Media Shuttle.

Another issue? Some of CBN's clients are in countries with unreliable power. This can result in small transfer windows and frequent connectivity interruptions. For example, if a program recipient is five hours into a six-hour file download, but then the power goes out, the person will need to start the time-consuming FTP download process from the beginning when the power returns.

But with Media Shuttle’s Checkpoint Restart feature, interrupted transfers are restarted from the point where they stopped. Thanks to this and Signiant’s file acceleration technology, CBN has experienced far shorter international transfer times than ever before.

CBN originally explored using a solution from one of Signiant's competitors since CBN was already using the product to move domestic files. While this particular solution improved speeds and solved the reliability problem resulting from frequent transfer interruptions, it also introduced new challenges.

Specifically, Trauffer said the alternative solution was “very cumbersome” and “user unfriendly”. Then there was the cost associated with the solution's bandwidth-based license. The expense to upgrade CBN's system to support the bandwidths it needed for international distribution was significantly higher than the cost of adding Media Shuttle.

Media Shuttle offered CBN a substantially more affordable model based on active users and with no restrictions on bandwidth or file sizes. This aligned better with CBN’s budget and its international needs. As a cloud-native SaaS, Media Shuttle is also easy to deploy and maintain. Its intuitive, user-friendly, web-based interfaces require virtually no training. Plus, Media Shuttle still allows CBN to keep its files in on-premises storage. This made Media Shuttle a far better fit for rolling out to end users at CBN’s partners and customers in far-flung locations all around the world.

“We integrated Media Shuttle into our overseas distribution workflow and our clients haven’t been happier. Single hour downloads compared to overnight FTP downloads; this product is indeed the fastest file transfer system we’ve experienced. For me, Media Shuttle was very simple to figure out. It was very straightforward, and I honestly have never used a file transfer tool that is as easy and reliable as this is,” said Trauffer.

Trauffer also enjoys Media Shuttle's email notifications feature: “If I send a batch of files, Media Shuttle will alert me as each file is being downloaded. So it lets me know, for example, that Israel is getting their files, or have received these two and are working on a couple more. I don’t have to keep logging into the system to see what is going on, or sit there and wait for an email seven days later saying “oh, I haven’t been able to get the files, the link expired.” Instead, I can actually see the progress, which is great.”

Thanks to Media Shuttle, CBN is now able to deliver content to the affiliates and subsidiaries it serves in over 200 countries seamlessly and efficiently.

Click here for more information on Media Shuttle.

Jon Finegold is the chief marketing officer for Signiant

Access to better, faster, more efficient file transfer technologies have become a top priority at media and entertainment companies. But how to choose among them?

To help with that process, this buying guide for creative media professionals outlines considerations when choosing a hands-on file transfer system as well as a checklist of must-have features for competitive advantage.

Click here to download 

AMSTERDAM—TV Technology recently spoke with Cory Bialowas, senior vice president of product marketing on their plans for the IBC Show, taking place at the RAI Convention Center in Amsterdam, Sept. 9-13.

TV TECHNOLOGY:What will Signiant be showing at IBC?

CORY BIALOWAS: We’ll be demonstrating new capabilities across our entire portfolio of accelerated file transfer solutions for media enterprises. Support for local object storage is the big news for our flagship Manager+Agents, which is ‘behind the firewall’ software for automated file movement. Companies that own these systems are also adopting Flight in record numbers – that’s our cloud-native offering for upload to AWS or Azure, which can be connected directly to a M+A system. And there are lots of new enhancements to Media Shuttle, the Signiant SaaS platform that continues to be the tool of choice for people who need to move large media files fast.

TVT:Signiant recently released a new guide on FTP. Can you tell us a little more about that?

CB: That asset specifically focused on augmenting or replacing FTP, which is something that more and more of our customers are doing. FTP is old technology, it’s slow, and the user experience isn’t great. Our Media Shuttle SaaS offering is a next-generation solution that solves all of those problems, and at IBC we’re introducing new features that make it practical to undertake large-scale, enterprise-wide deployments. 

TVT:What do you think the main themes for your customers will be at IBC?

CB: We’re expecting cloud technology to continue to be very topical, and local object storage is part of the same conversation. Media customers tell us that storage independence is a critical factor – so Signiant has a strong commitment to supporting a range of storage technologies and suppliers. And as always, customers are looking for technical solutions that meet their over-arching goals of business agility, cost management, and effective resource utilization.

TVT:Can you elaborate on your workflow for Azure and what customer reaction has been?

CB: That was just one example of how media workflows can be extended to the cloud, which is an area of great interest to our customers. Signiant technology plays a key role in the move to cloud technology, whether for a single simple process or the kind of large-scale cloud adoption outlined in our recent press release about Discovery Networks.

Signiant will be in booth 14.L08 in the RAI. For more information on the IBC Show, visit www.ibc.org