The cloud is playing an ever increasing role in media production, with broadcasters increasingly deploying hybrid platforms that combine the cloud with on-prem solutions that take advantage of advances in processing, connectivity and AI.

In our latest Guide to Cloud Solutions, we examine the current landscape of cloud-based production and how media companies are adopting the best of both worlds to make workflows simpler and more efficient.

Download your free guide here.

SAN FRANCISCO—LucidLink has expanded its workflow integration with Adobe Frame.io, giving globally distributed production teams unified access to their Frame.io projects and offering support for production media in separate cloud storage environments.

By extending the Frame.io ecosystem, LucidLink said it provides a complete production workflow where editors and producers can access Frame.io assets alongside all supporting production media, including B-roll, audio, graphics and archives—all within a unified LucidLink file space.

Using LucidLink Connect, files stored in such cloud environments as Microsoft SharePoint, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and Amazon S3 appear instantly for the editor. No data migration, downloads or file duplication is required and existing cloud-storage systems remain unchanged.

This approach extends LucidLink’s file-streaming technology to assets outside Frame.io, bringing local, real-time performance to the rest of the production workflow. Creative teams can collaborate in Frame.io while keeping assets synchronized across the rest of the production toolchain, providing a true camera-to-timeline experience, LucidLink said.

“Creative teams don't work in a single application anymore,” LucidLink CEO Peter Thompson said. “They move across NLEs, MAMs, review and approval tools and VFX platforms. Our integration with Adobe Frame.io means customers can enjoy an exceptional review and collaboration experience, while LucidLink provides the persistent, tool-agnostic storage layer behind it. You get the best of both worlds: a seamless Frame.io workflow and a cloud filespace that serves every other tool in the production.”

As more vendors introduce their own integrated storage options, many media organizations are re-evaluating how to architect their workflows. While application-specific storage can simplify narrow use cases, it often creates silos when content needs to move beyond a single platform.

LucidLink Connect addresses this challenge by acting as an enterprise-grade access layer across the entire production workflow, the company said. Content reviewed and approved in Frame.io can simultaneously be used by other tools, such as NLEs, finishing systems, MAMs or AI services without additional exports, syncs or manual handoffs.

Key benefits of the LucidLink and Adobe Frame.io integration include immediate camera-to-timeline workflows, access to everything in one place, no need to move or duplicate files and enterprise-ready orchestration, the companies said.

“Over the years, Adobe and LucidLink have teamed up to help organizations like Brut, Casual and Minute Media, plus hundreds of other joint customers, do their best work. That success continuously informs our roadmap,” Thompson said. “This integration isn't about choosing one storage option over another. It gives customers the flexibility to design workflows that match the way they actually work. LucidLink Connect provides a neutral, high-performance storage layer that lets Adobe Frame.io shine at what it does best, while ensuring assets are always ready for the next stage in production.”

From high-end episodic and feature projects to live sports and fast-turnaround social content, organizations are increasingly relying on hybrid and fully cloud-based workflows, the company said. The LucidLink and Adobe Frame.io integration is designed for media and entertainment studios, broadcasters, sports and live event producers, agencies, brands, in-house creative teams and enterprise video teams.

More information is available on the LucidLink website.

Over the years we have all gone through numerous video content format introductions with new formats raising the bar as the world moved from black and white to color and then the subsequent format and technology increases in quality—sometimes major and at other times incremental—in resolution, frame rate, color sampling, dynamic range, overall color palette and so forth. Some have been easier than others depending on what is needed at each step in the path from content creation to viewing on the display at the end of the chain.

That said, they all involved a collection of components to hold up the advancement’s three-legged stool. One is the bucket of things needed to create content, including cameras, mixing/processing, post and editing. Another is the devices needed to display the content for audio and video; amps speakers and display screens and projectors.

The third leg is often overlooked, but without it the other two can’t hold things up. After all, even when the content is superbly created and devices are available to show it with pristine clarity, you have to have a means of distribution. Imagine farmers, bakers or ranchers with all the things needed for meals and a restaurant on other end ready to cook, prepare and a table to serve without the trucks and other transportation routes to get everything from one end to the other.

The Missing Link
That brings us to 8K. It’s not new. All the elements of the content side and display sides of the stool are there, but for the consumer market that middle segment has for the most part been missing: the delivery playback means to get the content to its end destination.

Now, that has changed with the introduction of the Kaleidescape Strato K Movie Player, the first consumer storage and playback product that can deliver 8K content as part of an ecosystem that will offer a wide range of content in resolution up to 4320/30p. Equally important, with Kaleidescape’s new 4K Cinematic format, this is the first consumer device capable of playing back content in 4K with full 4:4:4 chroma sampling and up to 2160p/60/12-bit delivery.

Fine, you might say, but you’re reading TV Tech from the perspective of a professional, and likely high-end, content creator, not as a home entertainment purveyor or installer so why should you care about this new device? Let’s go into the details before answering the question and hopefully the answer will reveal itself.

If you are not familiar with Kaleidescape they are a 25-year-old company that offers high-end content playback devices that deliver reference quality video and lossless audio with a huge library that includes movies, concerts, TV series and more that are downloaded to the device rather than played from an optical disc or streamed.

Using a “rental or purchase” model, once downloaded, the content is stored locally so there are no compression artifacts, no buffering, and course, no ads. Combined with a masterfully simple user interface, Kaleidescape products have become the de facto standard for content playback in high end home theaters.

The product in question is the new Strato K Movie Player from Kaleidescape.

The Strato K Movie Player’s ability to deliver two media playback formats to consumers that have not previously been available outside of your control and mastering suites is important as it helps justify the complaints about the added file size requirements for 8K and 4:4:4 versions of the content you are involved. It enables the Premium Large Format experience beyond specialized theatrical exhibition that we see with the likes of Dolby Cinema, PRIME and XL at AMC venues and PRX and PLF at Regal Cinemas. What is in large part is now driving the theatrical side of the distribution market is now available in the home.

The Details
As you will see going forward in my new “From The Other Side” articles in TV Tech starting next month, there is another important reason to bring this to your attention. As a content business professional you are someone that friends, relatives, co-workers and those C-Suite executives that depend on you will look at for expert knowledge on how they can get the best images and sound not only in the office and facilities you work in, but also in their homes. For that reason, some additional details on this breakthrough product are in order.

The Strato K is available now and 8K content will soon be available in SDR and HDR10. For the 4K Cinematic format there are already well over 150 movies already available, and it is worth noting that the 4:4:4 material is newly rendered out to 4:4:4 and is NOT interpolated.

The Player itself, can play out immersive audio formats as Dolby Atmos and DTS:X along with other lossless audio such as Dolby TrueHD and Dolby MAT, DTS-HD High Resolution and linear PCM at 96kHz/24 bit. On the video side there is HDR10 up to 8K (SMPTE ST 2084 and ST 2086) and Dolby Vision up to 4K (of course, all formats are dependent on the specific content). Color spaces up to BT.2020 are supported as are a variety of aspect ratios including 1.78:1 and 2.35:1 with automatic or user interface selectability.

For those already familiar with Kaleidescape, while the 4K Cinematic 4:4:4 titles will obviously have a larger file size, the rental or purchase price is the same as the standard 4:2:0 versions. Even better, if a current Kaleidescape owner upgrades to a Strato 4K there is no extra charge to download the newer version. 8K titles will, however, require a new download at a higher price.

On the storage side, the Strato K has enough onboard storage to hold seven 4K Cinematic files or 10 standard 4K files on its internal drive. Additional storage may be added via the Terra or Terra Prime servers or previously downloaded movies that were purchased, rather than rented, from Kaleidescape may be downloaded again.

There is no front panel display as most installations will use Kaleidescape’s own control system over ethernet through the likes of Crestron, Control4 or other systems or with a smartphone app or an optional remote. From an installation standpoint note that the Strato K requires a wired Gigabit network connection drop for the main unit and any additional Strato K or other Kaleidescape players in a multi-zone system.

By providing the needed third leg of the 8K ecosystem stool as well as giving home viewers higher quality image reproduction thanks to the 4K Cinematic mode, professionals may now have yet another rationale for 8K or high-color sampling content creation as a means of playing it back in the home—or in your viewing rooms—is now available.

The price? At $5,000 US, with availability in Canada at $CN7,05, the UK at £4500 GBP or in Australia at $AUS $7,999. For applications that don’t require 8K or 4:4:4 content delivery/display, the price of the existing Strato V has been reduced to $3,995.

Since its introduction, 8K has been derided by some as having great pictures that can be displayed on large projectors, dvLED walls or the growing segment of 88-to over 100-inch flat panel displays but no way to get native or new 8K scanned transfers, not upscaled, content.

The arrival of the Kaleidescape Strato K puts that objection to rest once and for all as those displays now have viable, certified, way to have a library of that long sought after 8K content delivered. For you, as a TV professional, the excuse no longer holds water. 8K as an end-to-end ecosystem is truly complete and those beautiful displays and projectors will no longer be starved for feature content.

For broadcasters and streamers, a migration to the cloud is no longer a simple technical upgrade. The era of merely replicating on-premise infrastructure in a virtual environment — the so-called lift and shift — is over.

The most successful organizations are embracing the journey as a fundamental operational and creative transformation, requiring a phased approach that addresses architectural resilience, cultural change and the accelerated adoption of new technologies like AI.

The initial hurdle for many is realizing that the journey to the cloud is less about IT infrastructure and more about people.

“Cloud migration isn’t just a technical decision. It’s a creative and operational one,” Sami Aziz, executive producer and founder of Pale Blue Originals and former head of live broadcasts at NASA, said.

“The organizations that navigate the move to cloud best treat it like a production: a phased approach, very clear communication, investment in training and intentional standardization across tools.”

Any move to the cloud comes with challenges, including managing real-time media workflows that demand low latency and high reliability.

“To tackle this, it’s important to ensure workflows are consistent to reduce training time and use real-time monitoring tools to keep an eye on network and media performance,” said Bryan Bedford, director of consumer industries and business solutions at Cisco Systems.

“Automation and orchestration can simplify operations and help scale efficiently. Plus, collaborating with vendors and adopting open standards ensures everything works well together.”

Reliability Concerns

Reliability, especially for real-time media workflows that demand low latency, remains a constant challenge. Organizations must design their systems to survive multiple problems, from public internet performance issues to data center and region outages.

Mike Pilone, enterprise architect at National Public Radio, suggested that any system deployed in the cloud has to “utilize multiple regions to ensure they can survive an interruption. Using multiple cloud providers can give you an additional layer of availability as well as flexibility if a provider is no longer attractive due to service or pricing changes.”

Content protection and ownership in a cloud-first world are also new challenges facing content owners, especially with the need to protect their assets and set clear parameters in case a platform goes down.

“Most broadcasters don’t ask these questions until something goes wrong,” Aziz said. “Redundancy and contracts with clear data ownership language are two critical starting points. Security should also be treated as an ongoing operational priority, not just a one-time setup. The same care you would apply to protecting a finished master should apply to every stage of your cloud pipeline.”

The growth of AI is also linked to the move beyond a basic cloud deployment. Most AI tools, such as automated captioning, content tagging and quality control, are cloud-based. AI models are resource-intensive operations that may only be practical in a shared computing environment such as the cloud.

“As we see more AI adoption in various use cases, we can expect to see greater use of the cloud to provide the core models and compute,” said Jon Cyphers, senior manager of product and support, distribution at NPR.

AI is transforming how broadcasters operate in the cloud, Bedford agreed, helping to automate and optimize media production and delivery, making workflows more efficient and reducing manual errors.

“Combining AI with cloud and edge computing opens up exciting possibilities like personalized content delivery and intelligent network orchestration,” he said.

“This integration helps broadcasters stay competitive by enhancing efficiency and creating new ways to engage audiences.”

According to Aziz, organizations that have already started migrating to the cloud will be able to adopt and adapt to AI incrementally, with human judgment still a large part of the workflow.

“Organizations still anchored to legacy systems will have a harder time making the leap all at once,” he said. “We’re all watching how quickly AI is evolving. The honest truth is, it’s moving faster than any of us can set editorial and ethical standards, and that’s a conversation our entire industry needs to be having.”

© 2026 NAB

XenData, the provider of cutting-edge data storage solutions, has announced the availability of three products that enhance LucidLink functionality: Backup for LucidLink, Archive for LucidLink and Cloud-Connect for LucidLink.

This suite of products will be demonstrated for the first time at the 2026 NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 19 to 22 on the XenData booth W2811.

All three products run on a Windows platform, typically a cloud-based virtual machine such as an EC2 instance from AWS.

"LucidLink is the leading provider of shared cloud storage for real-time collaborative video editing," said Dr Phil Storey, XenData CEO. "We are delighted to be offering enhancements that provide independent backup and archive plus Cloud-Connect, which makes it easy to integrate existing multi-tiered cloud archives with LucidLink."

Backup for LucidLink provides an enhanced disaster recovery strategy. While a LucidLink Filespace offers excellent redundancy and availability, XenData’s Backup for LucidLink synchronizes the content to an entirely different storage location. It supports backing up to any AWS, Azure, Seagate Lyve or Wasabi datacenter. Data integrity is ensured using end-to-end logical block protection and individual files may be downloaded independently of LucidLink.

XenData said that Archive for LucidLink is ideal for offloading finished projects. It allows an administrator to easily move files and folders from a LucidLink Filespace to standard object storage on one or multiple public clouds, including AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, Seagate Lyve and Wasabi object storage. Archive for LucidLink provides a web portal that displays previews of all video and image files written to the cloud archive, including files that are stored on inaccessible storage tiers such as AWS Glacier and the Azure Archive Tier. Furthermore, it allows users to rehydrate files to an accessible tier and then to download to their local Mac or PC.

Cloud-Connect for LucidLink allows files stored in existing AWS and Azure object storage, including on inaccessible tiers, to be easily added to a LucidLink Filespace. The software continuously indexes the object storage repository creating a file-folder structure that can be browsed via a Cloud-Connect web portal. Users can rehydrate selected files from inaccessible storage tiers such as AWS Glacier and the Azure Archive Tier and then connect them to a LucidLink Filespace.

WASHINGTON—Although the Federal Communications Commission has approved the Nexstar deal to acquire Tegna and Nexstar quickly declared the $6.2 billion transaction closed on March 19, legal challenges to the deal continue to mount, with Newsmax Media and several pay TV groups filing a motion in United States Court Of Appeals for the District Of Columbia Circuit seeking to halt the deal.

The emergency motion for stay and injunction pending appeal was filed on March 21 by the Broadband Communications Association Of Pennsylvania, Broadband Communications Association Of Washington, Indiana Cable And Broadband Association, Mississippi Internet And Television, Tennessee Cable & Broadband Association, VCTA – Broadband Association Of Virginia and Newsmax Media Inc.,

As previously reported, eight states have separately filed an emergency motion in California seeking an injunction blocking the deal while the federal court considers their antitrust lawsuit filed last week.

In addition, Monday March 23, Free Press, the Communications Workers of America, the United Church of Christ Media Justice Ministry, Inc. and Public Knowledge filed an appeal of the Federal Communications Commission’s rushed approval of the largest broadcast television merger in U.S. history.

The challenge, like the motion by Newsmax and the pay TV groups was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. It asks the court to stop the merger of Nexstar and Tegna before it proceeds and the companies combine all operations, and asks the court to set aside the FCC’s approval of the deal. The groups assert that the merger is unlawful, in contradiction of laws established by Congress and of FCC procedures, too.

Democracy Forward represents the coalition in the case. It filed a notice of appeal and motion on Monday.

“The whole point of these deals is not better news coverage, as these massive companies claim,” said Matt Wood, Free Press’ vice president of policy and general counsel. “They’re all about raising consumer prices while slashing the companies’ costs, which means firing reporters and centralizing the production of top-down, duplicative and watered-down news. We’re ready to challenge this unlawful deal before the courts and alongside the communities that Nexstar is supposed to be serving.”

The separate motion filed by Newsmax and pay TV group in the D.C. Circuit also complains that the FCC acted improperly in approving the deal and that Nexstar moved too quickly to close the deal.

“The merger `adversely affect[s]’ Appellants and consumers: By lifting regulatory restrictions on the first and third biggest broadcasters, the new company will upend the market for cable news and digital media and exert its newfound leverage to demand higher and higher fees from cable providers and other multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) wishing to carry Nexstar/Tegna stations (which in turn means higher monthly TV bills for American consumers). Yet while Congress guaranteed adversely affected entities the right to judicial review, it will be exceedingly difficult as a practical matter to unwind the acquisition once Tegna fully dissolves into Nexstar. That fact is not lost on Nexstar and TEGNA—rather than slowing things down to facilitate review, they apparently worked hand-in-glove with the FCC to frustrate judicial review: The order approving the transaction was publicly released around 6:50 PM; by 7:05 PM, Nexstar publicly announced that the transaction had already closed.”

More specifically, the filing argues that its challenge to the FCC’s order is likely to succeed because the FCC’s “order is flawed from stem to stern. In the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2004, Congress prescribed a `39 percent national audience reach limitation, so a company with 80% national reach [that the combined Nexstar/Tegna group would have] should be a nonstarter. FCC regulations also prohibit one company from owning more than two stations in a single market—so a company owning 3 stations in scores of markets should also be a nonstarter. And even if the Commission somehow retained authority to suspend either requirement wholesale, the Commission has never done so—so allowing the subordinate Bureau to do so should be yet another nonstarter, because the Bureau expressly lacks authority over `novel questions of law, fact or policy.’”

“Under binding precedent from both this Court and the FCC, the least the Commission had to do was hold a hearing and put this transaction to a vote of the Commissioners,” the motion continued. “But that precedent went out the window after a social-media directive from President Trump to “GET THIS DEAL DONE!” The Media Bureau then dashed out an order approving the transaction in three-and-a-half months—roughly half the usual timeline—whistling past the Commission’s prior position that it lacked the authority to `decline to enforce” the 39% cap “against any person or entity.’”

“The remaining factors confirm the need for a stay,” the motion concluded “Notwithstanding the `serious, substantial’ legal questions that the Bureau purported to resolve, Nexstar and Tegna spirited their transaction across the finish-line in an attempt to avoid defending the Bureau’s `difficult and doubtful’ conclusions in court. Notwithstanding this gambit, substantial steps remain before full integration, and this Court should act promptly to enjoin them. Failing to do so would eviscerate Appellants’ right to review while hearkening the problems that Congress’ `39 percent national audience' reach limitation’ sought to prevent, concentrating control over high-value news, sports, and emergency programming in a single company and empowering that company to inflate prices while dictating what gets reported to 80% of households. And it would give future Commissioners (and Presidents) a roadmap to follow: Shunt politically-favored-but-legally-dubious mergers to the Bureau and give the parties a head-start to close before adversely affected entities can get into court. To protect its jurisdiction, to preserve Appellants’ statutory right to review, and to safeguard consumers, the Court should immediately stay the Bureau’s order and direct Nexstar and Tegna to hold separate and take no further steps to combine.”

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Harmonic has introduced Spectrum X Plus, the newest generation of its Spectrum X media server, offering double the channel density of previous generations. The company will showcase the new server at the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22 in Las Vegas.

Harmonic says Spectrum X Plus dramatically simplifies video ingest and playout functions for broadcasters and content owners, significantly lowering the total cost per channel for broadcast delivery. Spectrum X Plus strengthens Harmonic’s playout-to-delivery solutions by enabling broadcasters to deploy high performance playout infrastructure on premises, in the cloud with Harmonic’s VOS360 Media SaaS, and in hybrid environments, according to the company.

“As broadcasters face growing cost pressures and increasingly complex workflows, Spectrum X Plus provides the flexibility, performance and future-ready architecture they need to modernize ingest, production and playout operations,” said Stephane Cloirec, vice president, video appliance and software product management at Harmonic. “With Spectrum X Plus, we’re responding to customer demand for higher channel density and lower cost per channel without compromising the outstanding quality and reliability that Harmonic solutions are known for. The next-generation media server also paves the way for future integration of AI-based applications such as Harmonic’s AI orchestration service.”

Offering up to eight HD channels or two UHD channels per server, Spectrum X Plus significantly reduces rack space, power consumption and operating costs for broadcasters and content owners. The high-performance baseband video server supports multichannel ingest, studio and news production, channel-in-a-box and integrated playout workflows.

Spectrum X Plus streamlines video playout with integrated onboard graphics, audio loudness control, MCR switching and subtitle insertion. The media server also provides innovative capabilities for next-generation production including support for UHD workflows such as 3D LUT-based HDR conversions, immersive audio formats such as Dolby Atmos and MPEG-H as well as multiple resolutions, frame rates and codec formats.

LUT-based HDR conversions, immersive audio formats such as Dolby Atmos and MPEG-H as well as multiple resolutions, frame rates and codec formats.

Built on a flexible, software-based architecture, Spectrum X Plus eliminates the constraints of traditional hardware-centric systems, Harmonic says. The next-generation media server enhances performance for SMPTE ST 2110 environments, supporting SDI and SMPTE ST 2110 IP I/O, or hybrid configurations. This advanced feature enables broadcasters to transition seamlessly from traditional SDI to fully IP-based workflows.

Spectrum X Plus shares the same file and graphics formats with VOS360 Media and can be controlled by the same automation and traffic systems. This enables broadcasters to easily expand any Spectrum X system with cloud playout resources. The transition is seamless for broadcasters, allowing hybrid playout infrastructures to support service continuity and the rapid launch of pop-up channels in the cloud through fluid operations.

The media server’s software-driven architecture also enables GPU acceleration and deployment of AI-based capabilities such as automated captioning, translation and other value-added workflows, helping broadcasters further streamline operations and reduce costs.

Harmonic will demonstrate its new Spectrum X Plus media server at its NAB Show Booth, W2831, in the West Hall of the LVCC.

MONTREAL—Matrox Video will showcase how broadcasters and media organizations can evolve toward modern, software-defined infrastructures designed to enhance operational flexibility and efficiency during the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The company will present its portfolio of devices powering end-to-end broadcast workflows, linking today’s open standards-based IP infrastructures with the software-defined production models shaping the future.

At the center of its booth will be Matrox ORIGIN, an asynchronous media framework and deployment-ready foundation for the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) Dynamic Media Facility (DMF) vision. Running on standard IT infrastructure—on-premises or in the cloud—Matrox ORIGIN replaces custom hardware interconnected by clocked, synchronous protocols, such as ST 2110 or SDI, with distributed media services operating in COTS environments.

At its core, Matrox ORIGIN Fabric provides an MXL-compatible, uncompressed media exchange layer that enables secure, application-level content sharing across vendors.

By decoupling media processing from dedicated hardware and combining high-performance transport with integrated control, Matrox ORIGIN enables low-latency, resilient and highly scalable workflows, giving users the ability to operationalize the DMF model today beyond transport alone.

“The broadcast industry is moving toward software-defined and IP-based production models,” said Alberto Cieri, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Matrox Video. “With Matrox ORIGIN and our comprehensive IP portfolio, we enable customers to achieve greater flexibility and operational efficiency while maintaining the performance and reliability expected in live broadcast environments.”

Complementing Matrox ORIGIN at NAB is Matrox Video’s IP-based production tools that support live production workflows from capture through delivery. This includes Matrox Monarch EDGE for secure, low-latency encoding and decoding for remote production and distribution workflows; Matrox ConvertIP, enabling zero-latency bridging between SDI and ST 2110/IPMX workflows; and Matrox Vion, a multi-channel 4K IP gateway for encoding, decoding, transcoding and cross-conversion across live and cloud production environment; and Matrox Avio 2, an ST 2110/IPMX and NMOS-enabled IP KVM extender supporting high-resolution extension over standard networks. Together, these devices provide practical, scalable pathways to IP within existing infrastructures.

See Matrox Video at 2026 NAB Show booth N2451.

More information is available on the company’s website.

WASHINGTON—Senator Deb Fischer (R-NE) and Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Commerce Committee’s Telecommunications and Media Subcommittee, have sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) urging the agency to preserve the existing rules and power levels governing the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band (3.55–3.70 GHz).

“CBRS’s low-power, shared-spectrum model has become vital infrastructure nationwide, with network hardware produced from American design, construction, and investment,” the letter noted. “Today, there are over 422,000 active CBRS radio devices deployed across the country. To put that in perspective, the entire U.S. wireless industry combined cumulatively operates nearly 250,000 macro cellular sites. This growth is not theoretical—CBRS is already deployed in more than 82% of U.S. counties that are predominantly rural, helping deliver cost-effective connectivity and closing gaps in unserved and underserved communities, including on Tribal Lands. Especially in rural areas, CBRS spectrum is critical for wireless internet service providers to serve customers over great distances. It also enables Tribes to deliver essential services—such as telehealth, distance learning, and other Tribal services—more economically and reliably.”

“Given the critical nature of this band, we urge the FCC to reject changes that would upend CBRS’s carefully calibrated mid-power operating model—including proposals to increase power levels or otherwise modify the technical rules in ways that raise interference risk, degrade service, `squeeze out' users, or move users to a different band,” the letter concluded. “Such changes would reduce spectrum efficiency and undermine the very facilities and community networks that rely on CBRS today.”

The letter was applauded by Spectrum for the Future, a group supporting dynamic spectrum sharing that is backed by tech companies, wireless providers and others.

“CBRS is already delivering strong results for communities, businesses and public sector users across the country. That success is the result of more than a decade of significant private sector investments and intensive collaboration between federal agencies, the military and industry. It has worked so well at protecting the military that they recently showed more confidence in the technology by agreeing to relax some of the protection requirements—again a clear demonstration of the good-faith collaboration that CBRS has fostered," said Dave Wright, policy director at Spectrum for the Future in a statement. "Senator Fischer and Senator Luján correctly underscore the vital role CBRS is playing in connecting previously unconnected Americans in rural areas and Tribal lands, and its importance to the success of the BEAD program."

DUSSELDORF, Germany—Elements will feature its new GRID NAS platform as well as the latest developments in its ELEMENTS media ecosystem at the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22, at the Las Vegas Convention center.

GRID, built on Ceph, an open-source, distributed storage system, is a software-defined, scale-out NAS platform. It combines all-NVMe performance with the company’s automation engine and Media Library media asset management software. The company has begun shipping GRID to customers.

The company will also feature its Elements cloud production platform with AI integrations. At the core of the secure cloud platform is the flexibility for a future-proof and scalable foundation to boost performance and maximize ROI.

Its Media Library MAM enhances the platform with tools for tagging, searching, organizing and securely sharing media. API-driven automation and AI integrations generate rich, searchable metadata for faster, smarter and more collaborative production.

Elements will also feature its ELEMENTS NVME CUBE with a petabyte of RAW storage, 12 GB/s speed and a toolset that increases on-set productivity. It will also showcase workflows and integrations across the ELEMENTS media ecosystem, including a new Avid Media Composer panel that allows editors to search and browse Media Library assets, preview proxies and seamlessly bring media directly into their projects.

Building on this is VALET, which extends storage seamlessly into the cloud, which allows teams to offload inactive projects while keeping them instantly accessible with BLINK delivering enterprise-grade BeeGFS (Bee Global File System) performance across Windows and macOS for high-throughput environments.

See Elements at 2026 NAB Show booth N1717.

More information is available on the company’s website.

LOS ANGELES—The high-end video data management and workflow solution provider OpenDrives has announced an add-on investment to its previous funding rounds led by IAG Capital Partners.

The company reported that the new capital will support OpenDrives’ continued strategic market growth as it expands its software platform across media, sports, and enterprise video production teams worldwide.

In conjunction with the funding, OpenDrives’ board announced the promotion of long-time chief operating officer, Trevor Morgan, to CEO. Morgan has led a multi-year operational and strategic transformation of the business and brings deep experience in data management and SaaS across both early-stage companies and Fortune 500 enterprises, including Cisco and Capital One.

The company said the leadership transition completes OpenDrives’ successful evolution from a hardware-centric offering to a pure-play software platform purpose-built to manage the complex requirements of high-end video data at scale.

In late 2025, OpenDrives completed development of the first version of Astraeus, an innovative, advanced data services platform based on Kubernetes. Astraeus extends the capabilities of OpenDrives’ flagship Atlas product, which is trusted by many of the world’s major broadcasters, professional sports organizations, and post-production studios and networks.

“We could not be more optimistic about OpenDrives’ future in delivering the world’s leading video data management platform for media, entertainment, professional sports, and corporate video production teams,” said Joel Whitley, Partner at IAG Capital Partners.

“With our business transformation behind us, we are well-positioned to expand the use of the OpenDrives platform to video production professionals across all industries and around the globe—wherever companies struggle with complex video, we are the solution partner of choice,” said Morgan.

OpenDrives’ solutions give customers the flexibility to purchase storage hardware from their preferred vendors while still leveraging OpenDrives’ world-class software for video data workflow storage management and data services orchestration. The platform manages video assets seamlessly across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, enabling organizations to repatriate cloud data to on-premises infrastructure for significant cost savings—while retaining cloud-like management, scalability, and accessibility.

As video becomes the dominant medium for communication, OpenDrives said it is uniquely positioned as the only software partner whose core competence is exclusive to video production and workflow storage management. Industry data underscores the scale of the challenge: video accounts for over 85% of global internet traffic, and the world now generates hundreds of exabytes of video data every year across entertainment, professional sports, news, marketing, and enterprise communications. High-resolution formats such as 4K, 8K, HDR, and immersive video continue to accelerate storage demands and network costs, while presenting workflow challenges for users and creatives.

OpenDrives enables organizations to dramatically reduce data storage costs, minimize network egress fees, and deliver near-zero latency access to massive video libraries—capabilities that are critical for time-sensitive production environments.

While OpenDrives continues to serve its core customers in media and entertainment, the company has recently expanded into professional sports and is accelerating adoption among corporate creative and marketing teams producing high-end video content. Although purpose-built for video, the OpenDrives platform is capable of managing any large-scale unstructured data types that demand high performance, reliability, and intelligent workflow management, the company noted.

More information is available at www.opendrives.com.

Over the relatively short history of television broadcasting, archives have developed both technologically and in importance. There has been a progression from reels of film or telerecordings to videotapes—all on shelves— to the digitized deep storage of LTO (Linear Tape-Open) and disk drives, with solid-state flash memory and servers later bringing even more choice.

The cloud is now seen as a viable alternative to these methods in a media market that finally recognizes the financial value and potential of its assets, both historic and recent. Some broadcasters have made a wholesale move into the cloud for archiving, but others prefer a hybrid approach. This is highlighted in the 2025 annual report from the Active Archive Alliance (AAA), which promotes “active archives” that provide quick access to secondary storage systems, with the data always available online for fast recovery and review.

Stop Start
“I had seen many companies gravitating towards the cloud when it first came out, and then there was a bit of pulling back and potentially even repatriating data out of the cloud,” said Eric Polet, co-chair of the AAA and director of product marketing at software platform developer Arcitecta. “What I’m seeing now is a lot of hybrid cloud for distribution and sharing content, oftentimes bringing long-term preservation back on-prem.”

Polet’s co-chair, Rich Gadomski, director of channel sales and new business development for data- storage solutions with Fujifilm North America Corp., added that the AAA is “technology-agnostic,” with all main archiving media represented: optical, Savartus; solid state drives (SSD)/hard disk drives (HDD), Western Digital; tape, IBM, Fujifilm and Spectra Logic; and the cloud, Wasabi.

“Regardless of where the data is being stored, it can be accessed on-prem or in the cloud,” Gadomski said. “The volume of data, and its importance and value, has increased tremendously, so nobody wants to delete anything.”

From the cloud perspective, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is seeing many of the world’s leading broadcast and media and entertainment organizations commit their archives to the platform. But Stephanie Lone, global leader of solutions architecture for media, entertainment, games and sports at AWS, acknowledged that, in some cases, there is a hybrid element to the setup.

“The demos we give at the NAB Show and IBC often have the workspaces on physical hardware,” she said. “This means people have the tactile response they love, but don’t know if it is happening on the cloud or a hard drive under a desk. We’ve worked well in these hybrid environments with broadcasters and continue to do so.”

In addition to this, Lone added, full cloud transfer is also being undertaken by leading broadcasters. “Warner Bros. Discovery has an entire secure media supply chain on AWS, migrating petabytes of content to serve its customer base, which is approximately 95 million [HBO] Max subscribers alone,” she said. “Without the cloud, media companies can’t deliver or monetize their content across the digital landscape they’re in today.”

Have a Clear Roadmap
Avid produces cloud-compatible tools, including the MediaCentral workflow-management system and NEXIS storage platform, which can also connect with LTO archives. “Many broadcasters are still exploring the best use of cloud for their workflows,” observed Craig Wilson, product evangelist for artist relations at the company, with archiving a growing area.

“Cost of egress remains an issue, so broadcasters are focused on studying the total cost of ownership to ensure full value for their investment,” he said.

James Fraser, vice president of U.S. sales at content discovery platform developer Moments Lab, observed that most broadcasters are either actively migrating their archives to the cloud or running a hybrid model.

“But they have a clear road map over time to push more content into the cloud because of accessibility,” he said. “On-premises systems have done a tremendous job over the years, but cloud technology has allowed organizations more global access to their content, both from within the business and for third parties.”

Ease of access and moving away from physical in-house libraries would appear to be compelling arguments in favor of cloud-based archives, but SSD, HDD and tape systems are still used by on-prem setups. Other World Computing (OWC) is known for its range of internal SSD and RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) systems, but last year launched the Archive Pro Ethernet network-based LTO backup and archiving system.

“We were not an LTO company and I wasn’t an advocate for it,” OWC Founder and CEO Larry O’Connor said. “But from large organizations to individual producers, there is a desire to have what is ultimately cost-effective storage that’s air-gapped and has longevity without requiring ongoing maintenance.”

O’Connor called the cloud “an amazing tool,” but said the cost of uploading and then accessing content can be “exorbitant.” That hasn’t been AWS’ experience, Lone said, citing public broadcaster Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), which has moved all of its digital media services into the cloud.

“This has allowed them the flexibility to support its surging traffic and maintain security but [also] save more than 50% on event services,” she said. “When thinking about the cost implications of moving broadcast archives, each customer’s implementation varies.”

What About AI?
As part of this, Lone said, many broadcasters and media-related organizations are utilizing AI and machine learning (ML) to automate tagging of assets transferred to the cloud “for better discoverability.” A recent report on the archive market confirms this, showing AI-driven media archives are now “a top priority across nearly every M&E segment.”

The State of Media Archiving survey from object-based storage specialist Pixitmedia by DataCore revealed that of the 330 M&E professionals questioned, 30% of studios and 46% of enterprises are embedding AI/ML “to enhance content operations.”

The survey also reveals that only 6% percent of M&E companies have moved to a single platform for media archiving. The overall feeling, as shown by the AAA report, is that hybrid operations are now more the norm, with older technologies, including LTO and drives, still part of the picture for secondary storage, if not the amain archive.

Either way, it is reassuring that preserving TV programs—by whatever means—is now a major consideration for broadcasters and streamers alike.

LOS ANGELES—Software-defined data storage and data services provider OpenDrives has elevated Alex Dunfey to chief technology officer, responsible for driving the company’s overall technology and software strategy.

The promotion of Dunfey, who had been senior vice president, engineering, coincides with the soft launch of OpenDrives’ Astraeus platform, a cloud-native data services platform announced in September. Astraeus is designed to configure, store, orchestrate, manage, secure and deploy mission-critical applications across dynamic environments, whether on-premises, cloud, or hybrid, OpenDrives said. It extends OpenDrives’ reach beyond the media and entertainment space to include IT departments across a wide range of enterprise organizations, the company said.

“Since joining OpenDrives, Alex has made a significant impact on how quickly and reliably we produce and release software,” said OpenDrives Chief Operating Officer Trevor Morgan, to whom Dunfey will report. “He is a consummate engineering leader who knows how to organize and encourage development teams to outperform. More importantly, Alex is an experienced technologist who understands current market trends and how to drive our company and products to take advantage of them. With Alex bringing his broad experience and strategic mind to our C-suite, and with the other organizational adjustments he’s making within the engineering team, we’re nicely poised for our planned growth just ahead.”

In conjunction with Dunfey’s promotion, OpenDrives said, several members of the engineering team were also promoted to new leadership roles:

• Christian Kuntz advanced from director of software engineering to director, advanced development, focusing on research, prototyping, and exploring new technology areas.
• Heather Lapointe was named chief architect, software engineering and infrastructure, leading a new architecture team to ensure software, infrastructure and engineering operations evolve to meet new product challenges.
• Sandy Luppino was elevated to manager, quality engineering, and Joshua Marx will join the management team as manager, software engineering. Both will assume increased responsibilities in day-to-day engineering development, testing and bringing new products to market, OpenDrives said.

“The launch of Astraeus is just the beginning, both for our product and our team,” Dunfey said. “Future updates to Astraeus will add new data services, simplify workflow management and leverage AI for insights and automation, which means we have to evolve the way we operate to do that. We will need dedicated resources who can focus on researching and prototyping new technologies, ensuring we have the underlying architecture required to fulfill the vision for Astraeus. Fortunately, we already have a great team of engineering and product leaders to forge the path ahead, and I’m excited to continue this journey with them.”

Dunfey joined OpenDrives in 2023 as vice president, engineering. Prior to joining the company, he was an engineer and technical lead at EMC, VCMWare and Simplivity, later joining Amazon Web Services (AWS). OpenDrives said he guided the company’s transition from a traditional, hardware-based storage model to a software-defined organization, aligning strategies to match an evolving landscape and consistently delivering projects on time and within budget.

MONTREAL—New Delhi Television Ltd. (NDTV), one of India’s leading news and digital journalism companies, has selected Grass Valley to modernize its media asset management systems and to provide technologies that will enhance collaboration across its global teams.

As part of that effort, NDTV implemented Grass Valley’s Framelight X solution, which is powered by Grass Valley’s AMPP OS platform, to consolidate media assets, preserve metadata, and provide a unified, browser-accessible platform for managing and distributing content. Recently implemented, the deployment is designed to streamline workflows and improve operational efficiency.

Founded in 1988 and headquartered in New Delhi, NDTV is a pioneer in Indian news and digital journalism. Operating under AMG Media Networks Ltd, it reaches audiences across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, the Middle East, Australia, New Zealand, Mauritius and SAARC countries.

Grass Valley reported that the migration project involves transferring high-resolution media from NDTV’s existing GV Stratus system to the Framelight X storage pool, with Stratus Rules managing the migration process. Associated metadata is safely transferred alongside the content to ensure immediate accessibility in Framelight X, while automated workflows generate new proxy files, simplifying access and enabling faster collaboration. By consolidating assets into a single intuitive platform, NDTV gains a more efficient and flexible system that empowers teams to collaborate seamlessly across multiple regions.

“Our priority was to modernize our content management system while ensuring that none of our existing assets or metadata were lost in the process,” explained Dinesh Singh, chief technology officer at NDTV. “Framelight X has given us exactly what we needed: a seamless migration path, powerful asset management, and the confidence that our teams can collaborate more efficiently across platforms. This has been a 100% successful deployment.”

Evan Boyd, senior vice president for APAC at Grass Valley, added that “NDTV has been a trusted partner for many years, and we are proud to continue supporting their transformation journey. With Framelight X, NDTV is not only modernizing its content workflows but also future-proofing its operations to scale with evolving digital demands. This project demonstrates the strength of Grass Valley’s AMPP in delivering efficient, flexible, and collaborative solutions for media organizations worldwide.”

Grass Valley will be exhibiting at Broadcast India in Mumbai between Oct. 14-16 on stand D04.

LOS ANGELES—When we launched KOCOWA, our vision was simple yet ambitious: to bring the best of Korean entertainment to audiences worldwide. Founded by Korea’s leading broadcasters, KBS, MBC and SBS, KOCOWA began in the Americas in 2017. Over the years, it has evolved into a truly global platform, with expansion into Europe, Australia and New Zealand in early 2024.

Today, KOCOWA has subscribers across 73 countries who enjoy their favorite dramas, variety shows, and K-pop programs just six hours after they air in Korea, with subtitles available in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese.

This rapid expansion has been fueled not only by our dedication to fans but also by our commitment to continuously improving our technology. Dalet Flex, in particular, has become the foundation for building an efficient and scalable operation that supports both our B2C subscribers and B2B partners worldwide.

The Deployment
From the beginning, our goal was to automate content acquisition and distribution to operate with minimal resources while maintaining the highest quality of service. We needed a platform capable of handling the high volume of content arriving from Korea, adapting to diverse business models and scaling globally.

Dalet Flex provided robust, adaptable workflows that reduced manual labor and ensured consistency across every aspect of our media supply chain. With the support of Dalet’s professional services team, we designed and configured workflows tailored to our specific needs. These cover everything from ingesting and processing content to preparing metadata and delivering assets to both B2C and B2B end points. The Dalet team also trained our staff, enabling us to quickly optimize operations.

Today, we have team members across content management, marketing, service operations and engineering who rely on Dalet Flex on a daily basis. This cross-departmental adoption demonstrates just how central Dalet Flex has become to our operation.

In our operations, Dalet Flex automates the entire supply chain. Incoming assets and metadata are acquired, processed and transformed for use on our streaming service. Content is then distributed seamlessly across our B2C platform as well as to our expanding roster of B2B partners. Tasks that once required hours of repetitive manual effort are now handled automatically, allowing our teams to redirect their efforts toward innovation, user engagement and strategic partnerships.

One of the most valuable aspects of Dalet Flex is the Flex Core. Its flexibility allows us to adjust workflows as business needs evolve, whether we are scaling into new regions or adding distribution partners. Additionally, the Dalet Flex Publish feature has become indispensable to our content marketing strategy, automatically delivering promotional clips to YouTube, where they engage fans and generate excitement for full episodes.

Future Flexibility
The impact of Dalet Flex on our operations is clear in terms of efficiency, cost reduction and improvements in the viewing experience. The solution automates and eliminates repetitive manual work, accelerating turnaround and ensuring content is ready for fans within hours of broadcast in Korea.

It has also reduced costs. By leveraging automated workflows, we have kept staffing levels lean and operational costs under control, even while serving audiences around the world. In addition, simplified, reliable processes mean that viewers receive subtitled content faster, improving satisfaction and loyalty, while B2B partners benefit from smooth, on-time delivery.

As KOCOWA continues to grow, Dalet Flex will remain a cornerstone of our operation. Our plans include expanding our B2C reach into new territories while also strengthening our B2B partnerships with media companies worldwide. By doing so, we aim to make it easier than ever for audiences everywhere to discover and enjoy the rich, diverse world of Korean entertainment.

For us, Dalet Flex is the backbone that enables us to fulfill our mission of connecting global audiences with the vibrant, ever-expanding universe of Korean entertainment.

More information is available at www.dalet.com.

NEW YORK—Dalet unveiled Dalia, the company’s Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution that unifies the Dalet ecosystem under a single, natural-language, conversational‑style user experience, at the just-ended IBC2025.

Dalia, an intelligent layer embedded across Dalet Flex, Dalet Pyramid, Dalet InStream, Dalet Brio and Dalet Amberfin, features a family of media-aware agents that act as assistants to facilitate complex workflows across ingest, production, rights management, distribution and archive.

“After a year of shaping and executing our product strategy, we’re thrilled to bring this vision to life,” said Stephen Garland, chief product and technology officer at Dalet. “From Day One, we have challenged ourselves and the industry to deliver the kind of seamless, user‑centric experience that consumers now expect. What we’re unveiling isn’t just another tool or AI chatbot. It’s intelligence beyond an agent, a transformational leap that unifies the entire Dalet ecosystem under a single interface. With this launch, media professionals can reimagine how they work, leveraging the full power of our platform through a conversation with a trusted assistant.”

Built on Dalet’s open-core API, the agentic interface sits above all applications in the Dalet portfolio, offering a single conversational entry point. Users can ask the agent to locate assets, build title collections based on rights status, trigger review workflows or schedule live ingest, and the system will execute these tasks end‑to‑end.

Unlike generic chatbots, Dalet’s conversational AI interface and agents are media-aware: trained on the company’s own orchestration and media engine, not on customer data. This allows users to interact with a full range of media types directly and securely within the chat. Training and analyzing media is done within the core platform, providing complete control of which engines access customers’ content. Dalet AI Agents understand how to search, clip, transcode and package content without users leaving the chat. This approach augments traditional user interfaces for many day‑to‑day tasks, giving users the ability to perform complex operations with ease.

More information is available on the company’s website.

DENVER—In the runup to IBC2025, Comcast Technology Solutions (CTS) has announced that Dubai Media, the official media organization of the Government of Dubai, has selected CTS as the end-to-end technology provider for Dubai Media's video streaming platform.

The deployment will power the streaming experience for Dubai Media's full suite of channels, including Dubai TV, Dubai Sports, and others, rolling out to consumers later this year.

"Dubai Media is committed to providing our viewers with the best possible informational and entertainment services, supported by the most advanced and proven technology," said Saleh Lootah, senior vice president of engineering and operations at Dubai Media. "As a leader in the regional media sector, we take pride in shaping the future of digital content in the Middle East. Our partnership with Comcast Technology Solutions gives us unprecedented flexibility and insights, enabling us to continue setting the standard for innovation and excellence."

The two companies explained that the adoption of the new platform reflects Dubai Media's ongoing mission to reimagine media in the digital era, building on its legacy as a cultural, social, and bridge between Dubai and the wider Arab world.

CTS' Cloud Video Platform, part of Comcast Media360, a 24/7 managed service, will support Dubai Media's efforts to modernize Dubai's digital media ecosystem. The service will manage the entire content lifecycle for Dubai Media, from acquisition and transformation to OTT streaming delivery, monetization, and user experience.

The new Dubai Media streaming experience using the platform will launch later in 2025. Further consumer-facing details will be announced by Dubai Media at a future date, the two companies said.

"We're honored to support DMI's vision and excited to be part of this transformative new chapter for media in Dubai," said Bart Spriester, senior vice president and general manager of streaming, broadcast, & advertising for Comcast Technology Solutions. "Our core expertise is managing, and alleviating, the back-end technical complexity of video operations, so our customers can focus on the best ways to reach and engage their audiences. DMI's selection is a powerful endorsement of Comcast Media360 and our strategy to deliver end-to-end video solutions to the most forward-looking broadcasters and media companies around the world."

By providing a single point of ingest for any video title, and its associated files, Comcast Media360 enables broadcasters and content owners to streamline content processing, title management, channel origination, playout, and delivery for their direct-to-consumer branded properties/apps and distribution partners, including MVPDs, vMVPDs, FAST aggregators, and social media, the company said.

As part of the Comcast Media360 umbrella service, Cloud Video Platform, and other CTS' services, can be combined or used separately based on the unique needs of each broadcaster or content owner, CTS reported.

The company also noted that Comcast Media360 will be showcased at the upcoming 2025 IBC Show in Amsterdam. From September 12th to 15th, Comcast Technology Solutions will host meetings in the Content Everywhere Hall #5. In addition, CTS' vice president of product and marketing, Peter Gibson, will also speak on a special floor session titled "Streamlining Video Operations for Broadcasters, Sports, and Content Providers." To schedule a business meeting with Comcast Technology Solutions at IBC, click here.

For more information about Comcast Technology Solutions and Comcast Media360, visit: www.comcasttechnologysolutions.com.

Additional details about Dubai Media are available at: www.dmi.gov.ae.

LOS ANGELES—OpenDrives has launched Astraeus, a cloud-native data services platform to enable IT departments in enterprise organizations to configure, store, orchestrate, manage, secure and deploy mission-critical applications on premise or in cloud or hybrid environments.

Previewed at the 2025 NAB Show in April, Astraeus drives both operational efficiencies and cost savings over cloud-dependent workflows and data environments. Astraeus addresses the costly reality of data fragmentation and sprawl facing enterprise organizations.

The company will offer qualified candidates exclusive access to the initial release of Astraeus Starting this month, the company said.

The current dominance of cloud-first and cloud-only environments has resulted in growing data silos, leaving organizations grappling with ever-increasing public cloud costs. Many seek something more cost predictable, but with cloud-native resiliency and scale-out flexibility. Some think they need both cloud and on-premises or all-multi-cloud environments; however, Astraeus takes a different approach, it said.

“Traditional data infrastructures, whether cloud or on-premises, have often been blamed for increased costs, lack of performance and high complexity. Infrastructure has also been blamed for leaving data lifecycle challenges unresolved as data continues to sprawl, and workflows continue to get more complicated,” said OpenDrives CEO Sean Lee.

“At OpenDrives, we think infrastructure has not kept pace with workflow demands because infrastructure is not the right solution for the job," he added. "This isn’t about where to move your data. It’s about what you can do with your data. Outcome-based data services are the answer.”

Built on cloud-native principles, Astraeus brings the flexibility, familiarity and experience of the cloud back on-premises where performance and workflow management capabilities are key. The platform’s Kubernetes-based architecture and cluster-first design enable IT departments to deploy their entire cloud workflows without having to re-architect anything and access and manage disparate data stores—all from a unified namespace that can easily scale out when the need arises, the company said.

Astraeus handles demanding workflows across data-intensive industries by tackling every data lifecycle stage—from creation to ingestion, storage and performance, orchestration and unification, governance and compliance, consumption and operations and protection and retention.

Astraeus’ built-in services include:

• high-performance storage management
• simple resource allocation and orchestration
• flexible deployment and scalability
• intelligent application and cluster management
• data optimization and tiering
• data governance and protection

More information is available on the company’s website.

BOSTON—EditShare will unveil its latest Ultimate EFS Nodes, optimized for high-performance media workflows at any scale, during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center.

The company will preview all NVMe (nonvolatile memory express) systems tailored for demanding 8K, VFX and DI tasks. It will feature its newest portable, rugged EFS Field, which now offers greater capacity, live ingest and secure, verified media transfer. Additional updates to the Ultimate EFS lineup will be announced at the show.

EditShare will spotlight its advancements in collaborative workflows. MediaSilo’s integration with Louper enables real-time, frame-accurate review sessions without lag, downloads or version confusion, allowing global teams to comment and approve instantly. A live Atomos camera-to-cloud demonstration will show proxy uploads directly into MediaSilo for immediate access, accelerating fast-turnaround projects.

The company will also demonstrate other integrations, including Lasergraphics 5K 16-bit DPX film scanning supporting EFS, frame-accurate NDI ISO ingest with multi-channel recording, as well as comprehensive newsroom collaboration with Octopus.

“From green performance at scale to workflow flexibility across post, production and archive, we deliver innovation shaped by customer insight,” said Tara Montford, executive vice president of sales and company co-founder. “Whether you’re scaling up, streamlining reviews or refining remote workflows, our solutions help teams move faster, collaborate better and reduce friction. We look forward to showcasing these advances in Amsterdam.”

See EditShare at IBC2025 Stand 7.A35.

More information is available on the company’s website.

BOSTON—Collaborative media workflow solution provider EditShare has announced that it will be showing a wide range of new innovations at the 2025 NAB Show that will redefine media storage, workflow efficiency, and AI-driven content management.

Building on the Ultimate series well-received debut at IBC 2024, EditShare’s latest advancements will now make their U.S. premiere in Las Vegas.

The company reported that attendees will get a firsthand look at the next generation of media storage solutions, offering remarkable speed and scalability to support a variety of production environments. Whether it’s boutique post-production studios or major broadcast networks, EditShare’s latest solutions are designed to empower creative teams with unparalleled performance and workflow efficiency, backed by powerful security features, the company said.

Beyond storage, EditShare is rolling out significant upgrades to its intelligent media management tools. These enhancements will streamline how media professionals handle, process, and locate their assets making workflows faster, smarter, and more intuitive.

The company noted that clients will see noticeable gains in speed and performance across the entire product line, alongside major OS upgrades that improve reliability and ease of use. With new, competitive pricing, EditShare is making high-end media solutions more accessible than ever before, the company reported.

One of the must-see demonstrations at NAB 2025 will showcase the direct integration of EditShare’s high-performance NVMe storage with cutting-edge film scanning technology from Lasergraphics. This live presentation will highlight the system’s ability to handle high-resolution media, reinforcing EditShare’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

“Our goal has always been to give media professionals the tools they need to create, collaborate, and deliver with ease,” said Brad Turner, Chief Executive Officer of EditShare. “The advancements we’re bringing to NAB 2025 demonstrate our dedication to helping our customers stay ahead of the curve. With faster speeds, smarter workflows, and better value, we’re changing the game.”

Visitors to NAB 2025 are encouraged to stop by EditShare’s booth for live demonstrations and an exclusive look at the future of media workflows.

For more information on EditShare solutions, please click here to get in touch. Or book a meeting with us at the show here.

MURRIETA, Calif.—DigitalGlue, a systems integrator and provider of end-to-end media solutions, has announced its plans for the 2025 NAB Show where it will be showcasing its innovative platform, creative.space.

At Booth SL5411 during the Show between April 6 to 9. DigitalGlue will unveil new creative.space features designed to push the boundaries of scalability and efficiency. Visitors will be the first to experience enhanced capabilities that eliminate technical bottlenecks, empowering teams to scale seamlessly and focus on creativity as technology fades into the background, the company said.

“Today’s video teams face immense challenges when they try to scale,” explained Sean Busby, president of DigitalGlue. “They frequently lack real-time video editing capabilities, adequate and predictable storage capacity, and waste countless hours on manual tasks such as transferring files. We’re thrilled to bring NAB 2025 attendees transformative new tools that eliminate the constant start-and-stop of technical hurdles so creatives can focus on their craft.”

Staying true to its signature promise of “Less Work, More Flow”, DigitalGlue emphasized that creative.space is more than a storage solution: it’s an all-inclusive service complete with 24/7 proactive support. By addressing the core challenges of performance, capacity, and management at a foundational level, creative.space delivers the freedom, control, and focus that teams need to stay in their creative zone.

At NAB 2025, DigitalGlue will introduce a number of advancements to creative.space that enable teams to scale easily without limits, minimizing complexity and maximizing automation resulting in more creative time.

More specifically, at Booth SL5411, the company will demonstrate:

• Multi-Tier Data Management with Archiware Integration: This integration facilitates seamless automation of backups and archives across storage tiers, ensuring secure, cost-effective scalability to meet growing demands.
• Multi-Space Tagging: By building a centralized library across projects and spaces, the complexities of folder structures are eliminated, enabling quick and easy asset discovery.
• Camera-to-creative.space (C2C): Footage from RED and other cameras is automatically ingested into centralized storage, streamlining the path from shoot to edit and removing delays associated with slow cloud transfers.

More information is available at www.digitalglue.com.

PARIS—Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), Ireland’s national public-service media company, has chosen Dalet to develop and implement a state-of-the-art content management ecosystem, the company said.

As part of the agreement, Dalet will provide a scalable, flexible and collaborative media asset-management and workflow orchestration platform that will serve as the foundation to manage RTÉ archival workflows as well as production workflows connected to its content, such as video editing.

In addition, Dalet will provide a high-density ingest and playout solution to manage content capture, ensuring that metadata is meticulously captured.

“This partnership with Dalet represents a significant step in the transformation of RTÉ into a modern media organization,” RTÉ chief technology officer and director of operations Richard Waghorn said. “A key element in that transformation is the development of solutions that enable us to deliver our programming and content, including a vast amount of archive material, to our audiences more easily and more effectively. Dalet’s content management ecosystem will ensure we can do that.”

Waghorn also stressed that “with Ireland's rich history, RTÉ’s archives contain a wealth of unique Irish content that will now be more readily accessible to better utilize and share. This demonstrates our leadership’s commitment to continue building RTÉ into a world-class media organization.”

The new content management ecosystem, named “One Media Share,” will integrate about 1.3 million hours of content from 19 siloed content storage and archive systems, including in-production content, nearline stored digital content, and deep archive content stored on tape. Dalet’s platform will standardize metadata, ensuring all content is fully accessible and searchable. This comprehensive integration will maximize the return on RTÉ’s existing investments by enhancing production and delivery workflows.

“Dalet has extensive experience bringing together massive disparate storage pools and archives for broadcasters around the world,” said Enrique Lafuente, vice president of sales EMEA, Dalet. “We’re proud to partner with RTÉ as it enhances its content management, user experience and to enable new opportunities through our agile solution.”

RTÉ established its radio services in 1926 and its television service in 1961, making it one of the world’s longest-operating public-service media organizations. RTÉ is dedicated to championing Irish culture by captivating audiences with trusted, engaging and challenging content, celebrating the country’s rich diversity and cultivating its talent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More information is available at vizrt.com.

Memnon, a provider of global content preservation and migration services, said it is now making archiving services available on the AWS Marketplace. The partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) will give broadcasters, production companies, and cultural institutions a cloud-based option to preserve and manage media content.

“Preserving content is often an overlooked priority until it's too late,” Memnon CEO Heidi Shakespeare said. “By migrating legacy media to the cloud, we’re not only preserving valuable content for future generations but also making it more accessible and ready to be leveraged. Being part of the AWS Partner Network and listing our services on the AWS Marketplace enables us to offer organizations a more efficient and cost-effective solution to safeguard their digital heritage.

“In the face of technological advancements and the ongoing degradation of physical media, your invaluable, irreplaceable content faces unprecedented risks,” Shakespeare added. “We're eager to address these challenges and partner with organizations to safeguard their media content and ensure its long-term value and profitability."

Media and entertainment organizations are among the world’s biggest consumers of data storage. Given the boom in content creation seen in recent years, this is hardly surprising, and according to industry estimates, it’s driving a storage technology and services market that will grow from more than $10 billion in value last year to $28.5 billion by 2032.

One of the big challenges facing M&E organizations is where to keep all of their data. There is a wide range of options out there, from legacy on-premises technologies to outsourced public cloud services—an approach that has built huge momentum. In the last 20 years, the likes of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have become extraordinarily successful providers of cloud-based storage and today, the market is booming: Having reached over $108 billion last year, it is expected to grow to more than $660 billion by 2032.

The impact of this trend on M&E tech spend has been profound, underscoring the growing focus of the cloud. For many, this has resulted in the adoption of an “all-in” cloud strategy, where legacy on-premises systems have been removed in favor of a fully outsourced model.

Dark Clouds
While the benefits of the public cloud are well documented, some growing cost and performance concerns are causing many organizations to rethink their approach and pivot to a hybrid model where the cloud is used alongside on-premises infrastructure technologies.

More specifically, the fees charged by some major public cloud providers to access data assets, such as video files, are becoming prohibitively expensive. This problem can be exacerbated by usage-based cloud pricing models, which can fluctuate significantly and make it difficult for users to produce accurate forecasts.

For those organizations with a heavy commitment to cloud storage, paying someone to host the data is just part of the picture.

Then there are the problems associated with limited workflow integration. For instance, while advanced artificial intelligence (AI) tools are often available in the cloud, it’s not always easy to integrate them within the cloud storage setup required for M&E-specific workflows. Some industry experts have also raised concerns about asset control and ownership, given the outsourced model shifts the emphasis away from M&E businesses and toward their cloud supplier.

The various areas of concern around the public cloud market haven’t gone unnoticed by industry regulators. This time last year, for example, the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority launched an investigation into the supply of public cloud infrastructure services. The issues of most concern included the egress fees charged to move data out of the cloud, discounts to incentivize customers to use only one cloud provider and technical barriers to switching, which may prevent customers from being able to switch between different clouds or use more than one provider. The CMA is expected to conclude its investigation next April, at which point it will become clear if further action is required.

It’s a Hybrid World
So, what’s the alternative? For many M&E IT leaders, the answer lies in the reintroduction of on-premises storage architecture as part of a hybrid strategy. Once considered the “poor relation” of cloud, on-premises technologies have advanced significantly in recent years to the point where the best solutions can match and even improve on the cost and performance levels offered by public cloud providers.

This approach gives M&E organizations a lot of scope for innovation. For example, the object storage technologies used by the likes of Amazon S3 are available via equivalent on-premise solutions. These are extremely well-suited for storing and managing vast amounts of unstructured data, making them ideal for scalable media files, backups and archives with easy retrieval and metadata tagging.

Organizations can also implement advanced AI tools on-premises to deliver storage management and end-user benefits. A hybrid approach also allows M&E companies to tailor storage solutions to high-performance workflows, such as rendering and post-production, without latency issues. Crucially, on-premises storage offers direct control over system specifications to support these demanding processes. Add the savings made from reduced or eliminated egress costs, and it adds up to a compelling argument where, for M&E business, cloud has a redefined role.

These are quickly becoming defining requirements. According to one recent study, 42% of companies in the U.S. “are considering or already have moved at least half of their cloud-based workloads back to on-premises infrastructures.” If this trend is replicated in the M&E industry, hybrid strategies will play an increasingly important role as organizations look to drive maximum value from their infrastructure spend.

DENVER––In a bid to improve the content management and revenue potential of its archives, Court TV has selected Veritone to manage and monetize its extensive digital content library.

Court TV, which offers live coverage of trials, boasts a massive content archive dates to the founding of the original Court TV cable network in 1991. To better manage, organize and monetize that library, E.W. Scripps-owned multicast network Court TV is deploying Veritone’s AI-powered Digital Media Hub. DMH provides a secure, cloud-based environment for content storage, search and retrieval that makes Court TV’s content accessible to its affiliates, media professionals, partners and legal institutions.

In addition to content management, Veritone’s Content Licensing will enable Court TV to exploit new revenue opportunities by offering its unique content to an even broader audience, including more filmmakers, documentarians and podcasters, enhancing its reach and impact, the companies said.

“Consumer interest in the real-life drama of true-crime programming is at an all-time high and the Court TV library is enormous, containing thousands of hours of coverage and footage from the nation’s biggest cases over the past 30 years,” Ethan Nelson, head of Court TV, said. “We believe Veritone’s Digital Media Hub and content licensing solutions will help us pursue and unlock new opportunities for monetization of the library and make the content even more accessible to audiences and partners alike.”

Court TV’s adoption of Veritone’s solutions reflects the growing trend among media organizations to adopt AI-powered tools to become more efficient and better monetize content.

More information about Veritone’s Digital Media Hub is available here; more information about Veritone’s Content Licensing can be found here.

PARIS—New Zealand public broadcaster RNZ has selected Dalet to transform its editorial systems with the media solutions provider’s story-centric news production technologies, the company said.

RNZ is making the upgrade as it enters its 100th year of operations. It plans to transition to the new system in 2025. Dalet is currently working with the broadcaster on a comprehensive staff training program.

“RNZ’s upcoming centenary marks not just a celebration of our past, but a bold stride into the future,” RNZ Chief Technology Officer Mark Bullen said. “This investment underscores our commitment to digital transformation, leveraging modern technologies to streamline operations and enhance our capacity to deliver timely news and information.”

RNZ provides independent news and current affairs and a range of diverse programs and podcasts, on-air and online, with both audio and video programming. The new system will free RNZ’s staff to spend more time on what matters most, the broadcaster said—delivering impactful narratives to audiences.

RNZ said it plans to deploy Dalet Pyramid, a news solution that enhances resource sharing and story collaboration for chaos-free operations that are open and auditable. The integrated solution will modernize content production and delivery with a story-centric approach.

The replacement newsroom management solution includes planning, story editing and approvals, wire feeds, contact management, publishing, rundown management and archiving. In addition, the updated audio editing and management solution will let RNZ staff capture, edit and publish audio anytime and anywhere. The tech upgrade represents an investment of NZ$4.5M for the implementation and first five years of operation, RNZ said.

“One of the systems we’ve been relying on dates back to 1999,” RNZ Chief News Officer Mark Stevens said. “To put that into perspective, in 1999 Nokia 3210 topped phone sales and Google had just hired its first employee. Our dedicated RNZ kaimahi (staff) have worked wonders with these outdated tools, finding creative solutions wherever possible. However, we owe it to our storytellers to provide them with state-of-the-art technology so they can concentrate on delivering quality content to our audiences.”

Dalet was chosen to deliver the new system after a rigorous six-month tender process with almost 200 specific requirements, including RNZ’s role as a lifeline utility needing a hybrid cloud and on-premise solution. This ensures that RNZ can remain on-air to deliver news broadcasts during emergencies.

LOS ANGELES—Immersive media storyteller Light Sail VR has adopted the OpenDrives Atlas storage platform to modernize and scale its creative production business.

The transition to Atlas has improved the productivity of the Light Sail VR team, streamlined its workflows and optimized data-management capabilities. Atlas offers such features as mount management and containerization that enable Light Sail VR to scale existing storage and add resources, allowing the business to take on more commercial projects using various third-party tools available via the OpenDrives containers marketplace, according to OpenDrives.

“OpenDrives was our most important investment at the very outset, as the new infrastructure would set the stage for greater efficiency,” Light Sail VR co-founder and creative director Matthew Celia said. “The effortless and swift integration into our existing operation enabled us to continue working on the growing number of creative projects without any technology-related glitches.”

More information is available on the OpenDrives and Light Sail VR websites.

AMSTERDAM—AI-driven digital asset management system (DAM) Starchive announced at IBC 2024 a collaboration with Seagate that fully integrates its toolset with Seagate Lyve Cloud Object Storage.

Starchive’s DAM tools will enable Seagate customers in the media, music, sports and entertainment industries to discover, preserve, transform and monetize their digital media assets, the company said.

The combined solution will allow Starchive to provide the same level of functionality it provides content creators at scale to meet the demanding needs of modern media companies and brands through Seagate’s Lyve Cloud Object Storage, while redefining the level of functionality for Seagate’s M&E customers, it said.

“Combining Starchive’s advanced metadata approach and encoding capabilities with Seagate is Object Storage 2.0, a logical evolution that includes enhanced management, enriched search and access control layers, making it easier than ever to understand and utilize your stored content,” said Peter Agelasto, co-founder at Starchive.

“Collaborating with Seagate allows us to innovate with a world leader to further enhance our users' experience by providing seamless access to their content and enabling new ways to manage and monetize their archives."

Key highlights of the integration include:

• AI Integration and Flexibility—Starchive will allow the new combined platform to integrate seamlessly with any AI solution, such as AWS Object Rekognition.
• Enriched Object Search—Starchive’s advanced metadata capabilities make objects easier to find, group and share inside Seagate’s Lyve Cloud Object Storage.
• Fully Mobile Capabilities—Emphasizing mobility, the combined platform allows users to interact with their content from anywhere at any time via mobile devices.
• Preview and Streaming Capabilities—High-quality content previews and low-latency streaming are now within reach, allowing users to view hi-fidelity previews while retaining the original source files intact. 
• Visualization and User Experience—Advanced visualization tools make it easy to view, search, organize and manage large volumes of data.

"Seagate Lyve Cloud Object Storage is committed to delivering the best solutions available, and our collaboration with Starchive allows us to provide more powerful tools for media and entertainment as we want a tailored solution for our vertical clients,” said Melyssa Banda, vice president of enterprise systems and solutions at Seagate. “Together, we are shaping the future of content management, providing powerful tools that allow our clients to unlock the full potential of their assets.”

See Seagate in the IBC AI Tech Zone in Hall 14 (14.AIA01) and Seagate and Starchive at Stand 6.MS1.

More information is available on the Starchive website.

BOSTON and MONTREAL—Grass Valey will offer Wasabi Technologies’ cloud storage within its AMPP media production platform and will show it within its AMPP ecosystem at IBC 2024, Sept. 13-16, at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Center.

GV AMPP delivers agile, software-defined workflows to enable media users to choose best-of-breed solutions on a single common platform. Pairing AMPP with Wasabi’s cloud storage, which does not charge for egress, enables AMPP users to move assets freely in and out of Wasabi storage without incurring unpredictable costs, Wasabi said.

Integration of Wasabi storage now supports AMPP applications for active archiving, live playout and editing workflows, it said. 

“AMPP has revolutionized the broadcast industry by delivering the most flexible, scalable, and efficient platform for media production and distribution,” said Whit Jackson, vice president of media and entertainment at Wasabi. “The addition of Wasabi hot cloud storage to the AMPP platform further delivers on the goals of driving down operational costs, enabling AMPP users to easily scale storage up and down as needed, and allowing media companies to deliver more content to more channels.” 

See Grass Valley at IBC Stand 9.A01.

More information is available on the Wasabi Technologies and Grass Valley websites.  

Launched in 2017, Brat TV is a leading digital production company known for its original content aimed at a young Gen Z demographic. With a strong presence on multiple digital platforms and a roster of rising stars, Brat TV has built a loyal following that continues to grow as it produces new episodes, stories, and songs, from hit shows like Chicken Girls, Total Eclipse, and Mani as we prepare to unleash the next wave of youth culture.

DigitalGlue has been the ally of video professionals since 2002, guiding them through the challenges inherent in a rapidly evolving technology landscape. Customers and partners depend on DigitalGlue’s dedication to providing tools that support uncompromised creativity and productivity while maintaining the integrity and efficiency of their daily operations. 

Powered by DigitalGlue, creative.space offers an alternative to traditional storage systems with a shared approach to accommodate any budget. The platform is designed to streamline collaboration workflows and enhance productivity for video teams while also setting a new standard for media storage with its white-glove service and flexible payment models.

The Challenge

With a growing portfolio of programming, Brat TV was struggling with managing storage across hundreds of hard drives and over 40 team members. As a result, the team encountered disorganized workflows, frequent inefficiencies, and significant delays in keeping project updates current and accessible. Seeking a more efficient, centralized storage solution, Brat TV also placed high value on finding a model that would avoid a large initial capital expense, provide financial benefits, and eliminate the need for additional IT involvement.

The Solution

Brat TV became an early adopter of creative.space, DigitalGlue’s unique shared storage solution.  Incorporated user management tools and VPN capabilities allow for efficient onboarding and offboarding of team members, ensuring that only authorized users have access to specific projects and capabilities vital for their operations. The ability to edit permissions and manage different Spaces within shared storage has been crucial for maintaining security and organization. Additionally, the integrated VPN capabilities support remote work without compromising data security, allowing team members to access projects and seamlessly collaborate from anywhere in the world. This flexibility has been especially beneficial for managing the numerous freelancers and temporary staff involved in various productions.

The Results

Substantial performance improvements, increased revenue opportunities, and workflow benefits are a few of the many reasons Brat TV has extended the partnership with creative.space.

Over the past five years, this platform has transformed our operations, from drastically improving our workflow efficiency to enabling seamless remote collaborations. We've seen a remarkable reduction in labor costs and a significant boost in our content delivery capabilities. The support they’ve provided has been exceptional, and the platform’s robust user management features have been vital factors in driving our growth and adaptability.

Since adopting creative.space, Brat TV has experienced significant advancements in its operations. The centralized storage solution has consolidated media assets into a single directory structure, vastly improving organization, making it easier to manage projects, and drastically reducing time spent on project updates and data management. Teams can now collaborate in real-time, accessing and editing the same media assets simultaneously across post-production applications. This streamlined workflow has resulted in smoother VOD delivery to multiple platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Peacock, Pluto, and Roku, monetizing content and boosting revenue streams.  

One of the standout benefits of creative.space has been its impact on our marketing efforts. By providing instant access to media assets, creative.space has enabled Brat TV to unlock new revenue streams through partner deals for integrated ad spots. This flexibility has allowed us to quickly adapt to tight turnaround campaigns and deliver high-quality content consistently.

creative.space also drastically reduced our labor costs. Previously, we required 12 hours of daily labor just to manage hard drives. creative.space eliminated all that and paid for itself within the first month. This efficiency is projected to save Brat TV more than 30,000 hours over 5 years, translating to approximately $1.5 million in cost savings.

Looking Forward

Exceptional customer support has been a major factor in Brat TV’s decision to renew our contract with DigitalGlue, locking in another five years of creative.space.  The creative.space team has consistently provided prompt and effective assistance, often identifying and resolving issues proactively. This high level of support has ensured smooth operations with minimal downtime. Backed by creative.space for another five years, Brat TV aims to expand content production and reach new audiences, leveraging creative.space as a critical part of their workflow.

Renewing our partnership with creative.space was a no-brainer for us. We look forward to leveraging creative.space as we continue to expand our content production and reach new audiences.

CENTURY CITY, Calif.—The software company Ateliere Creative Technologies has announced the general availability of Ateliere Connect AI, along with its first Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) module to transform content workflow management. 

The company reported that Connect AI revolutionizes media supply chains by integrating cutting-edge Generative, Multimodal AI and machine learning technologies into the cloud-native media supply chain platform, Ateliere Connect.

The products will be shown at IBC 2024 at Ateliere’s stand, 5.C24. 

“Connect AI underscores our commitment to innovation, offering comprehensive solutions that go beyond conventional predictive AI applications,” said Dan Goman, CEO, Ateliere. “This introduces a new level of sophistication, intelligence, and automation to our award-winning platform, greatly enhancing its ability to manage common workflow stages such as ingesting, managing, distributing, and monetizing content.”

More specifically, the company said that Connect AI automates the packaging, localization, and distribution of content, while delivering real-time, AI-driven insights that optimize efficiency across the supply chain. The module is driven by sophisticated, continuously learning GenAI engines that leverage machine learning models. After critical vetting, Ateliere not only adopts best-of-breed AI technologies, but also seamlessly integrates custom solutions into their platform. 

An optional enhancement to Ateliere Connect, award-winning Connect AI seamlessly integrates with existing workflows. Businesses can stay ahead of market trends with enhanced decision-making. The platform swiftly identifies content ready for distribution, ensuring it reaches global platforms efficiently with all necessary checks in place. This significantly increases monetization and revenue opportunities, the company said. 

Through powerful APIs, Connect AI integrates with best-of-breed technologies under a single media supply platform. The solution features AI-driven automation and optimization for inventory organization, content discovery, metadata enrichment, content delivery, and monetization.

Companies can significantly improve operations efficiencies through intuitive “smart agent” interactions and continuous learning algorithms. The added functionality transforms Ateliere's flagship solution, Ateliere Connect, into a pioneering AI-first media supply chain platform.  

As part of a customer-centric approach, Ateliere established an AI Advisory Council of leading entities from the global media, telecommunications and entertainment sectors. Council members provide input on new market opportunities and how to use GenAI to bring order to chaos. 

Read more on Ateliere’s GenAI vision here. 

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.—Bitcentral has launched Fusion Gateway, a best-in-class cloud offering that the company says “bridges the gap between media asset management (MAM) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools,” enabling Bitcentral customers “to harness new opportunities for content discovery, automation, and increased efficiency and sets the table for more creativity.”

As media libraries grow larger, managing them has become more complex, expensive and time-consuming. Media companies require solutions that can streamline MAM by automating repetitive tasks. Bitcentral says Fusion Gateway’s cloud-based solution seamlessly integrates third-party AI tools with Bitcentral’s ecosystem, unlocking new possibilities for customers to improve speed and productivity, allowing them to rapidly create, distribute, and monetize high-quality video.

Key Features and Benefits of Fusion Gateway:

• AI-Driven Content Enrichment: Fusion Gateway leverages cutting-edge AI algorithms to enhance metadata, automate tagging, and improve content discoverability. Whether quickly identifying key moments in live streams or suggesting relevant assets, AI-driven enrichment delivers smarter, more efficient workflows.
• Customizable Workflows: Users can easily create tailored workflows that incorporate AI services such as speech-to-text transcription, facial recognition, sentiment analysis, and object detection. Fusion Gateway adapts to a variety of specific use cases, from news production to sports highlights.
• Seamless Integration: Fusion Gateway natively connects with Bitcentral’s Core News system, enabling users to efficiently access AI-powered content enrichment directly from within their existing collaboration environments.
• Scalability and Flexibility: As a cloud-native solution, Fusion Gateway scales effortlessly to accommodate growing media libraries and changing demands. Users can choose from a range of AI providers and APIs, ensuring flexibility and adaptability in a rapidly changing field.

“Fusion Gateway represents a leap forward in media management, a next step in our bigger vision for enhancing the entire content production process through AI-powered tools, said Sam Kamel, Bitcentral CEO. “Our customers can now efficiently harness practical applications of AI to discover hidden gems in their content libraries, reveal new insights, automate repetitive tasks, and raise their content creation processes to entirely new levels.”

Fusion Gateway is available immediately. For more information, visit https://bitcentral.com/

In today's fast-evolving landscape, the demand for high-quality, diverse, and personalized content is skyrocketing. However, traditional storage methods are struggling to keep pace with this surge, revealing their inadequacy in meeting the industry's evolving needs. AI is a disruptive force that is reshaping how media assets are stored, organized, and accessed.

This article explores the transformation that is underway in the M&E sector, which is driven by the integration of AI into content storage solutions. Beyond mere data management, this shift represents an important moment for the industry, unlocking creativity and innovation the likes of which have not been seen before.

Challenges With Traditional Storage Systems
Today’s M&E companies are facing an unprecedented surge in the size of their video libraries, spanning years, even decades of content. The proliferation of video content is fueled by the ease with which high-quality material can be created today. Additionally, businesses of all scales are increasingly leveraging video to connect with their audiences and partners.

However, many media assets lack appropriate metadata tagging, posing significant challenges for M&E companies aiming to repurpose and monetize their content. Editors and post-production teams cannot afford to spend hours searching for specific clips, nor is it cost-effective.

While newer content typically receives metadata assignments, the usefulness of such metadata can be limited. Production teams often tag original content with basic details like season, episode, and keywords, which may not meet the unique needs of marketing and promotional teams. 

Moreover, the value of an M&E library often relies heavily on a small group of individuals. It's common for media companies to depend on a few production experts who possess comprehensive knowledge of all recorded content. This dependency creates bottlenecks, especially when multiple teams simultaneously require access to historical content, leading to delays in workflow.

Additionally, traditional asset management systems are intricate, with only a select few editors trained to navigate them effectively. Simplifying access to footage is crucial for M&E companies, allowing anyone to conduct a straightforward search and swiftly locate the required digital assets.

Key Ways AI Storage is Transforming the M&E Industry
AI has emerged as a game changer for M&E, revolutionizing the storage and organization of media assets to meet the evolving demands of the industry. With AI-powered storage solutions, media companies can bring unparalleled efficiency to data management and foster an environment that nurtures content creativity and innovation.

One significant way AI storage is transforming content creation is by facilitating content processing at the edge in unprecedented ways. Instead of relying solely on cloud-based processing, where data is uploaded and decisions are made off-site before being sent back, AI at the edge enables real-time decision-making at the point of data collection. 

This means that a substantial amount of video content generated onsite, whether at a production studio, film set, or sports arena, can be processed locally. For example, by feeding live camera transmissions at a sports event into an AI-powered local storage system, content creators can swiftly identify key shots and transmit them back to the studio for live broadcasting, highlights, or future distribution.

Moreover, AI is revolutionizing personalized content delivery beyond mere program selection. News programs can now be curated based on individual interests, and content can be delivered in preferred languages, all thanks to AI algorithms that learn from user preferences. However, the efficacy of such personalized content delivery relies heavily on cutting-edge storage solutions to support these algorithms effectively.

AI-powered technologies also facilitate advanced capabilities like automated object recognition, editing, and semantic search. Semantic search vastly accelerates content retrieval, enabling editors to quickly locate specific moments within media files, such as every time a baseball player hit a homerun in a game. This enhances content discovery for viewers, improving their overall experience.

Additionally, Generative AI (GenAI) is making significant strides, simplifying tasks such as the creation of edits, lighting effects, and more. Ultimately, GenAI enhances efficiency and accuracy, ultimately enabling content creators to deliver high-quality video services at lower costs. By offering add-on services such as these service providers can upsell advanced features whilst making unique service offerings.

The Evolution of AI-Driven Content Storage and Management
The future of AI-powered content storage and management solution is moving toward hybrid cloud and the edge. Implementing AI at the edge alleviates the burden on centralized or cloud storage systems by allowing media enterprises to conduct in-depth analysis and metadata enrichment directly on-site when time is of the essence. 

In a hybrid setup, media companies retain the option to utilize cloud-based AI for specific functions, such as running algorithms that have not yet been deployed to edge devices, or for processing data that has already been transferred from edge devices without prior preprocessing, such as archival data.

AIOps also holds promise in the M&E industry. AIOps automates the process of determining the most suitable storage tier for different use cases, streamlining access during editing and ensuring robust protection against attacks during storage. By automating storage management tasks, AIOps not only reduces costs and security risks but also allows content creators to allocate more time to creative endeavors.

Conclusion
As traditional media storage methods struggle to keep pace with the requirement for personalized content, AI is breathing new life into M&E workflows. By embracing AI-powered content storage systems, M&E companies can access video footage quicker, more efficiently, and economically, enabling them to repurpose and monetize their content to sustain long-term business success.

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream today launched DIVA 9, the latest update to its middleware system for media management, access, and archiving. 

Targeting the complexities of long-term video asset storage, DIVA 9 introduces critical enhancements to bolster the accessibility, reliability, and efficiency of digital video archives, the company said, adding that the new version simplifies archiving with smart media storage policies, advanced Elasticsearch search functions, and comprehensive cloud integration, ensuring secure, scalable, and adaptable solutions. 

DIVA 9 includes a new Proxy player integrated with Telestream Vantage, simplifying clip identification, segment marking, and partial restore processes, offering unprecedented ease in handling video data, the company said. Telestream also said DIVA 9 is easier to deploy in cloud environments with  support for Postgres open source database, and compatibility with major cloud storage options, catering to both hybrid and native cloud setups.

“One of the qualities that makes DIVA 9 such a powerful solution is its widespread support for diverse production ecosystems, including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments,” said Tom Pflaum, Vice President of Product Management at Telestream. “DIVA’s versatility makes it highly adaptable to various storage technologies, such as LTO, disks, and private cloud servers. It also effortlessly integrates with MAM, PAM, and automation systems to further enhance and enrich media supply chain workflows. It’s truly a comprehensive and flexible solution for content management.”

DIVA 9 features nearly 100 updates from its predecessor, focusing on improving system reliability, user experience, and operational efficiency, according to the company. Updates encompass bug and security fixes, performance enhancements, and usability improvements and the solution's intelligent media storage lifecycle policies aid in reducing costs while optimizing asset storage, Telestream said.

DIVA 9's Elasticsearch-driven search capabilities offer a unified view across multiple storage systems, ensuring efficient resource utilization. Its redundancy, distributed deployment options, and disaster recovery features enhance reliability for media production teams, the company said.

DIVA 9 centralizes content management, transcoding, and archiving, eliminating workflow silos, facilitating a more agile media supply chain, the company said. Integration with Telestream solutions like Vantage, Qualify QC, and GLIM Clipping & Inspections automates quality control, accelerates media processing, and enables efficient proxy-less playback.

FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla.—Perifery, a division of DataCore, has unveiled a partnership with ERA to offer a fully managed cloud service for ERA customers and users in the media and entertainment (M&E) industry. 

The deployment of Perifery's media-focused Object Matrix platform on ERA infrastructure provides companies with the highest levels of data protection and simple, uninterrupted access to valuable media assets, the companies said.The Object Matrix integration forms part of ERA's Coeus archive system, giving object storage functionality via an intuitive interface to its customers.

"With the ever-increasing need to ensure content is secure, protected, and easily accessible, it is critical for any company to have access to the most cutting-edge services that offer highly available archive and backup workflows that are also cost-effective," said Peter Watling, senior sales director, EMEA, for Perifery. "The new service provided by ERA based on Object Matrix redefines how cloud storage can be utilized by any organization, offering exceptional value, seamless integrations, and unrivalled access without being prohibitive to use."

Perifery's Object Matrix platform is specifically designed for media workflows. Used by the biggest media organizations across the globe, Object Matrix provides a secure and flexible storage platform available. It comes with a suite of applications including asset management, analytics, and file system and is tightly integrated into most media third parties, including Avid and Adobe. The integration enables ERA to provide cloud-based archive and back-up services with specific media functionality to its customers.

"We're excited to team up with Perifery and offer a media-based cloud storage service with unparalleled scalability, availability, and security," said Sean Baker, managing director at ERA. "Combining Perifery's decades of data management experience with our expert support, deep industry knowledge, and highly skilled engineers will help elevate M&E storage workflows to new levels of efficiency."

Perifery and ERA will share more details about their fully managed object storage service during a webinar on Wednesday, Jan. 24. Registration for the webinar is available here. 

More information about Perifery is available at www.perifery.com. 

SEVILLE, Spain—RTVA is the Spanish regional broadcaster of Andalucia, a major Spanish region with 8.5 million people. It consists of Canal Sur Televisión, which broadcasts three TV channels; Canal Sur Radio, with four radio channels; and Canal Sur Media, including the OTT platform “CanalSurMas”, the website canalsur.es, among other online channels (including YouTube).

Since 2006, RTVA had been using Tedial’s Media Asset Management (MAM) system across multiple sites in the Andalusia region, where staff worked locally from the eight diversely located sites. But the local systems architecture, which had once worked so well, became obsolete and plans to replace it were delayed due to the difficulty in obtaining CapEx financing.

Shifting to SaaS
To overcome this problem, RTVA made the decision to adopt a new business service model using a SaaS-based production and archive system with centralized operations. This approach would solve two problems: the centralization architecture would reduce local teams support and the SaaS model will avoid the difficulty of finding funding for capital expenditures. 

After a 2021 tender, Telefónica—one of Europe’s leading telecommunications companies—was selected to be the service provider and decided to deploy Tedial’s smartWork. The Tedial solution would become the integration engine for RTVA to transform their business model from a multilocation architecture to a centralized infrastructure hosted on a private cloud in an external data center. The SaaS platform is licensed under an OpEx model. 

The project utilizes smartWork, Tedial’s NoCode Media Integration Platform, as the core platform for seamless integration of multiple systems from numerous and varied vendors. These integrations include Tedial Evolution MAM, Avid Interplay PAM, Avid iNews NRCS, Telestream Root6 transcoding farm, Provys traffic system, Pebble Beach Marina Playout, Etiqmedia AI, David DigaSystem Radio production system, Quantum storage, among other Canal Sur Media systems. 

This new approach also unifies the TV and radio archives in a unique platform, integrated with TV production system (Avid) and radio production system (David). The project also encompasses the migration of eight legacy MAM sites to a new centralized Tedial Evolution MAM, which is being seamlessly facilitated by smartWork’s newest addition, smartPacks. The smartPacks solution streamlines the process of deploying business capabilities by automatically installing everything needed to run the specific service. 

Telefónica hosts the smartWork platform in Telefónica’s Andalucia Virtual Data Center (VDC-Edge), a private cloud in Telefónica data centers that can be scaled up and down to meet specific needs. Telefónica is also providing the network with enough bandwidth to allow remote users from the different sites to use the new centralized platform.

To ensure business continuity, the project includes a Tedial Evolution MAM at RTVA facilities as a Disaster Recovery. This MAM uses a LTO8 tape library to archive all new and legacy content, so RTVA has a copy of our 35 years of existence and more. 

Digital Transformation
This innovative solution, hosted in Telefónica data centers, enables Telefónica to support RTVA with self-sufficient media services, empowering them with enhanced operational efficiency. Tedial’s smartWork platform speeds up our digital transformation and offers such benefits as  unprecedented flexibility, seamless and effortless integrations, reduced costs, enhanced team collaboration, improved profitability, accelerated growth and dramatically shorter delivery times. 

To meet RTVA’s specific requirements, smartWork’s business intelligence features were incorporated, providing a global Dashboard that perfectly aligns with RTVA’s needs.

With this model, RTVA has an always up-to-date platform that can scale up and down to meet RTVA business needs and meet such new challenges as IP production and UHD workflows that may arise in the future. Adding new features and tools in the future will be as easy as adding new SaaS services and won’t require us to find CapEx funding.  

More information is available at www.tedial.com. 

RALEIGH, N.C.—WRAL-TV, channel 5, is the NBC affiliate serving the Research Triangle area in North Carolina and is locally owned and operated by Capitol Broadcasting Company. Our station produces about 12.5 hours of live news every day, offering viewers a mix of breaking news, weather, sports, entertainment, and educational content. 

The volume of content we manage is growing rapidly, driving us to optimize our news archive. We wanted to upgrade our archive to enable faster access to historical content and simplify search, enabling digital news assets to be reused and monetized more effectively. 

The Key Challenge
Our existing archive consisted of a mix of spinning disk and an optical disk archive system. Given the sheer size of our archive, one of the challenges we faced during the upgrade was deciding whether to store the archive in the public cloud or on-site. Ultimately, we chose to host the new archive on-site to speed up access to content and ensure high reliability with no reliance on internet service.

Our key requirement in an archive solution was support for an S3 connector. Supporting S3 would ensure seamless integration with third-party solutions, like artificial intelligence platforms. We also wanted an archive solution with high scalability, flexibility, and a predictable cost model.

We worked with Bridge Digital, a Nashville, Tenn.-based systems integrator, to ensure a seamless implementation. After evaluating the available archive solutions, we chose Perifery’s Swarm S3 cloud-native in-facility archive for its fast access to media content, S3 compatibility, and reliability.

We installed Swarm software on a 500 TB storage platform that will continue to grow as our station’s needs evolve. Deploying Swarm has transformed our archive operations—the S3 cloud-native solution reduces complexity by offloading content from online workspaces. Once content is offloaded, Swarm keeps it online and easily accessible anywhere, anytime, providing us with a powerful web-based search tool and enhanced metadata awareness. 

At WRAL, we need to be ready to cover breaking news 24/7, and Swarm offers instant access to all of the assets in the archive whether we have an internet connection or not. Beyond speeding up the archive workflow, Swarm software provides us with flexibility, scalability, and a predictable cost model. We aren’t locked into a particular cloud vendor or piece of hardware. 

Integrated Access
Swarm software compatibility with the S3 open standard for object storage ensures that we can integrate third-party applications with the archive. Currently, Swarm is integrated with Eon Media’s Eon Archives AI product and BitCentral’s Oasis media asset management software. Integration with Eon Media’s platform to Swarm allows WRAL’s archives to serve as a highly advanced AI-powered media store, supplying hyper-local and media clients, as well as content creators across the globe with stock and archival footage.

In addition, Swarm software is scalable, allowing us to grow in capacity and throughput. We can rapidly scale up to hundreds of nodes, and dozens of clusters as needed—from a few 100 TBs to hundreds of petabytes and beyond. 

Furthermore, Swarm includes multi-layered security, encryption in-flight and at-rest, immutability, WORM, and automated replication capabilities to ensure that internal or external parties never violate the integrity of WRAL’s content. 

Our data storage requirements will continue to grow. With Perifery’s Swarm software, WRAL is ready for the foreseeable future. Swarm provides us with a flexible, scalable, and reliable S3-compatible archive solution that speeds up access to digital assets and improves content discovery. 

More information is available at www.perifery.com.

MANHATTAN, Kan.—Kansas State University’s K-State Athletics has upgraded its existing storage network with the addition of more storage and cloud synchronization from EditShare. 

EditShare U.S. channel partner Alpha worked with the company to complete the installation, which is went online this month.

The K-State Athletics storage expansion includes an upgrade and greater capability for K-StateHD.TV, its official video department, which provides comprehensive linear, web and social coverage of all 16 men’s and women’s sports as well as delivers elements and production services to third-party media companies across the nation, EditShare said.

Since 2016, K-StateHD.TV’s broadcast and video board control rooms have used shared storage from EditShare. 

“We have been very pleased with the stability of the EditShare servers we have been using since 2013,” said Andy Liebsch, director of video services at K-State Athletics. “As we looked to the future, we wanted to make sure our servers were equipped to handle our increasing storage needs. We also wanted to provide a more robust solution for legacy content and backup. Alpha and EditShare provided the solution and a seamless integration and transition program.”

The new installation adds online and nearline storage on site as well as provides for storage and backup in the cloud with EditShare FLEX Cloud Sync. The upgrade also includes additional servers for the EditShare FLOW asset management database, which has opened up automated ingest and media acquisition, the company said. 

“As well as showing how our products fit seamlessly into modern workflows, this project also shows the benefits of our comprehensive distribution channel. Darren [Whitten, senior account executive at Alpha] and his colleagues at Alpha stay in close touch with the team at K-State, so they understand what the college needs to achieve. That means we can roll out the right solution at the right time,” said EditShare chief revenue officer Said Bacho.

K-State Athletics, as part of Kansas State University, has become one of the forefront collegiate athletic programs in the country, coming off a 2022 Big 12 Football Championship and an Elite Eight NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament appearance, the company said. 

More information is available on the company’s website.

TAIPEI—Infortrend Technology, Inc. has announced that WQED in Pittsburg has adopted its EonStor GS unified enterprise data storage solution to improve efficiency of their M&E post-production and TV broadcasting workflows.

Working with Infortrend's partner, Intelligent Technology, the public broadcaster WQED upgraded to a unified storage EonStor GS 4060 operating in 100GbE environment. It is paired to an encoder server and fourteen media editing workstations equipped with high-performance Intel CPU and running Adobe Creative Cloud suite. The storage solution provides 1PB storage capacity in 4U form factor and delivers 10GB/s read and 5.5GB/s write throughput performance to ensure smooth M&E workflows.

"We are excited to see WQED TV integrating Infortrend EonStor GS 4060 unified storage solution solving the pain points of media production and broadcasting workflows. It has been Intel's great pleasure working with Infortrend to develop the EonStor GS series of storage platforms featuring Intel Xeon Processor, delivering excellent performance for accelerating M&E applications and video demands," said Jason Ziller, general manager, client connectivity division at Intel Corporation.

To store the growing volume of video assets, GS offers simple scalability options: the company can scale-out the system with a new GS storage and scale-up with JBOD. Moreover, it has redundant design, ensuring high availability and minimal downtime. All the components are modular and hot-swappable, allowing for easy maintenance. IT staff can monitor the GS system through the intuitive management interface EonOne, the companies said. 

"Having been a customer of Infortrend storage for years, upgrading the existing storage for broadcasting to an Infortrend solution was a natural choice. We are extremely satisfied with the stability and price of their storage solutions," said Paul Byers, Executive Director of Engineering at WQED.

Let’s face it. The media and entertainment industry has a big data challenge. A high-definition film shoot today can generate as much as 2TB of data per hour. Not to mention that data then needs to be captured, stored, and moved to different locations, throughout the post-production and commercial release process. 

Factor in ever-increasing video capture resolutions, infrastructure and bandwidth limitations, and constant security concerns driving calls for encryption—it’s no surprise many businesses in the industry are finding data management an increasingly difficult task. Especially as many productions are asking DITs to do more work within shorter timeframes and limited budgets.

Whether your team is on the hunt for a new data storage strategy to address a major studio production, livestreamed event or innovative virtual production, discovering a cost-effective storage solution that alleviates data logistics complexity should be a top priority. 

What Studios and Post-Production Teams Need from Their Storage
From aggregating raw footage on set to duplicating and transporting final files after editing, every stage of the modern production process involves data. For some production houses, the old ways of managing data might still work. 

Especially for small-scale projects, deploying on-site data storage for shoots and network attached storage (NAS) to safely back up all the data at a central location for later use works just fine. But for many studios whose workloads are expanding at the same time that their turn-around times are shrinking, this set up is no longer viable for the quantities of data they’re dealing with.

To make sure your IT teams keep ahead of these trends, instead of falling behind, it will be imperative to rethink your data management strategies from the ground up—beginning at the first stage of production planning, to ensure everything from pre-production and post-production data is accessible via a uniform interface.

To accomplish this, many teams are incorporating Data Transfer as a Service (DTaaS)-based data management strategies into their camera-to-cloud workflow, which not only offers them access to the tools they need for fast ingestion of mass data sets for storage, backup, and archive, but leaning on a data storage provider to import that data to the multi-cloud gives teams time to focus on the work ahead of them, all while making sure they only pay for the storage devices they need, when they need them.

Unlock the Benefits of DTaaS
After all, the cornerstone of a good digital media workflow is data flexibility—this means having your data in the right place, at the right time, and with the right accessibility. In a world where we’re producing more data than ever, the issue isn’t whether we have enough space to store all of it—it’s getting that data moving to where it’s needed fast enough. 

Not only does an on-demand, consumption-as-a-service model simplify your device management, preventing unnecessary on-set IT costs, it also gives your video production teams the flexibility they need to alter the numbers of devices they deploy to complete certain projects, as storage needs change. 

By circumnavigating the headaches that come with owning data storage infrastructure outright, like maintenance fees and technology upgrades, DTaaS-based strategies give you the freedom to expand your production, accelerate your timeline, and even reallocate your budget without having to worry about your data.

As Production IT teams and DITs know, not all content creation workflows are created equal. Each project requires an entirely unique data storage infrastructure, both for on-set camera card consolidation and backup and camera-to cloud data transportation. Deploying DTaaS-based storage strategies gives you the ability to consolidate data on location quickly and securely, using a right-sized, direct-attached, on-prem storage system. 

When it’s time to move that data, DTaaS-based storage services eliminate the burden for remote IT production teams to figure out sneakernet methods to transport drives to and from set. Leaning on your storage provider to import dailies from a service center close to production straight to your S3 cloud bucket of choice leaves room for your post-production teams to focus on getting the edit done, instead of waiting for their drives to arrive.

New Horizons in Data-Led Decision-Making
When it comes down to it, you can’t produce, broadcast, distribute, stream or market eye-catching content without a modern approach to data management. Investment today means improved workflows for content producers, tomorrow, and better insights for the business as a whole. Implementing a streamlined, cost-effective, and complexity-free data management workflow that reaps the benefits of DTaaS is the best thing you can do for your studio. 

After all, a happy Production IT team means higher quality work and quicker project turnarounds. 

CENTURY CITY, Calif.—Ateliere Creative Technologies has released a video detailing how it worked with Lionsgate to transform its media supply chain in ways that helped the studio better manage and monetize its iconic 17,000 title library. 

Gray Ainsworth, executive vice president of technical operations & delivery at Lionsgate, noted that migrating to a digital media supply chain into the cloud was designed to address several key issues:

• Sales Enablement & Time to Market: The large and growing Lionsgate catalog resulted in a very disparate library with knowledge silos existing all over the company, Ainsworth said. To automate and streamline the supply chain, library visibility was of the utmost importance; a clear picture of what Lionsgate already owned paired with an efficient distribution workflow enabled the sales team to maximize ROI on existing titles.
• Creating a Better Partner Experience: While some content was held by Lionsgate, some was held by its partners, creating an unorganized environment for everyone, Ainsworth noted. By centralizing content and then migrating it to the cloud, Lionsgate partners are now able to access “clean” titles, which led to more flexibility and collaboration resulting in the ability to deliver more content without additional resources.
• Achieving Greater Operational Efficiency: Establishing a well-defined title hierarchy became critical to managing the numerous assets that correspond with features and episodic content. Through an event bridge, anytime a title is updated in Lionsgate’s title master system, it automatically syncs across the entire workflow, eliminating different versions that perpetuate over time. The entire system was up and running in a matter of weeks. Before, this required a proactive and manual process that resulted in duplications and lost time.
• Building for the Future: Rather than constructing an extensive infrastructure in-house, Lionsgate wanted a no code option that allowed them to focus on organizing their library, migrating it to the cloud, and optimizing distribution, the companies said. The result is greater flexibility, more efficient collaboration with service providers and a future-proofed media supply chain set to meet customer needs of today and tomorrow.

The full video and more information on the project is available here.  

The demanding and rapidly evolving sports media industry needs to ensure that new and historical content is always available when needed for the creation and delivery of stories and footage quickly to their dedicated and enthusiastic fan bases. Secure, cost-effective, long-term protection of these assets is paramount for the continued monetization of this content. 

According to Parks Associates, annual sports OTT subscription revenue in the U.S. was $13.1 billion in 2022 and will almost double to approximately $22.6 billion in 2027, a 73% increase in five years. There’s an opportunity for media companies to monetize historical content, in particular, but first they need to understand the technologies driving enhanced storage and the key components required to ensure long-term content preservation. After all, if content is no longer usable due to corruption from inadequate protection, monetization isn’t possible.  

Future-proofed, resilient, and secure content storage enables better monetization of sports content. 

Key Storage Challenges for Sports Applications
Sports media organizations need all their assets to be easily accessible, safe, secure and all in one place. One of the biggest challenges with storing sports media assets is long-term content preservation. Sports content must be stored for an extensive period of time. It’s important for media organizations to consider whether in 20 years’ time their storage solution will still be able to read the content. Moreover, determining how the storage will be maintained is imperative. 

Mitigating unpredictable costs for storing assets over a long period of time is also crucial. The cost of storing content in the public cloud may be clear today, but it can change in the future. Deploying a storage solution with long-term cost predictability will help media companies successfully monetize their assets.

Key Components for Long-Term Content Preservation
Traditionally, sports media organizations relied on LTO storage due to its low cost. However, recovering content from LTO is slower compared with other archive types. Now, organizations are moving more toward the cloud to gain greater flexibility and scalability, but the cost of pulling out an asset from long-term cloud storage can be substantial. It’s hard to anticipate when an asset might need to pulled from storage.

While cloud and tape are options today, there are inherent challenges in terms of cost, security, and performance. These issues can be addressed with software-defined object storage, utilizing the same cloud-native S3 interface and capabilities that power the public cloud. 

Leading object-storage based archive solutions run on commercial-off-the-shelf hardware. As lower cost hardware becomes available, media companies can take advantage. Moreover, using object-based storage for long-term content preservation ensures protection against bit rot and long-term loss of content. Erasure coding technology enables seamless upgrades from smaller hard drives to larger hard drives. Ultimately, by choosing an object-based storage solution that is affordable, secure, and easily accessible, sports organizations can tap into their archive for monetization purposes.

Latest Innovations in Content Storage Include Cloud, Edge, and AI/ML
While many media organizations are embracing on-premises solutions for long-term content preservation, more and more, they are using the cloud for live sports production because it is flexible, scalable, and efficient. We’re seeing a shift toward cloud-native storage solutions as media companies look to unlock greater efficiencies and scale storage capacity based on changing requirements. 

Another key trend is storage at the edge. Most of live sports production is done at remote locations such as sports venues. Edge storage is cost-effective, as it eliminates the need for sports media companies to move video to a physical location during the live event. Sports fans benefit because they receive content fast, without any delays.

During a live sports broadcast, there is not a lot of editing that goes on. But highlights and replays created after the event is over are done at a location outside of the edge. Moving content between the core (i.e., a facility or production center), edge (i.e., a remote venue), and the cloud can be done effortlessly by partnering with an expert in workflow solutions. 

AI and ML technology are also pushing the envelope of innovation, enabling faster content search and access, as well as enhanced metadata awareness. When sports media companies are streaming live highlights, they need information about the content at the edge. Until now, AI and ML functionality has almost exclusively been limited to the cloud, but the tides are changing. 

Technology providers like Perifery, a division of DataCore, are looking to bring cloud-enabled AI/ML applications to the edge to make content search more intelligent and to open up new monetization opportunities for sports media companies. 

Future-proof Storage Strategies
Sports media companies can take a few different approaches toward ensuring their content storage acts as foundation for future monetization. First, sports content must be easily accessible all the time. A great example are cloud-based storage solutions that assure easy access to searching and retrieving files from the archive through a web-based content portal, available over HTTP/S3, which are standard interfaces. 

Moreover, metadata awareness is critical. By choosing a storage solution that couples data and metadata together, sports media companies can perform a multi-level search in metadata as well as data. Adding a panel between the content storage solution and popular video editing software applications will enrich the metadata of searched objects and speed up the search for media assets, optimizing content browsing and enabling increased monetization.

Furthermore, content needs to be stored in more than one place. Using a storage solution that supports the core (i.e., on-premises data center), cloud, the edge empowers sports media companies to utilize a storage option that matches their evolving business goals.

Having a strategy for long-term content preservation is imperative if sports media organizations want to monetize their content. Through a mix of core, edge, and cloud-based storage, powered by AI and ML technology, sports media organizations can mitigate unpredictable costs, ensure immediate access to content, and locate content clips faster.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.—XenData has unveiled the E-Series Object Storage Archive Appliance, an on-premise archive platform offering support for between 280 TB and 1.12 PB of storage that can be accessed via a Windows file system and as object storage with an S3 interface.

A media-focused platform, the E-Series supports partial file restoration, a technique that restores parts of large files to create clips without having to restore a complete file. E-Series also supports playing video directly from the appliance, the company said.

It is compatible with many Media Asset Management systems, including those from Aveco, Cinegy, Dalet, EditShare, eMAM, Facilis, IPV, Metus, Videomenthe and VSN. Used with a MAM, E-Series provides for centralized storage that promotes collaboration and enhances productivity, it said.

The base E-Series configuration has a single storage node, which delivers a usable capacity of 280 TB. As extra capacity is needed, the system can be expanded by adding up to three additional 280 TB nodes. The appliance provides fast archive and restore operations, optimized for large files. It is available with several network options, including dual 10/25 GbE ports, XenData said. 

The E-Series runs a Windows Server 2022 operating system. When accessed as a file system over a local network, it adheres to Microsoft security based on Active Directory. When using the S3 object storage interface, content stored on the appliance can be accessed from anywhere using secure HTTPS, it said.

The appliance supports three data protection options, each of which creates a second instance of the files/objects on a second-tier storage location. Support is included for the following options:

• Mirror to LTO data tape in an attached robotic library.
• Mirror to public cloud object storage, including to AWS, Azure, Seagate Lyve and Wasabi.
• Mirror to another E-Series appliance located in another physical location.

When one of the data protection options is implemented, the system supports deep archive of content. This is achieved by configuring the appliance with disk retention policies to convert files/objects to stubs. A stub takes minimal space on the appliance disk storage, and files/objects in deep archive are restored from the second-tier storage by simply reading the stub file.

An E-Series base configuration with one 280 TB node costs $64,800. The archive storage platform is available now.

More information is available on the company’s website.

PARIS—Iron Mountain Entertainment Services (IMES) has announced the opening of their new facility in Paris, the company’s first preservation facility in France. 

With facilities in the U.S, Canada, the U.K. and Ireland, this marks their 17th global facility, which will provide climate-controlled media storage (including fridge storage and private vaults) and asset preservation services to international media clients.

The new Pantin facility includes climate controlled storage rooms and private vaults. In addition to physical asset storage, the facility also offers digital solutions ranging from asset digitization and transfer, metadata creation and enrichment, and digital preservation and distribution through their Smart Vault platform.

“We are thrilled to be opening our newest media storage facility in Paris at a time when our entertainment clients are actively mining their content archives for monetisation opportunities,” says Hanna Balouka, head of client partnerships, France. “This storage facility is built to world-class sustainability standards and will  provide the French market with a much-needed option for premium, secure, climate-controlled media storage. The building features state-of-the-art energy efficiency measures, consistent with Iron Mountain's commitment to meet ambitious net-zero targets. IMES also offers volume and specialized digitisation and digital storage, so now clients' materials don't ever have to leave the safety of the IMES environment."

Trusted by more than 3,500 organizations around the world, a few notable French clients include French broadcast powerhouse Canal+.

The new facility is located at Pantin Logistique at 110, bis Avenue du Général Leclerc - 93500 Pantin Entrepôt N°15, étage 2B. More information about Iron Mountain Entertainment Services (IMES) is available here.  

NEVADA CITY, Calif.—Telestream will unveil Telestream Content Manager, a management system that leverages both on-prem and cloud storage, and PRISM MPP, a multi-format rasterizer purpose-built for post-production, at the 2023 NAB Show, April 15-19, in Las Vegas.

The company also will introduce a software-only version of its Lightspeed Live Capture solution and showcase Qualify, a cloud-native QC service as well as demonstrate its iQ architecture for cloud-native video quality monitoring, it said.

“Digital transformation is driving exciting innovation across media and entertainment workflows, and we want to ensure our customers can take full advantage,” said Jon Wilson, president and COO of Telestream. "We’re focusing the vast capabilities of our company on delivering software-centric and cloud-native solutions to give content owners, broadcasters and video service providers the flexibility and tools they need to automate, optimize and scale their operations.”

The Telestream Content Manager offers a single point of access to content across an organization’s entire storage ecosystem, including the cloud and on-prem, and is built on DIVA Core technology. It is integrated with Telestream’s workflow orchestration tools and all major MAM, PAM and automation systems, the company said.

With an intuitive web-based user interface to search, preview and repurpose content, the new offering includes an auto-discovery feature that enables indexing of files directly from cloud storage without incurring egress charges, it said. 

Telestream Content Manager, which has a summer release target, enables supply chain workflows that incorporate content movement, lifecycle management and media processing, it said.

The Telestream PRISM family now includes three new models to address the needs of post-production workflows focused on high-end video formats like SDI- and IP-based 12-bit RGB for 4K/UHD applications. The solutions offer measurement tools for colorists with HDR requirements, a complete set of QC tools for objective evaluation of video and audio content and a remotely accessible user interface, Telestream said.

Supporting local, remote and post-production applications up to 8K, the MPP models enable color grading, surround sound audio production up to 7.1.4, SDI monitoring and IP analysis. The company expects to release the tools in the summer.

Telestream’s new software-only version of Lightspeed Live Capture can be run from a Telestream server, the user’s own server or in the cloud. It is due out in the spring.

See Telestream at 2023 NAB Show booth W1501.

More information is available on the company’s website.

BOSTON, Mass.—EditShare has implemented a comprehensive storage and media management platform for Last Cut Media, based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The system was implemented in conjunction with Advanced Media Trading, EditShare’s distribution partner in the region.

As it faced growing workflow limitations in its ad hoc storage systems, Last Cut Media decided to upgrade to a coherent and powerful single-point solution and ultimately selected the EditShare solution.

The initial architecture for the system features a 160TB EFS shared storage node with the full functionality of the EditShare FLOW media management platform. This works in conjunction with a 240TB nearline store for disaster recovery as well as rapid access to content as projects require it. Long-term storage is on LTO-8 tapes, using EditShare ARK archiving software and hardware, the companies said. 

“We provide state-of-the-art services to users across the Gulf region from our base in Abu Dhabi,” said Saad Duaibes, founder & creative director at Last Cut Media. “The new workflow and storage system from EditShare allows us to be much more flexible and productive, delivering the performance and quality that our clients expect. We also appreciate the way that EditShare is designed for remote access and multiple locations: we have bold plans for growth including a facility in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the near future.”

Among the workflow improvements opened up by the EditShare system is the capability of remote editing, allowing productions to access their files from wherever they are shooting and wherever the editor is working. EditShare FLOW ensures that, as content is ingested, so proxy files are automatically generated allowing remote editing from any location, the company said. 

FLOW also provides for rigorous content and metadata management, and automated secure archiving according to business rules set up for each project. Last Cut Media covers the whole range of post from commercials to movies, drama serials and documentaries, so needs to be able to set workflows and functionality by project, with complete security between clients.

“Working with Advanced Media Trading, we displayed to Last Cut Media that we could provide solutions from a secure and orderly transfer of existing content to long-term archiving strategies, to comprehensive training,” explained Said Bacho, chief revenue officer at EditShare. “Having a strong presence in the Middle East also gave Last Cut the confidence that our solution is well supported as well as technically the best for their needs.”

For further information on all EditShare solutions, visit www.editshare.com 

BOSTON, Mass.—EditShare has announced that it has delivered two large-scale EFS storage network systems, alongside FLOW workflow tools, to clients in the UAE. The solutions were designed and implemented by EditShare’s systems integration partner in the region, UBMS (United Broadcast & Media Solutions).

In one of the deployments, a division of the Dubai Government had been a user of EditShare storage for over five years. As part of an upgrade to provide access to all users from a common location, it tapped EditShare for solutions for an extended storage node, a fully redundant backup site in an alternative location, and an LTO tape-based ARK archive sub-system.

In addition, the regional broadcaster MBC Group has implemented its first EditShare EFS storage network so that it can boost production workflows at its facilities. 

For the deployment, redundancy was important with two alternative locations. To handle this, an ARK tape archive is maintained in synchronization by the FLOW asset management software that resides on the EditShare storage network. The result is that content can be ingested as soon as it is shot, and it is immediately available to all the editors, whatever editing software they choose.

“The EditShare platform provides all the functionality that these two very different customers needed,” said Rayan Nasser, head of projects at UBMS. “We were able to configure the systems as each user required, setting up business rules for synchronization and archiving to provide the highly resilient, highly productive solutions they sought."

“We have been working with this division of the Dubai Government for a long time, so we understand their requirements and workflows well,” Nasser added. “This was our first project with MBC, and we supplied them with the complete production system, including cameras from Sony and ARRI. EditShare sits well in such a high-profile production workflow.”

“We are delighted to be involved with two important high-profile storage implementations in the Middle East region," added Said Bacho, chief revenue officer at EditShare. "We understand the significance of protecting valuable  assets and this fully fledged EditShare solution, with complete redundancy, ensures that robust, secure and cost-efficient workflows are maintained across these mission critical environments.” 

The production platform for MBC is now online. The new storage network for this division of the Dubai Government is being implemented as part of a rolling program of enhancements.

For further information visit www.editshare.com.

CHATSWORTH, Calif.—Xytech has released the Granite version of its new and improved Media Operations Platform for end-to-end media production. The launch makes Xytech’s Media Operations Platform the only platform media teams need to manage all assets, people, resources, and facilities, the company said. The newest update, announced earlier this month and showcased on a webinar Dec. 8, provides 400+ new and improved features with customizable feature sets. 

With over 14,000 hours of product development work dedicated to the latest software update, the Media Operations Platform drives media creation by aligning the workforce and supporting the on-time delivery of content, as well as encouraging future media development, the company said. 

Xytech’s customers can take full advantage of the platform for managing people, equipment, resources, facilities, and logistics with the Granite release.  With enhancements and additions to its APIs and integrations such as OpenID, Azure AD, MS Exchange, Google Calendar, MS SharePoint and many more, media production teams no longer need to switch programs while completing critical tasks, as Xytech enables them to work in a single platform to trigger workflows, saving time, and increasing productivity, according to Xytech.

Long-Term Planning, the newest addition created for Granite allows users to track, report and compare resource capacity and demand, providing companies with greater visibility into their media pipelines, the company said. 

“The key benefit Long-Term Planning brings to the media production lifecycle is that it offers a real financial value to media teams who have dispersed staff and need clear visibility of their resources,” states Xytech’s Chief Product Officer, David White. “The application allows teams to streamline resource planning by generating demand by group, resource, projects, jobs and orders by type. This, in return, simplifies and consolidates views and functionality, making the Media Operations Platform a powerful operational solution that helps media companies to plan, develop and deliver content seamlessly.”

LOS ANGELES—Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) has announced that it successfully delivered large volumes of long-form and short-form legacy content for A+E Networks (AETN) using its CLEAR AI and CLEAR enabled media services.

PFT collaborated with AETN in digitizing its legacy content to be cloud-ready and to meet the growing fulfillment demand for linear and non-linear outlets (FAST, NextGen TV, OTT, AVOD, and SVOD). In addition, PFT worked with AETN to optimize their files to allow for faster content reuse and redistribution to meet future end-point specifications.   

"PFT has processed and transformed large payloads of content to date, leveraging CLEAR and its AI. A key aspect of this project was to train the CLEAR AI engine on the editorial guidelines. Both teams worked together to ensure that this is done promptly to achieve the scale needed to deliver within the desired timeline." said Ankur Jain, senior vice president of sales at PFT North America. "We are focused on the accuracy and actionability of our AI/ML tools. Such use cases will continue to increase operational efficiencies, enable quicker monetization and hence bring measurable business benefits to our customers."    

PFT leveraged a combination of its CLEAR AI and its media services team to deliver for AETN, the company explained. 

First, the legacy videotapes were digitized at PFT's New York facility. The digitized files were then ingested into CLEAR for further processing. CLEAR supply chain management tools enabled PFT and AETN teams to automate media logistics, track tasks and provide visibility into the process. CLEAR AI then automatically processed the file and rearranged all segments per the AETN specifications to create a master file.

PFT is the technology subsidiary of Prime Focus, a global leader in M&E industry services. For more information, visit www.primefocustechnologies.com