MALAGA, Spain—Tedial says it will focus on its “intelligent” media asset management platforms at the 2026 NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 19-22.

The company will demonstrate how its intelligent, composable future-ready platform combines pervasive AI, composable architecture, and deployment flexibility to increase operational efficiency, accelerate production, and unlock greater content value.

“The future of media operations depends on intelligent automation and architectural flexibility,” said Julian Fernandez-Campon, Tedial CTO. “The platform enhancements we are unveiling at NAB 2026 bring practical AI, deeper composability, and real operational control to modern media operations — helping teams work faster, more efficiently, and with greater agility.”

For Tedial, artificial intelligence is not an add-on—it is embedded throughout the company’s platform with new agentic AI capabilities directly integrated into media workflows, enabling intelligent automation, proactive assistance, and faster decision-making, the company said.

New this year is Tedial’s integration of agentic AI with the Model Context Protocol (MCP), providing organizations with comprehensive flexibility and control over their AI models and services. The MCP interface ensures organizations can select and integrate AI technologies that best suit their needs, ensuring flexibility, scalability and future-readiness. This empowers teams to unlock the full value of their content libraries, improve reuse, and accelerate production workflows.

With NoCode workflow design capabilities, teams can easily automate processes, connect systems, and adapt operations without relying on development resources, according to Tedial.

An ecosystem of more than 200 integrations connects seamlessly with production systems, archive platforms, editing tools, distribution channels, and AI services. This integration-first approach eliminates silos and enables organizations to evolve their technology stack without disruption.

At the core of Tedial’s platform is an AI-powered MAM that uses semantic search capabilities to allow users to locate relevant media instantly based on meaning, context, or visual content, not just metadata.

Tedial’s NoCode UI designer allows organizations to create fully customized user experiences tailored to their workflows and operational needs. Using modular widgets —including media players, metadata panels, dashboards, search interfaces, and storyboards— teams can design intuitive workspaces without coding.

Tedial’s platform supports IP-based live workflows, enabling broadcasters to ingest live streams, enrich them with metadata in real time, and perform live clipping for immediate publishing. By integrating live metadata sources and AI-driven technologies, the platform enhances live content discoverability and value, enabling faster publishing, improved audience engagement, and new monetization opportunities, the company said.

Tedial’s modular platform adapts seamlessly to diverse media sectors, including social media, news, sports, and post and can be fully deployed to support cloud, hybrid, and on-prem.

Tedial will be in Booth W1851 in the West Hall of the LVCC during the show.

MALAGA, Spain—Media integration and asset management solutions provider Tedial has formed a strategic partnership with Moments Lab, a provider of AI-based video discovery.

The collaboration has led to the integration of Moments Lab’s MXT-2 multimodal AI indexing technology into the Tedial EVO MAM, powered by its smartWork media-integration platform.

“We are excited to partner with Moments Lab and integrate their advanced AI solutions into our EVO MAM platform,” Tedial Chief Technology Officer Julián Fernández-Campon said. “This collaboration enhances our ability to provide innovative, AI-powered media management solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers.”

MXT-2 breaks down videos and generates human-like descriptions. It recognizes who is in the content, what is happening, where it is taking place and which kinds of shots are used. It can also identify the best sound bites from interviews, speeches or press conferences, saving users time, it said.

MXT-2 can be customized to a user’s needs, whether that is detecting people relevant to the organization or breaking down specific types of content to pinpoint the best moments at scale, it said.

“Partnering with Tedial enables us to connect with more customers who are looking for next-generation MAM with the latest multimodal AI capabilities,” Philippe Petitpont, CEO and co-founder of Moments Lab, said. “Together, we are setting a new standard for media asset management, ensuring our clients have the tools they need to succeed in a rapidly evolving industry.”

More information is available on the Tedial and Moments Lab websites.

MALAGA, Spain—As media and entertainment companies work to increase audience engagement and boost sales across various platforms and deliver a seamless, cohesive customer experience across every channel, Tedial will be showcasing solutions at the 2025 NAB Show that the company says will help them achieve those goals by better integrating their apps, automating their media supply chains and upgrading their businesses.

Tedial noted that while AI has become increasingly important in the M&E business, the growing number of AI tools are creating their own challenges. AI tools generate a lot of information that needs to processed and there is no standardized response format, so matching and harmonizing the results of multiple AI systems is complex, Tedial said.

To solve those problems it will be showing its smartWork at the show in Las Vegas between April 5 and 9. Tedial’s smartWork integrates the different AI tools by encapsulating all the logic and normalizing the output to the platform's data model, unifying and simplifying the workflows that use the AI tools. In this way, it make the different AI tools interchangeable at the workflow level because they share a common data model.

In addition, smartWork gives the customer the freedom to choose the AI tool which is more suitable for each business needs, and more importantly, gives the possibility of testing it with real content before taking a decision to check if it really meets the expectations.

To help companies create more agile and resilient media supply chain, Tedial also highlighted the importance of iPaaS technology, which it said stands at the forefront of the digital transformation of all IT markets. iPaaS is the backbone of no-code media supply chain automation for all M&E businesses. It addresses, Tedial said, these key industry trends:

• Cloud-Native and Hybrid Models: A hybrid approach offers flexibility and scalability, essential for modern media operations.
• No-Code Integration: No-code integration platforms are reducing the dependency on specialized developers and accelerating the deployment of integrated solutions.
• Interoperability: The diversity of integrations is crucial to foster innovation and efficiency.

Although more and more M&E organizations are using cloud technology in some capacity, very few of them have all of their current workflow elements completely cloud based, Tedial said.

As hybrid cloud workflows are becoming the norm, Tedial reported that smartWork, its no-code iPaaS for media supply chain, automates M&E processes in a hybrid and multisite environment, minimizing the costs of digital transformation.

In its NAB preview, Tedial also highlighted the importance of metadata and AI semantic search.

Data mapping and transformation are critical components of a strong data integration strategy for an agile media supply chain, the company said. iPaaS provides an ideal way to operate in an automatic integrated environment using a common metadata framework. It plays a crucial role in aggregating, transforming, and consolidating data from disparate sources, enabling businesses to derive meaningful insights and make informed decisions.

Tedial also stressed that "EBUCorePlus is an ontology for media companies, developed as an open source project. smartWork uses EBUCorePlus as a shared data model, being fundamental to establish a metadata integration framework, allowing interoperability and compatibility between applications."

Semantic search is an advanced technology that interprets the meaning behind words and phrases to deliver more relevant search results. Unlike traditional search methods that focus on exact word matches, semantic search uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand the intent behind a query. This approach ensures users receive content that matches the meaning, not just the keywords. smartWork I EVO enhances this experience with its new AI indexing and semantic search service, offering more accurate and intuitive search capabilities, Tedial explained.

Tedial will be showing its solutions at booth W1525 during the show. More information is available at www.tedial.com

"PBCs are reusable software components that constitute the fundamental building blocks of a composable enterprise."

Media and Entertainment organizations are grappling with the constraints of legacy technology and the pressing need to accelerate their digital transformation efforts. The imperative to modernize and enhance legacy systems is a central driving force in the M&E market. Business managers often aspire to offer innovative digital services, but they are encumbered by legacy technologies that prove costly to update and disruptive to replace.

A pivotal catalyst for digital transformation within the M&E market is the necessity to replace or upgrade legacy Content Management Systems (CMS), Digital Asset Management (DAM), and Media Asset Management (MAM) systems that were predominantly acquired in the past decade. Presently, these systems pose a substantial hurdle to progress in automating the multifaceted processes essential to the M&E industry. Their inflexibility and sluggishness hinder the creation of new services and the swift integration of an expanding array of cloud applications.

In today's business landscape, M&E enterprises seek to maximize automation wherever feasible. Therefore, when they invest in an asset management solution, they aim for software defined workflows that can seamlessly transition between on-premises, cloud, or hybrid deployments. Equally significant is the desire to expand the range of tools available, enhancing flexibility to design workflows that align seamlessly with current applications and any future tools that their teams may embrace over time.

Composable Technology
Why opt for modular application architecture? In the context of  (M&E) enterprises, applications have grown in size and complexity, which can make them challenging to manage, update, and innovate. Modularity is the approach of breaking applications into discrete components that can be managed independently, yet seamlessly integrated into the larger system. 

This modular approach is the foundation of composable digital technologies, which simplifies the advancement of digital transformation for companies without adding bureaucracy or exacerbating existing inefficiencies. The benefits of a modular architecture are manifold:

• Enhanced Manageability and Scalability: Modularity reduces complexity, making it easier to cater to the evolving needs and expectations of business users.
• Team and Technology Autonomy: Organizations can allocate projects around specific business functions, fostering efficiency and process optimization.
• Resilience: In a modular architecture, functional isolation allows for fault containment.

Modern applications must be inherently modular, enabling companies to create and evolve experiences and services at a pace that was inconceivable just a decade ago. The flexible coupling of modules minimizes service dependencies, resulting in improved value when purchasing, building, expanding, or configuring services. This shift in the economics associated with digital transformation enhances the new digital experience.

Packaged Business Capabilities
The ability to rapidly create business-ready applications and solutions empowers us to design and adapt new services on demand by harnessing the technological capabilities of a media application integration platform, partner integrations, and key customizations. These are pre-composed solutions.

Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs) represent applications or services tailored around specific business functions. They are software components embodying a well-defined business capability, readily recognizable by business users, and suitable for reuse in the creation of custom-assembled products, applications, and services.

The intrinsic modularity of PBCs positions them as foundational elements for applications or solutions, akin to aggregations of microservices. Microservices serve as the framework for designing, building, and deploying modular applications, and PBCs encapsulate these application services. This confluence is especially advantageous for companies that demand high levels of flexibility, security, agility, and transparency.

Leveraging PBCs to construct cloud-native applications furnishes Media and Entertainment (M&E) organizations with an expeditious and cost-effective means to modernize services and systems integral to their operations. PBCs offer an array of advantages, including:

• Addressing common business challenges;
• Facilitating cross-functional decision-making;
• Accelerating scalability and time to market;
• Mitigating dependence on single suppliers, and
• Encouraging the adoption of best-in-class solutions available in the market.

Furthermore, the combination of multiple PBCs can give rise to composable applications, often referred to as "smartPacks," enabling companies to offer comprehensive end-to-end services without making substantial investments in new systems.

The current user interface technology, coupled with the composability of PBCs, elevates the application experience through straightforward plug-and-play actions. This approach reflects a no-code paradigm in software development, permitting the creation of applications without prior expertise in traditional programming languages. Citizen developers or those with limited programming experience can assemble applications using PBCs and graphic workflow designers.

PBCs present a solution that enables businesses to incrementally introduce new digital services at a pace that balances customer demands with budget constraints. These building blocks can be targeted at specific business functions and deployed independently. PBCs carry minimal risk and disruption, allowing companies to modernize specific components within larger systems.

PBC-Based Modernization
In typical large on-premise installations, vendors often deliver various point-to-point integrations and custom functionalities for customers, resulting in each installation being unique. Over time, managing multiple versions of such software becomes increasingly challenging.

Investing in expanding the functionality or integrations of legacy systems, which are reliant on the provider, is generally an unsound business practice. A more advantageous approach is to temporarily integrate the legacy system with an application integration platform, specifically an iPaaS designed for media. 

This approach opens up opportunities for the customer to evolve their business by temporarily halting the development of the legacy system and incorporating necessary new products and workflows. This strategy ensures business continuity while allowing the gradual phase-out of the legacy system in the future.

To ensure the business continuity of M&E organizations, it is imperative to establish an integration strategy for legacy systems, particularly in the context of many CMS, DAM, and MAM systems. One immediate question arises: Can a monolithic application serve as a (PBC? The answer is affirmative, provided that the application offers an API organized into functional blocks. Each of these functional blocks corresponds to a distinct PBC, readily identifiable by a business user. It's essential to understand that this is a temporary solution to facilitate the organization's digital transition towards a composable architecture.

M&E organizations face major challenges around modernizing legacy applications, replacing manual processes, and implementing new digital services. But complete system replacement is expensive and time-consuming. And pre-built applications are rarely tailored to the specific needs of organizations, leading to costly modernization. It's time to consider a new approach based on PBCs that allows M&E organizations to use lightweight application building blocks to deploy new services or incrementally replace entire applications. 

PBCs play a pivotal role in expediting the digital transformation of M&E organizations by enabling incremental innovations. There are three primary modernization approaches that companies can consider:

• Legacy Modernization: Many companies operate with legacy systems that would be too time-consuming and costly to entirely replace. In such cases, PBCs can be employed to substitute and upgrade functionalities within a larger legacy system.
• Legacy Enhancement: When companies are content with their current systems, they can introduce PBCs to expand existing functionalities. This enables companies to offer new end-to-end services without significant investments.
• New Modern Applications: In situations where companies have manual processes that need automation and have resources available for new developments based on microservices, PBCs can replace traditional workflows with modern applications. Additionally, this approach accelerates the transition to the cloud, either partially or comprehensively, based on the company's preferences.

The imperative to modernize and enhance legacy systems serves as a prominent driving force in the M&E market. Fortunately, PBCs offer a practical alternative, enabling companies to modernize quickly and incrementally. The specific functionalities of PBCs and their mix-and-match reusability to create composable applications can significantly assist companies in their digital transformation, reducing development time and modernization project costs.

We have discussed the challenges faced by M&E organizations in terms of legacy technology and the need for digital transformation. We have also emphasized the importance of modernization, flexibility, and the integration of new technologies. To accelerate digital transformation, we propose an agile and composable integration platform, based on PBC (no-code iPaaS for media), for the creation of media services that will pave the way for continuous and future-proof innovation.

MALAGA, Spain—Media technology solutions specialists Tedial has announced that it will be showing an ecosystem of smartPacks at IBC2023 on Stand 10.D45.

Tedial’s smartPacks are designed to provide users with easy-to-use toolsets that quickly deploy Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs) that let companies launch new business services and products.  

“In the M&E industry different organizations have unique needs depending on their specific business focus,” explained Julian Fernandez-Campon, CTO, Tedial. “smartPacks are designed to accommodate this diversity by offering various key business services such as news, post production, delivery to playout or OTT, sports, localization, etc. ready to use. By providing a modular and customizable approach, smartPacks allow organizations to select and implement the services that best align with their individual requirements ensuring that they can optimize their media operations based on their specific needs. We look forward to demonstrating these new smartPack capabilities, which further enrich smartWork, our award-winning cloud-native, NoCode Media Integration Platform, at IBC on Stand 10.D45.”

Tedial’s smartPacks, launched at NAB 2023 as a key element of smartWork, Tedial’s cloud-native, NoCode Media Integration Platform, automates business processes by leveraging existing digital capabilities to accommodate the precise requirements of specific applications. 

Tedial is now enhancing the platform with these pre-packaged smartPack components that come with a range of services tailored to target a variety of use cases such as News, Post-Production, Sports, Ingest, Delivery, Migration and more. 

The smartPacks cover many different business areas, including: 

• smartPack: Migration – Efficiently transfers metadata and media from a legacy MAM or other system to a new MAM.
• smartPack: Archive – Securely preserves media assets in multiple tiers and locations to ensure quick retrieval and long-term accessibility.
• smartPack: Delivery to Linear Playout – Streamlines the delivery of media assets for traditional broadcasting, ensuring seamless playout.
• smartPack: Delivery to OTT – Automates the delivery of content to OTT platforms to ensure an efficient and seamless distribution process.
• smartPack: Localization – Leverages automated processes to streamline localization services, collaborating efficiently with third-party translators, voice-over artists, and subtitling experts.
• smartPack: News – Integrates seamlessly with NRCS rundown, enhancing news production efficiency and facilitating timely delivery of breaking news and in-depth stories.
• smartPack: Post-Production – Integrates efficiently with NLE/PAM, streamlining the transfer of content, including timeline metadata from a MAM for precision post-production.
• smartPack: IMF – Offers robust support for IMF, ensuring efficient storage, versioning, and distribution of high-quality master assets.
• smartPack: Social Media – Repurposes media for social media platforms, maximizing viewer engagement and fostering online community growth.
• smartPack: Sports - Sport production with automatic logging from external metadata sources (OPTA, EVS, etc.)
• smartPack: AI Enrichment - Provides multiple tools to optimize analysis and filtering functionalities.
• smartPack: Content Distribution – Enables content delivery through easy-to-use features.

Tedial, a provider of media technology solutions, has joined the Google Cloud Partner Advantage program as a technology partner, giving Google Cloud customers easy access to Tedial’s smartWork cloud-native, no-code media integration platform.

The Google Cloud Partner Advantage program enables tech companies and service providers to sell, manage and support Google Cloud products and solutions. The program is designed to help partners deliver customer excellence while driving growth by providing access to resources, tools, and support from Google Cloud.

“Tedial is proud to join the Google Cloud Partner Advantage program as a technology partner," said Julián Fernández-Campón, Tedial CTO. "smartWork, our cloud-native no-code media integration platform, underwent a rigorous testing and approval process to achieve this designation, including a solution architecture technical review, and deployment and testing on Google Cloud’s infrastructure using the services available for cost optimization and maximize the performance (GKE, Google Cloud Storage, Database, AI tools, etc.) to build an effective and real cloud native solution in Google Cloud. 

"Receiving this designation is proof that Tedial complied with Google Cloud’s best practices usage requirements and that the platform is well-architected from a technical standpoint in terms of security, scalability, cost-efficiency, and operational excellence, is also well documented and has a clearly defined business model and SLAs.”

“By bringing its platform to Google Cloud’s globally trusted infrastructure, customers seeking different media & entertainment services and applications can easily access Tedial’s smartWork cloud-native, no-code media integration platform”, said Kip Schauer, Global Head of Media and Entertainment Partnership at Google Cloud. “We’re excited to welcome Tedial to the Google Cloud Partner Advantage ecosystem, and to help support users to define and implement integrations autonomously.”

smartWork, a cloud-native, no-code media integration platform, democratizes business processes by empowering users to define and implement integrations autonomously—without vendor participation—creating workflows in a simplified, flexible and agile manner, according to the company.

MALAGA, Spain—Tedial has announced it will be showing its award-winning smartWork cloud-native, NoCode Media Integration Platform at NAB 2023 with a suite of Package Business Capabilities (PBCs).

Tedial is billing the enhancement as the M&E’s industry’s first PBC solution. The improvements are designed to bring broadcasters closer to the cloud and enable the composable enterprise, a modular approach that leverages existing digital capabilities to create new products and services, the company said. 

Composability increases agility in digital transformation, relieves pressure on the IT team and frees up time for innovation, the company explained. 

Tedial said that smartWork, launched at NAB 2022, has transformed business processes by empowering users to define integrations autonomously – without vendor participation – creating business processes in a flexible and agile manner.  

At this year’s NAB Tedial will present an enhanced version of smartWork in Booth W3959 that now features smartPackages, a set of PBC modules capable of streamlining the processes of different business units including, but not limited to: news, content delivery, post-production, archive and even IMF.

“After the successful launch of smartWork in 2022, we are delighted to be back at NAB with an enhanced and expanded version of the platform featuring smartPackages, a set of PBC modules that reflect our roots in IT,” explained Julián Fernández-Campón, the CTO of Tedial. “This is the first and only solution capable of moving the world of PBCs into M&E with tools that tie directly to the business team’s needs by simplifying the creation and deployment of best-of-breed solutions.”

PBCs are reusable software components that provide the key building blocks of a composable enterprise and are used to create best-of-breed solutions in many verticals. 

In the M&E industry PBCs represent self-contained units that solve a specific problem: Localization, Content Delivery, Post-Production, etc.  PBCs function without external dependencies, or the need for direct external access to data. For interaction with the rest of the enterprise's systems and services, each PBC offers a data schema, an API, an event notification system and a set of services, Tedial said. 

Applying modularity to M&E entities achieves the scale and pace required to enact ambitious business practices. The modularity of PBCs combined with smartWork’s no-code technology – that allows applications to be created without any prior knowledge of traditional programming - enhances composability resulting in the flexible design of applications and services enabling organizations to innovate and adapt quickly to changing business needs. 

Tedial’s smartWork can be deployed on-premises, on any cloud or in a hybrid architecture for incredible flexibility. Cloud capabilities enable media services to be quickly built, deployed and evolved as business needs change by adding or adjusting business processes. Tedial recently successfully completed and achieved the AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR) for smartWork.  All smartWork services are available as apps, which can be provided by AWS.

We are at the dawn of the "composable enterprise” age, an era that will see business teams leverage existing digital capabilities to create new products and services without starting from scratch every time. A composable approach increases agility in digital transformation, relieves pressure on the IT team and frees up time for innovation.

Composability incorporates the basic principle of modularity; systems should be built from cohesive and loosely coupled components (modules). This means that a system will consist of different components with well-defined functionality which are interrelated and work together efficiently.

Media business composability is the mindset, technologies and set of operational capabilities that enable Media & Entertainment (M&E) organizations to innovate and adapt quickly to changing business needs. It’s based on applying modularity to M&E businesses to achieve the scale and pace required by business ambition. According to Gartner*, the idea of composable digital business operates on four basic principles: 

• More speed through discovery: Ability to discover and understand design opportunities to guide, track and secure change
• Greater agility through modularity: Partitioning a domain into managed components to scale and control change
• Better leadership through orchestration: Prescribing and negotiating interactions between components to enable recompositing and forming processes
• Resilience through autonomy: Minimizing dependence of components from each other to maintain integrity of change

Agility and flexibility are quickly becoming the two pillars of digital transformation success, allowing modular business capabilities to be assembled and combined. Packaged Business Capabilities (PBC) are software and service components that represent a well-defined business capability, functionally recognizable as such by a business user and reusable in the design of custom assembled products, applications, and services. 

Today's user interface technology, coupled with the composability of PBCs, enhances the application experience through simple plug-and-play actions. It is the codeless (NoCode) approach to software development, allowing applications to be created without any prior knowledge of traditional programming languages. Citizen developers, or less experienced programmers, can build applications by assembling PBCs and using graphical workflow designers.

If we can quickly create business-ready applications and solutions, then we can design and adapt new media services on demand. Media services can be simply defined as modular units which concentrate on a single business functionality. Modular media services can be easily reused in various contexts and can also be composed to satisfy new requirements. On the other hand, modularity in media services prevents the propagation of changes to other services and thus simplifies maintenance of service-oriented systems. 

The Future of MAMs
Composable digital business means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks. To guarantee M&E business continuity, it is necessary to have a strategy to integrate legacy media systems, such as CMS, DAM and MAM. 

The question immediately arises: Can a monolithic application be a PBC? The answer is YES, if the application offers an API organized into blocks of functionality. Each block would correspond to a different PBC, easily identifiable by a business user. It must be understood that this is a temporary solution to facilitate the digital transition to a composable architecture of the organization.

Legacy MAMs offer a level of automation restricted to the set of third-party systems that have been integrated point-to-point over the years. Today, many more functions are required and there are a multitude of media applications, as well as other IT products, to process complex workloads and create new media services, both in the cloud and on premises. In addition, the MAM vendor is responsible for keeping the 3rd party integrations updated to the latest versions in its orchestrator. The reality is that classic MAM orchestrators have become insufficient and can potentially hold back the digital transformation of M&E organizations. CMS and DAM systems are in a similar situation.

If we decouple the orchestration, automation and workflow design services from the MAM, moving them to an application and media systems integration platform, then we will achieve a more open and agile architecture for the M&E organization’s digital ecosystem. Moreover, product vendors (applications, media systems) are responsible for integrating with the platform and keeping it updated so that customers can choose them. The MAM is freed from the integrations and workflow design, which it delegates to the platform, and will be integrated as another application. 

In this scenario, the new generation of MAMs will be focused on organization, documentation, review, collaboration, order generation and asset access traceability. It’s expected that the new generation of MAMs will be based on microservices, focused on asset management and integrated with the media integration platform, which guarantees interoperability and compatibility with the rest of the applications and systems of the M&E organization.

Agile Media Service Platform
Process automation has always been a key pillar of digital transformation initiatives, automating, orchestrating, and monitoring end-to-end business processes to create an efficient and scalable solution, however this remains a challenge for businesses. Many M&E organizations are adopting tactical automation strategies that focus on automating specific tasks aimed at solving specific problems:

• Business-driven automation: Automation efforts within companies are increasingly business-oriented rather than IT-oriented.
• Composability: Process automation based on reusable PBCs.

M&E organizations demand flexibility and agility to create new services by adding and/or replacing applications and systems from multiple vendors. Service modularity is thus a key concept for a service-oriented perspective of the enterprise. The future of flexibly designed media services lies in an agile media service platform, easily reconfigurable by self-sufficient customers, simplifying the addition of new capabilities and using reusable components:

• Identify automation opportunities
• Intuitively map/model business processes using PBCs
• Rapidly implement service-specific automated workflows

Users want seamless, effortless integrations and developers want to spend less time on repetitive software programming tasks and integration maintenance. The days of the traditional, complex monolithic content management systems, which generate huge dependence on software vendors to provide the agility required to integrate new applications within the digital ecosystem, are over.

The natural alternative to legacy systems is an application and system integration platform that provides the flexibility and elasticity necessary for the creation of new services in an agile and efficient manner. Using PBCs, which abstract the complexity of all the underlying technology, the customer can choose the components and systems they need to integrate to create their network media service supply chain.

Democratizing innovation really means unlocking the basic tools and creating PBCs for people who are going to innovate on their own. In fact, a composable architecture built with PBCs makes it easy for business users to participate in the design and implementation of new features and services.

Innovation is inhibited not by legacy systems but by a legacy mindset. Ensuring the future competitiveness of the M&E industry will require it to be more efficient, predictable, sustainable and resilient. This implies a change in mindset to overcome existing industry legacy systems and silo-thinking. Improved collaboration and innovation are crucial to achieving this.

Service orchestration and automation platforms are key to delivering customer-centric agility and the rapid move toward a composable media business. To accelerate digital transformation, improve customer experience, create new services, automate processes and optimize costs, we propose an agile and composable media service platform, which will pave the way toward future-proof and continuous innovation.

MALAGA, Spain—Following the launch of its smartWork Media Integration Platform, Tedial has announced a remodeled Business Development team that will work to expand the company’s businesses with a “partnership centric approach.”

“This is an exciting time of transformation for Tedial and for the whole industry,” says Tedial founder Emilio L. Zapata. “For more than 20 years, we have identified the needs of our customers and provided solutions and services that efficiently and cost-effectively allow companies to meet their operational requirements and business objectives, improve their customer experience, and remain ahead of their competition. With the introduction of smartWork and the formation of our new business development team we are at the forefront of this media evolution providing simplicity, flexibility and greater business agility.”

The new Tedial business development team will be responsible for promoting the complete Tedial portfolio. With a partnership-centric approach, the team will also work closely with key partners who will serve as an extension of the Tedial business development team and will provide the highest level of services and support on a local level, the company said. 

The company’s new approach started in the summer of 2021, with the promotion of Manuel Martínez to business development manager. In addition to Martinez, the expanded business development team also includes:

• Nick Gold, who has been engaged by Tedial to provide business development services in the US and Canada markets. Gold is a media industry professional with 15-years’ experience at CHESA, a leading US-based system integrator, where he served as Chief Revenue Officer and Lead Technologist. He is an active participant in numerous industry associations, including SMPTE and AMIA (The Association of Moving Image Archivists) where he has served as chair of its Digital Asset Symposium (DAS) conference since 2017. Gold is the author of numerous published papers on media supply chain technologies and system architecture.
• Alexander Jasinski, who will provide business development services in the European market (excluding UK and Iberia). Jasinski is a media industry professional with 22-years’ experience at international enterprises as well as start-ups including Adtoox, Group IMD, and more recently at Vidispine, an Arvato Systems brand.
• John Perkins, an independent Optech Media Consultant, has also been engaged by Tedial to provide business development services in the UK market. Perkins is a media industry professional with 22-years’ experience at UK broadcaster ITV and leading broadcast service providers including Technicolor, Ericsson and Red Bee Media.
• Gold, Jasinski and Perkins will follow the sales strategy defined by José Luis Montero, who has been promoted to chief sales officer. Montero joined Tedial in 2017 as Regional Sales Director, LATAM. His proven track record in strategic planning and customer development and management led to the swift expansion of his regional responsibilities to include the Middle East and then Iberia. Montero will head up the sales organization worldwide in addition to his current responsibilities.

The business development team will be available to meet with attendees at IBC at Tedial’s stand 10.D30.

WASHINGTON—So many things have changed in the television industry in the last couple of decades, and the pace of change only seems to accelerate. What seemed highly unlikely five years ago becomes commonplace today, and producing content in the cloud is one of those things.

The acceptance of at least some new techniques and processes can be attributed to COVID-19, which overnight forced us to get things done without actually being in the same place. And “getting things done without actually being in the same place” could be the dictionary definition of cloud production.

If your only concession to COVID is to do an occasional Zoom meeting, you may get the impression that video in the cloud is convenient but nothing special. However, with production in the cloud, you can get the quality you want to get.

“It is no longer accurate to assume that a cloud-based production is of lesser quality,” said Martin Jolicoeur, director of product management for Grass Valley. “One of the things we have learned from being forced to work remotely is that cloud technology is capable of handling top-tier live events.”

Keep An Open Mind
Jolicoeur said that keeping an open mind—and an open system—is the way to build a successful cloud production strategy.

“The global pandemic forced us to adopt new ways of working,” he said. “This has expanded our range of possibilities: SDI, IP and cloud all have applications for which they are best suited, both in terms of production capability and cost. We need to master the entire range of production options so that we aren’t locked into a single model. By being open, we can ensure that we are applying the best business and operational model for every production that we do.”

Like so many things where the internet is concerned, what you can do in the cloud is mostly limited by your imagination. You could use production talent from anywhere there is an excellent, stable connection—which brings up the subject of what the concerns can be for creating a production workflow in the cloud.

“The cloud offers unique opportunities for production workflows, but it also adds some new challenges that need to be considered,” Chris Brähler, vice president of product at SDVI. “Connectivity and latencies are certainly factors that play a bigger role in a cloud-based environment than when everything is available ‘next-door’ on premise.”

Relearn Some Techniques
Those of us who grew up in the industry and learned our roles by actually handling physical equipment and cables need to relearn some techniques and processes that we thought were the basics of production workflow.

“Ensuring that the entire organization understands the strategy and the benefits that will accrue to them is probably the most important factor in determining success,” said Grass Valley’s Jolicoeur.

Getting your head around how assembling a production in the cloud is key to making it work for your organization. A look into one company’s product—SDVI’s Rally—is one example of cloud production workflow.

Rally can automate content verification and metadata enhancement processing, which can assist an operator in the production supply chain. This can include steps as typical as creating proxies or daily renders. Rally Access, available as a plugin for Adobe Premiere and accessible via browser using a cloud-services provider such as Accurate.Video, can be used to both edit content, and also to review and approve edits and sequences. 

Sometimes it seems like you need a “spirit guide” to appreciate how cloud production can benefit your creative and distribution processes. If you step back and think about it, the benefits make sense.

“Designing a unifying workflow is key to getting your content accurately and securely distributed to all stages of production,” said Colin McDonald, product manager for cine products at Teradek.

The company’s Teradek Core is a control platform that allows productions to securely manage, distribute and collaborate with live camera feeds, instant proxy files for editorial, high-quality recordings for dailies, and low-latency HDR streams for post-production.

Using a hybrid cloud approach to media asset management is at the heart of Tedial’s introduction of its smartWork Media Integration Platform.

According to Julian Fernandez-Campon, Tedial CTO,  “a hybrid-cloud architecture offers broadcasters the ability to move operations in-line with business objectives quickly while maintaining current systems in operation ensuring a low-risk transition into the cloud. Customers retain full control of their critical workflows and operations while benefiting from the latest cutting-edge cloud features, technologies and infrastructures. 

“smartWork is based upon no-code architecture, follows Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) and can be deployed on-premises, on any cloud or in a hybrid architecture seamlessly, allowing customers to integrate the more suitable systems for each deployment.”

Your Team Has the Skills
Just what sort of skills are needed to make all of this work? Look around at your team—it already has the skills.

“We worked with a group of top news and sports media companies to create cloud-native, microservice-based, media services,” said Paul Shen, CEO of TVU.

Shen said that one of these micro-applications is TVU Producer, a cloud-based live-production service. With its sync technology, the entire production team can all work from their home offices with their laptops and a normal home internet service. The application enables an audio engineer to have his own audio mixing panel and the video production engineer has his own live production panel. 

All production crews can communicate with each other in real time, as if they are working in the same physical space, and all the commands and instructions are executed precisely at the intended time without any misalignment introduced by network delay.

As well-formed as some of these scenarios sound, there is room to improve the processes and iron out the wrinkles.

“We are merely in the infancy of cloud-based production,” McDonald said. “Right now, content is being pushed to all levels of production without a direct form of feedback.  But soon, each of those departments and stakeholders will be able to push information back. This constant flow of information on a single platform will mean productions can work faster and with more accuracy.”

Increased Acceptance
Interestingly, the Covid crisis of the past two-plus years played a role in the increased acceptance of working on a real production using virtual tools.

“The biggest take-away has been that it works,” said SDVI’s Brähler. “Obstacles that were thought to be too big to overcome now had to be worked through, as there was no alternative.”

It looks like there is still a place for content creators to have their own facilities, even as the capabilities of “virtual” facilities are expanded and allow for greater flexibility.

“We believe completely in the cloud and IP’s ability to transform live production in a way that dramatically expands who and how video is produced and delivered,” said TVU’s Shen. “It’s what drives us to keep creating.”

The hesitancy from just a few years ago to shift to a cloud-based workflow has been replaced with urgency. The many improvements of a cloud production model became clear as COVID restrictions forced producers into a remote production model, Shen said. 

MALAGA, Spain—Tedial has announced that it will be introducing its new smartWork media integration platform at the 2022 NAB Show on Booth #C3036. 

Tedial has designed smartWork with an easy-to-use toolset that distills complex workflows into simplified processes resulting in unprecedented flexibility, seamless and effortless integrations, reduced costs, enhanced team collaboration, improved profitability, accelerated growth and dramatically shorter delivery times, the company said. 

“smartWork is the result of more than 20 years of experience designing and implementing workflows and integrations for the M&E industry,” explained Julian Fernandez-Campon, Tedial’s CTO. “Its no-code architecture will revolutionize productivity for non-technical users, and because it follows Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) it can be deployed on-premises, on any cloud or in a hybrid architecture for incredible flexibility. We are delighted to be heading back to NAB 2022 with this important launch, which will transform the way media companies and content owners manage their media, speeding up the digital transformation.”

smartWork has been created to democratize business processes, empowering users to define integrations autonomously - without vendor participation - and create workflows in a flexible and agile manner. 

Aligned with Movielabs’ 2030 Vision for Media Creation, the platform removes time-consuming and complex configurations via a common User Interface that guarantees an optimal user experience and easy access to all applications, external systems (including any legacy MAM), and features self-validation. Users are free to concentrate on creativity and can make the data-driven decisions necessary to quickly adapt to market or supply changes.  

smartWork’s unique approach is built upon a common interface and a common data model so applications and systems are integrated within the platform as opposed to the platform integrated into the applications, the company noted. 

This major change simplifies workflow design, as the workflows needn’t be aware of the specific APIs and the data models of each component making it simple to swap integrations within an existing workflow. In addition, a common workspace allows the applications to go to the media and not the media delivered to the applications, which is key. A media abstraction layer is added so that workflows are not dependant on physical locations (on premises / cloud) providing an extra security layer, the company said. 

Tedial has designed smartWork natively with microservices and kubernetes to provide future proofing and scalability of both media operations and resources.  

Its easy-to-use no-code editor enhances flexibility and minimizes operational risk with built-in complexity abstraction and visual tools. A quick drag and drop tool enables anyone, even those without coding expertise or technical knowledge, to easily assemble and modify workflows, including integrations of external third-party systems, without vendor or specialist intervention. This leads to greater self-sufficiency with cost saving as well as speed to market benefits for the organization. 

smartWork integrates core Tedial modules such as the Company’s AST Augmented Storage Management and the new BPM for optimal functionality. Although it can be integrated with the Tedial EVO MAM, it can be integrated with other third-party MAM solutions as well to guarantee business continuity and leverage the use of already deployed MAM systems with new features and services. Additionally, it provides a selection of pre-built processes and building blocks that address the most common media workflows (Ingest, Delivery, Exchange, AI Enrichment, Playout, Localization, Live, Migration) and new trends (UHD/HDR contents and packages like IMF, among others), the company said. 

LONDON—Media and entertainment enterprises are seeking automation to drive efficiencies with artificial intelligence and machine learning the technology keys. In a post-pandemic world where a remote and distributed work model is the new norm, AI engines could come into their own. 

“We’re at the beginning of a golden age of AI and ML,” says Hiren Hindocha, cofounder, president & CEO at Digital Nirvana, a Fremont, Calif.-based developer of media compliance technology. “The use in media is tremendous. It makes content searchable and translatable into multiple languages, allowing content to be consumed by users anywhere.” 

Others strike a note of caution. “AI/ML is working and has not led to the mass layoffs that some feared,” says Tom Sahara, former vice president of operations and technology for Turner Sports. “But nor has it reduced budgets by a huge percentage.” 

Julian Fernandez-Campon, CTO of Tedial, agrees, “AI/ML has become a ‘must-have’ feature across all technologies but we have to be quite cautious about the practical application of them. They’ve proved good results in some scenarios but in reality, broadcasters are not getting big benefits right now. Being able to test and select the proper AI/ML tool quickly and cost-effectively will definitely help adoption.” 

Roy Burns, vice president of media solutions at Integrated Media Technologies, a Los Angeles-based systems integrator, says customers are confused about what AI/ML is or what they want to do with it; “We have to explain, it’s not a magic bullet.” 

SPEECH TO TEXT

The key benefit and one ready for general operation today is captioning. Live speech-to-text quality is rapidly improving, leading to the possibility of fully automatic, low-latency creation of subtitles. Dalet reports time savings of up to 80% in delivering subtitled content for news and digital publishing. Additional ML capabilities allow systems to properly segment and layout captions to increase readability and compliance with subtitling guidelines. 

“Speech-to-text translation is probably most mature where there’s about a 90% confidence rate,” says Burns. “For some people that’s good enough but for others making an embarrassing mistake is still too risky. 

“It’s important to understand that the output of object or facial recognition tools are not human readable,” he adds. “They are designed to give a ton of metadata about the asset but to correlate it against your media you need a MAM [media asset management]. That’s what I try to explain—if you can ingest AI outputs to a MAM and correlate against a central database of record that is what is going to make it searchable.” 

Hearst Television has adapted its MAM with Prime Focus for automation of file management of commercial spots. Joe Addalia, director of technology projects for the station group, explains, “We have hundreds of commercials coming into our systems every day. If we have to mark in and out each time and do a quality check we are not being efficient. Instead, the MAM automates this, harvests necessary metadata and supplies it downstream to playout. There’s no reason for an operator to go into the item.” 

Addalia emphasizes the importance of metadata. “You can have the most glorious 4K image you want but if you can’t find it you may as well not have it. AI/ML is about being able to find what you need as you need it.” 

Hearst’s internal description for this is “enabled media:” Metadata-enriched video, audio or stills content that Addalia says will advance the possibilities for new workflow and products. 

“On top of speech-to-text, automatic machine translation is nearing maturity to enable multilingual captioning scenarios,” says Michael Elhadad, director of R&D for Dalet. “The main obstacle is that standard machine translation models are not fully ready to translate captions out-of-the-box. Automatic machine translation is trained on fluent text, and when translating each segment into individual subtitles, the text is not fluent enough; standard models fail to produce adequate text.” 

The alternative method, which consists of merging together caption segments into longer chunks, leads to another challenge: How to segment back the translated chunk into aligned and well-timed segments?

“A specialized ML method must be developed to address this challenge and produce high-quality translated captions,” says Elhadad. “This remains an open challenge for the industry and something that we’re working on at our research lab.”

CURRENT USES OF AI/ML IN MEDIA  

Additionally, object and face recognition logged as metadata can assist scripting and video editing, specifically with a rough cut being automatically created based on given metadata fields, for example, creating highlights from keywords, objects, text-on-screen. Tedial has been using AI/ML tools for some customers in the automatic logging of legacy archives, to identify celebrities and OCR using AI tools.

A big pain point is “text collusion,” when onscreen text (perhaps indicating a place or date) overlaps with caption files. Files presented with this error will immediately fail the QC of all the big streamers, but detecting issues manually in every version permutation is not cost-effective. 

OwnZones offers a deep analysis platform to scan content and compare it against other media items like time text. “The AI analysis tool can find the location of onscreen graphics using OCR [optical character recognition] and with information from time text is able to detect a collision,” explains Peter Artmount, product director for the Los Angeles-based developer of media management distribution technology. “A failure report is automatically sent back to whoever did the localization work to fix captioning before sending on to OTT services.” 

Typically, it would take an hour or two to manually QC and flag issues per hour of content; OwnZones claims its AI does it in 15 minutes. 

Another common use case is scene detection for censorship. Artmont describes a scenario in which an episodic drama containing occasional profanity requires closed captions to be blurred out for transmission during daytime hours. 

“Typically, you have to store all the versions you create, eating up storage on-prem,” he says. “In our example, you are storing 300–400 GB per show, yet the only difference between each version is to 3–4 MB of frames. We apply our AI analysis to generate a (IMF-compliant) composition playlist from the content. By storing only the differences [scenes with bad words] from the original we can trim content by 46%, making storage far more efficient.” 

CURRENT USE OF AI/ML IN SPORTS

Sports is a greenfield where the use of AI can leverage production to generate more tailored content for a specific audience. “With the reduction in live events, the ability to monetize valuable content from years of archives is key,” says Elhadad. 

There are two principal applications: Indexing (tagging, transcription, classification and object/face recognition) of vast archives; and automatic highlight creation, event-driven automatic overlays and titling. 

Aviv Arnon, cofounder of WSC Sports, an Israeli-based developer of sports media production technology, says its platform is taking “dirty” production streams of a sport into its cloud-based platform where an AI/ML system breaks the game into hundreds of individual plays. The system applies a variety of algorithms to ID each clip, make it searchable, and to clip each with optimal start and end times and then gathers the results into video packages for publishing. 

“Our ML modules understand the particular patterns for how basketball is produced including replays, camera movement, scene changes,” Arnon said. “We have all those indicators mapped to automatically produce an entire game.” 

He says sports leagues need to scale their content operations by packaging different clips to social media and other websites and that AI is the only way to do so rapidly. 

“I can’t say it’s 100% accurate but 99% is too low,” he said. “A better question might be, ‘if I had a manual editor would they have clipped it a second shorter or longer?’ It’s not about the veracity of the content. There’s no doubt it has helped speed up the process by allowing an operator to handle a lot of content in a short amount of time.” 

Elhadad explains that indexing is collected frame by frame (e.g., a frame contains the face or the jersey of a known player), but search results should be presented as clips (coherent segments where clues collected from subsequent frames are aggregated into meaningful classification). 

“While descriptive standards exist to capture the nature of such aggregation (MPEG-7), the industry has not yet produced methods to predict such aggregation in an effective manner.”

SMPTE DEVELOPING AI/ML BEST PRACTICES

Work is under way in this area. SMPTE is working with the ETC@USC’s AI & Neuroscience in Media Project to help the media community better understand the scope of the AI technology. 

“AI is promising but it’s an amorphous set of technologies,” says project director Yves Bergquist, noting that a quarter of organizations report over a 50% failure rate in their AI initiatives. Consultancy Deloitte also found that half of media organizations report major shortages of AI talent. 

“There are a lot of challenges around data quality, formats, privacy, ontologies and how to deploy AI/ML models in enterprise,” Bergquist says. “AI/ML is experimental and expensive and there are duplications across the industry. 

“We think there are strong opportunities for interoperability throughout the media industry,” he adds. “Not everything has to be in the form of standards. We also want to share best practices.” 

The task force is made up of about 40 members including Sony Pictures, WarnerMedia and Adobe. Research is focused on data and ontologies, AI ethics, platform performance and interoperability, and organizational and cultural integration. “That last topic is the most important and least understood challenge,” Addalia says. “It speaks to the ability of an organization to create an awareness and understanding of what AI is and is not, how to interpret its output, how to understand the data.” 

The task force is “expecting to make a substantial contribution in the area of suggesting best practices in terms of creating a culture of analytics,” he said. 

Addalia agrees that no single tech provider can do it all. “TV is a cottage industry,” he said. “We have to use our collective resources properly so we can leapfrog into next-gen where we have automated workflows. This requires cross-industry collaboration. Vendors must work together.” 

There’s also an onus on end users to provide feedback, Addalia added. “They need to define the use case and the desired results,” he said. 

Muralidhar Sridhar, vice president of AI/ ML products at Prime Focus says M&E needs specific treatment and that ready-made AI engines have not transformed the industry. 

Human-like comparison of video masters, transcription for subtitling and captions, AI-based QC, reconformance of a source from a master, automatic retiming of pre- and post-edit masters are all important use cases, he says, provided the AI can be made to understand the nuances. 

“The problem is that while most AI engines try to augment content analysis, the ability to accurately address nuances is not easy to match,” he said. “Marking segments like cards, slates and montages takes time and cost. It needs 100% accuracy and 100% frame accuracy." 

Prime Focus’ prescription for clients like Star India, Hotstar and Hearst Television is to combine computer vision techniques with neural networks where necessary then customize the solution for the customer. 

DEVELOPMENTS AHEAD

Higher accuracy and speed across all AI/ ML capabilities continues to advance. Fernandez-Campon advocates “Intelligent BPM,” where AI tools improve workflows by taking automatic decisions and focusing the work of operators on creative tasks. “That’s why it’s key to offer flexible and cost-effective AI/ML tools that can easily integrate into workflows and be swapped one for another,” he said. 

Dalet is working on a new approach to indexing faces and creating “private knowledge graphs” it thinks will speed up the process of cataloging large content archives and building libraries of local personalities for regional needs. Current technologies are not able to easily recognize faces throughout a historical archive, the company says. 

“Better context-aware speech transcription, more accurate tagging and smoother automatic editing will further reduce the need for manual, repetitive tasks,” says Elhadad. “AI/ML empower content producers and distributors to focus on higher value creative work. AI/ML is becoming pervasive: another tool in the box that users will find increasingly beneficial without the doom-laden ‘man vs. machine’ context.” 

LAS VEGAS—Tedial’s 2020 NAB Show portfolio will put the spotlight on a trio of enhancements the company is adding to its MAM platform. The new technologies include the SMARTLIVE sports and live events platform; the Hyper IMF system; and a Hybrid-Cloud architectural model.

SMARTLIVE has been integrated with Singular’s cloud-based technology to provide live graphic overlays. Graphics can now be inserted into the SMARTLIVE auto-generated EDL, reviewed in the player and then burned in when the EDL is flattened. SMARTLIVE can also now create transitions between EDL segments like fade ins/fade outs, mixes and wipes. Tedial will show SMARTLIVE at the NAB Show with AI Cloud technology that detects replay in live feeds, allowing SMARTLIVE to automatically complete a story, action or highlight with action replays.

Tedial’s Hyper IMF system has a number of new added features, including component-based assets with multiresolution MPEG-Dash streaming and end-to-end IMF workflows with third-party systems integrations. Tedial will use the NAB show to showcase Hyper IMF’s architecture by demonstrating a variety of deployment options like on local premises, in a public or private cloud with native S3 management or in a hybrid cloud. Hyper IMF also features an implementation of business rules that include late binding for IMP watermarking, employing a title centric view, the ability to automatically build packages related to a specific title or manage the delivery of package versions based on contractual business retention rules. The system can also work with Tedial’s Version Facotry.

The Hybrid-Cloud architecture from Tedial is based on the company’s aSTORM storage management platform and features a mixed computing storage and services environment that combines the privacy and security of a private cloud with the scalability of a public cloud. Features include an IT environment with multiple security layers; higher scalability; quick adaptation of new business requirements; increased operations flexibility; and improved quality through optimized bandwidth and lower latency.

Tedial will feature these technologies at its booth, SU5921, throughout the 2020 NAB Show, which takes place April 18-22 in Las Vegas.

For more information, visit www.tedial.com. 

NEW YORK—MAM specialist Tedial will show the latest enhancements for its media asset management platforms, including the addition of sports configurations for its SmartLive MAM, at the 2019 NAB Show New York, Oct. 16-17, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan.

The company will show SmartLive Multi Sport, an enhancement that makes it easy to add new sports configurations to the SmartLive MAM. Agnostic to all data feeds, the new feature makes it quick and easy to create highlights in a multisport environment without adding extra staff and equipment, the company said.

Another enhancement for SmartLive and the company’s Evolution MAM is a new module that allows content to be published to any social network with a single click, the company said.

The company also will showcase its new SmartLive bundled solution that can be deployed on top of a user’s existing production environment.

It also will highlight new features for the Tedial Version Factory, its IMF-compliant content assembly workflow. Updates include on-the-fly assembly of unique versions, including pre-, post- and mid-roll insertions, matching contractual distribution requirements for timely deliveries; and enabling IMF-compliant low-res proxy edits on media and templates, Tedial said.

Tedial also will show new features for its Evolution aStorm content management solution, which manages tiers across departments and multiple territories.

See Tedial at NAB Show New York booth N244.

More information is available on the Tedial website. 

MALAGA, Spain—MAM technology developer Tedial has announced the promotion of Julian Fernandez-Campon as the company’s new chief technology officer.

In the role of CTO, Fernandez-Campon will be tasked with overseeing research and development; operations and customer support; and to work closely with the chief sales & marketing officer and chief financial officer to align the company’s strategy with industry changes and market trends.

“Julian’s skill, talent and deep knowledge of the industry is reflected in the quality and success of our solutions,” said Emilio L. Zapata, Tedial CEO. “We are confident that the company will not only continue, but thrive as he assumes this leadership position, and our customers will benefit as he drives our technology to the next level.”

Fernandez-Campon, who has worked at Tedial since 2001, will take on the role of CTO effective immediately.

MALAGA, Spain—Tedial will unveil new features for its SmartLive sports and live events solution, including multi-sport configurations to support automatic highlight or auto clipping for any sports genre, during IBC 2019, Sept. 13-17, at the RAI in Amsterdam.

Agnostic to the type of data feed in use, Tedial’s metadata engine makes adding new system configurations easy when required. Another new feature added to SmartLive and the company’s Evolution MAM is a module that enables single-click publishing to any social media network.

The company also will showcase its partnership with Speechmatics and the integration of its Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) technology into SmartLive. With integrated ASR, SmartLive users can search for comments made during a sporting event, automatically create file locators, import a file or drop it into a watch folder and manually generate speech-to-text from the commentary track.

Tedial also will feature its SmartLive bundled solution that can be added quickly into a company’s existing production environment.

In addition, upgrades will be demonstrated for the Tedial Version Factory 2019, which supports input of millions of file inputs, transforming them to delivery configuration for distribution to multiple platforms from one operator screen. Among the updates are managing on-the-fly assembly of unique versions, matching contractual distribution requirements for timely deliveries and enabling IMF-compliant low-res proxy edits.

New features for its Evolution MAM to be shown at IBC 2019 include its Evolution aSTORM content management solution, which manages various tiers across departments, locations and in the cloud.

See Tedial at IBC 2019 Stand 8.B44.

More information is available on the Tedial website.

CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND—Speechmatics has incorporated its automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with Tedial’s live sport solution SMARTLIVE.

The technology partnership between the ASR company and the MAM specialist allows operators to search for comments made during a sporting match or live event, automatically create file locators and manually generate speech-to-text from a commentary track.

This eliminates the need for production teams to scale up, freeing them to create personalized stories while maximizing efficiency, output and profitability for broadcasters.

“We’re delighted to be partnered with Tedial in what is an exciting time for both companies,” said Ian Firth, VP products at Speechmatics. “Given the incredibly competitive nature of the marketplace in which they operate, both Tedial and its customers require the most accurate and efficient solutions, and we see this partnership as further testament to the quality of our product.”

Jérôme Wauthoz, VP products at Tedial, added: “The integration of Speechmatics’ technology reaffirms our commitment to deliver market-leading, cutting-edge MAM solutions. It’s a natural fit and we’re thrilled to welcome them to the fold.

“The beauty of technology like this is that this initial integration enables us to continue to benefit from further improvements in years to come. This is what machine learning is all about, and we look forward to continuing to work closely with Speechmatics to further enhance our solutions for an enriched customer experience in the weeks, months and years to come.”

MALAGA, Spain — Tedial, a provider of media and content management solutions, will be at IBC to showcase its live sport solution SMARTLIVE and its Hyper IMF end-to-end IMF platform. It will also bring Evolution aSTORM, its hybrid content management solution.

SmartLive, a live event solution for remote logging, PAM support and automated storytelling, leverages AI tools and provides compatibility with existing PAM systems such as EVS and SAM, the company said. Using a proprietary metadata engine, SmartLive automates media logging, clip creation and distribution, including social media pitches. Marrying AI to MAM, the company says SmartLive is capable of automating the event metadata ingest process and creating a production environment for teams, managing multicamera and multivenue feeds, providing multiple, instantaneous live searches to bring historical archives to live events, and automatically generating highlights and delivering them to digital platforms and social networks.

Tedial says that the Hyper IMF, an end-to-end MAM solution that supports IMF formats for ingest, archive and delivery, offers new features that improve the content delivery and management to nonlinear platforms by providing assembly-on-the-fly. Hyper IMF now includes automatic leader insertion, which incorporates all the elements required for each platform. Hyper IMF includes automatic localization based on delivery profile, enabling all credits and text insertions for every language required to be added automatically.

Evolution aSTORM, the company’s content management solution changes the storage paradigm from the traditional HSM approach (multitier vertical) to a true object-based storage environment (multisite, horizontal). aSTORM manages various storage tiers across departments and locations. The company says it allows users to adapt their investments when technology changes or when related storage costs decrease. aSTORM manages online, cloud and deep archive storage with complex algorithms based on customer-tailored business rules. It can virtualize file locations to enable multisite operations, cloud workflows and hybrid scenarios, offering an “augmented perception” of their physical location.

Demonstrations will be held throughout the show on Stand 8.B41. The IBC2018 show is Sept. 13–18, in Amsterdam. For more information or to register, visit www.ibc.org.

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

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

MALAGA, SPAIN—Effective immediately, Brian Hamblin is joining the team at Tedial as the company’s new director, media architecture, per a Tedial press release. Among Hamblin’s responsibilities will be defining solution guidelines to fulfill customer business requirements and educating customers in best-practices for broadcast and media operation/workflows.

Hamblin comes to Tedial after serving as the director of engineering at 20th Century Fox Film. Past stops also include leadership positions in post-production for feature films, television and visual effects.

Hamblin will be based in Los Angeles.

MALAGA, SPAIN—Jerome Wauthoz is coming on board with MAM technology provider Tedial in the role of vice president of products. Wauthoz will focus the Tedial development team on new products and services for the media and entertainment industry, as well as utilize strategic marketing, per Tedial’s official announcement.

Wauthoz comes to Tedial after more than 22 years at EVS Broadcast Equipment, where he began his career as a software engineer, then moving on to management-level positions, including R&D manager, product manager and market solutions manager. He most recently served as vice president of products with EVS.

Wauthoz will be based in Beligum.

AMSTERDAM—MAM technology system provider Tedial will use the IBC 2017 stage to showcase a range of its products, including its new Evolution Live Event Archive system.

Among the MAM tools that Tedial will display during IBC is the Evolution Version Factory. Part of the display will feature a demonstration of end-to-end Interoperable Master Format workflow that applies SMPTE standards to provide a SaaS cloud system for distribution applications. The Tedial architecture can also support UHD and HDR, provides adopters with multi-versioning support and can address late pending components for previous watermarked versions.

The Evolution Dashboard tools that will be on hand enable real-time monitoring of key performance indicators and reporting tools to measure business efficiency and capacity.

The company will also have its new level of Hierarchical Storage Management with Augmented Storage (AST). AST provides a storage system for cloud workflows and hybrid scenarios. AST can transparently manage the same content in multiple locations, automating task assignment and data transfers as needed.

Tedial’s support for cloud and cloud hybrid operations now features multi-resolution MPEG-DASH for full web GUI and integrates to Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Adobe After Effects and Avid Media Central. Content is processed and moved independent of storage locale, enabling minimal transfers in local high-res operations.

In addition, Dan McConnell, managing director of Timeline Television, will be giving a presentation during the show that will discuss Tedial and EVS’ new technology partnership and the Evolution Live Event Archive. The presentation will take place Sept. 16 at 10 a.m. at Tedial’s booth, 8.B41.

MALAGA, SPAIN & SERAING, BELGIUM—Tedial and EVS have formed a technology partnership, with sights set on closing the gap between live and archive.

The companies stated that by teaming up, they’ll be able to create a bi-directional link between EVS’ live production asset management suite, IPDirector, and Tedial’s Evolution enterprise MAM system.

Available globally, the partners said that their joint solution “pairs the speed and reliability of EVS technology with the robust and secure nature of the Tedial system”, enabling live content created in the EVS environment to be automatically added to archive workflows managed by Tedial systems.

ITV Sport and Kuwait TV have become the first users to adopt the joint solution. Kuwait TV produces and broadcasts content across its eight TV channels and selected the joint EVS/Tedial solution to integrate into its long-term archive management system and its EVS IPDirector suite.

In addition, Timeline Television is the first facilities provider to select the EVS/Tedial integrated solution to deliver a five-year contract to provide a full digital archive service for ITV Sport. To support its live production workflow, replays, highlights and clips created using Timeline’s LSM and XT servers, will be delivered to the ITV Sport archive. The solution will be implemented as Timeline begins the process of migrating the existing ITV Sport archive and will also give multiple remote users the ability to access all archived media and associated metadata via a web platform.

“Because of the fast-turnaround production ITV Sport undertakes, we needed a MAM solution that was closely integrated with the live production workflow to most effectively deliver this archive management contract,” explained Daniel McDonnell, managing director at Timeline Television. “Being able to back up live content directly from the EVS environment into the Tedial MAM system will let our users operate with much better efficiency.”

This story originally appeared on TVT's sister publication TVB Europe. 

MALAGA, SPAIN—AMC Networks International Iberia is looking to takie the next step with its MAM system by upgrading to Tedial’s latest technology and workflow engine, the Tedial Evolution. The upgrade has future-proofed AMCNI Iberia’s workflows for 4K video, video on demand versioning requirements and extending the number of channels.

Among the new features that are available in the Tedial Evolution system is the use of Tedial’s Mediaset metadata handling capabilities to supply and automate management of additional subtitles and audio files. The unit has a BPM engine that is designed for media and is capable of executing millions of workflows.

AMCNI Iberia is a producer/distributer of 25 TV channels across Spain, with multiple sites in Madrid and Barcelona.

SYDNEY—WIN Network is a privately owned regional television network and Australia’s largest commercial network, reaching more than six million viewers across six states of Australia as well as the nation’s capital. We needed a MAM solution capable of pulling media files from all our remote locations, starting with Albury, Taralgon, Bendigo, Ballarat and Shepperton, to central HQ at Wollongong, where they would be edited and prepared for transmission.

The Tedial Evolution offers multiscreen, multiplatform operations to manage tasks on a number of devices.

THE PROCESS OF EVOLUTION

We began talking to Tedial at the 2015 NAB Show where we discussed the variety of options available for efficient file movement, transfer, storage and transcoding. We decided on a full Tedial Evolution media asset management solution and worked with them to create a workflow that brought footage from all across the eastern seaboard to Wollongong. The system was supplied and installed by Magna Systems and Engineering and deployed in May 2016.

Tedial Evolution is an enhanced version of Tedial’s Media IT platform. It significantly extends MAM functionality with advanced search and indexing tools, new services to surf and explore archives, and improved integration between archive and workflow engines to reinforce a collaborative environment. True multiscreen and multiplatform operations allow us to manage tasks, validate media or monitor workflow status from smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.

With the Tedial system in place, our news teams can shoot and edit a story, then add the metadata. From there they can send the story back to Wollongong via FileCatalyst fast file transfer where closed captions are added and the file is processed.

SYSTEM BENEFITS

An important benefit of the Tedial MAM is the ability to automate previous manual workflows. Tedial automates and manages the workflows, then the files are sent to HQ where, once approved, they go straight to Pebble Beach Neptune automation or through to the GV Ignite systems for studio automation and then on to the broadcast center for playout.

We can also view any part of the workflow, identify errors or “choke points,” and correct them in a flash. As a result, our workflows now run on a virtualized cluster.

As part of the overall MAM and news solution, the system included FileCatalyst fast data transfer, CaptionMaker closed captions and an Oracle SL3000 deep archiving solution. Our Tedial Evolution MAM system manages, automates and controls an Oracle SL3000 deep archive system, Telestream Vantage media processing platform, local disk storage, Telestream CaptionMaker, ENPS news files, Pebble Beach Systems Neptune automation, FileCatalyst data transfer and Nugen Audio correction.

Tedial is not just an effective working MAM system; it has been developed to be completely flexible and particularly scalable, which means it can grow and accommodate WIN Networks’ future needs without any custom development—a critically important advantage.

Stevan Djokic is general manager of television operations at WIN Network. He can be reached by visitingwww.wintv.com.au.

For more information, please visitwww.tedial.comorcontact@tedial.com.

MALAGA, SPAIN—Tedial’s Evolution media workflow is on its way to Norway to be installed by public service broadcaster NRK. The next-gen workflow is expected to provide NRK with multi-site Enterprise MAM, Capture Manager software and a designated Disaster Recovery facility for its Oslo headquarters, as well as 12 regional sites.

Tedial Evolution is designed to reinforce a collaborative working environment and drive workflows for linear, VOD and OTT services. It will do so for NRK by providing a configurable MAM that can be accessed by all NRK sites across the country. The Capture Manager software offers NRK a central interface for controlling and monitoring devices and advanced ingest features. Then the Disaster Recovery facility allows business continuity options to manage content replication and transfer to multiple sites.

The Tedial Evolution will be fully integrated with NRK’s existing metadata bank and third-party ecosystem.

TV TECHNOLOGY:What do you anticipate will be the most significant technology trend at the 2016 NAB Show?

Jay Batista

BATISTA: The industry is reaching an inflection point where OTT and VOD services outnumber linear broadcast viewings. Systems to support these new delivery platforms and UHD will drive the technology applications, and adapting these tools to cloud infrastructure, whether private or public will be key to leveraging innovations in the upcoming years.

TVT:What will be your most important product news?

BATISTA: Tedial will not only introduce our ground breaking Version Factory, the world’s first true media factory workflow, we have also been invited to deliver a technical paper about the technology at NAB Show. Version Factory is a single, efficient and cost-effective workflow that supports millions of file input-to-output configurations and can be managed from a single operator screen. Designed to interface to content management/rights management/traffic/work order systems for automated operations, the Version Factory stacks your chosen media engines (transcoders, quality control, DRM, CDN, etc.), employs SMPTE standardized designs for future-proof “N-input to N-output” operations, and provides the maximum flexibility and scalability for OTT/VOD platforms, network operations and media companies focused on managing their Brand across all distribution formats.

This innovative application is built upon our new Evolution BPM, the industry’s fastest and most flexible Business Process Management (BPMN 2.0-compliant) Workflow engine. Evolution BPM will be highlighted at the show as well. Benchmarked against leading industry workflow engines such as Bonitasoft and Activity and already deployed in sites around the world, Evolution BPM is clocked 17 times faster and scales linearly through platform additions, whether physical or virtual, with no limitations! Real-world statistics prove Evolution BPM can process 50,000 workflows in only 2.9 minutes on an average sized platform. We are very excited to share this new tool’s ability to provide a cost-effective and efficient foundation to business practices with attendees.

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

BATISTA: The Tedial Evolution BPM is the first media-centric BPMN 2.0-compliant software designed with scalability and speed as its core functionalities. The Version Factory is the next logical step in building a true media factory, which until now has only been a dream for network operators, service providers and brand managers for over 15 years. These innovations are a major breakthrough in cost-saving design, driving the current technology of multiple workflows in support of media format and configuration packages to a single system that can be fully automated through interconnection to existing back office systems and third-party tools.

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

BATISTA: The NAB Show offers a unique opportunity to meet with customers and prospects while networking with our technology and business partners. It is the best place to get an understanding of world trends in media and entertainment and provides a reliable and valuable venue to introduce our products and services to the broadcast marketplace.

NEW YORK—With the onset of 4K and higher-resolution video formats comes the inevitable impact on storage. By some accounts as much as 12 terabytes of content is being produced daily, and it has to be stored somewhere.

The cloud is increasingly becoming an option. Cisco’s annual Global Cloud Index report predicts cloud data centers could execute 78 percent of all IT workloads by 2018, compared to just 22 percent for traditional (on premise) data centers.

A GOOD TIME FOR TRANSITIONING?
Numerous broadcast vendors, as well as major players such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon offer off-site storage solutions where video can be transferred for longtime archiving and backup. With so many options, the time to make the transition to the cloud could be now, especially if existing hardware systems are due for an upgrade.

“For those operating on production systems that were installed in the 2007–09 timeframe, they are reaching the end of life, and now is the time to look to an infrastructure that is cloud-ready,” said Jay Batista, general manager of Tedial’s U.S. operations, a division of the Spanish-based provider of media asset management software.

The cloud can be used to archive content and also provide access as needed.

“This is a great time to look at your business,” Batista added. “If you are producing scripted programming and push it over to a distributor or syndicator the cloud offers a way to save daily raw cuts as well.”

Production facilities can also leverage the cloud and pump up the storage or ramp it down as needed for short-term storage said Batista, especially as there can be times when more media comes in due to peaks in a sports or news cycle.

Mike Palmer, vice president of business strategy at Masstech Innovations “For those looking at the news model or daily content that might need to be retrieved often, a privately hosted cloud service works best,” said Mike Palmer, vice president of business strategy at Masstech Innovations, a Markham, Ontario-based provider of digital media management systems. “It offers immediate access and the storage cost is low.”

It may be necessary to watch key performance indicators to determine when more or less cloud storage is needed in the short term.

“Those business analytics are available, and can be set up to measure traffic and how it corresponds to storage on the cloud,” said Batista. “It is this cyclical nature of business that will determine the best way to leverage the cloud.”

SEND AND FORGET
Although increasing file sizes could prompt more broadcasters and media companies to turn to the cloud for longterm archiving, the move is not without issues. In many cases the cloud could be a “send and forget” option primarily.

There are three main issues to consider when determining whether to archive to the cloud, according to Alex Grossman, vice president of media and entertainment at Quantum, a San Jose, Calif.-based provider of storage management systems.

“The first issue is how secure is the cloud, so that you know it is archived but won’t get touched by anyone,” Grossman explained, adding that content owners should be able to feel secure that the cloud is reliable. “Are multiple [backup] copies maintained and how do you prove that?” he asked. The only way to ensure that the content has been actually backed up is to do auditing by downloading it and that can cost money.

The third issue isn’t just that the content will be there but that the cloud provider will be as well.

“What happens if the cloud vendor opts out of the business?” Grossman asked. “This leads to how you might move the content to a new place. These are the things not so much to worry about, but to consider when moving content to the cloud.”

The biggest issue however could remain cost, especially as video production moves to 4K, where files truly put the “big” in big data.

“One aspect to keep in mind with the cloud is that this isn’t a onetime payment,” said Chris Luther, director of professional services at SGL Broadcast, a U.K.-based provider of archive and storage management software for post production, news, sports and government. “You are in fact paying for that storage every month forever. It might only be a fraction of a cent per file, but files larger than 2GB often have to be broken up, and consider that 4K is about a gigabyte a minute. So every production needs to be broken up into two-minute chunks. In many cases we are seeing that broadcasters may be expecting too much of the cloud at this time.”

Michelle Munson, CEO, AsperaON THE DOWNLOAD
What goes up to the cloud will need to be downloaded when needed, and this is another factor that has to be considered, especially as cloud facilities could be geographically far from a production facility. The cloud is only going to be as reliable as the infrastructure to transport that data over vast distances, and should the connection be slow or unreliable, the data can be difficult, even impossible, to download or otherwise access. This creates more pressure on available bandwidth, according to Michelle Munson, CEO of Aspera, an Emeryville, Calif.- based next-generation software technologies transport vendor.

“We’re seeing that volume has grown and that only serves to take more bandwidth on the pipe,” she said. “Today you need to move terabytes of data, and we are striving to make all storage equal, independent of location or the amount of any data.”

The size of the files remains that issue, for the up and download.

“It is a double problem,” said Colin Dixon, founder and chief analyst of nScreenMedia a research firm that covers online media. “Today’s video files are massive if they are uncompressed and this takes up a lot of bandwidth, but every time the file is needed it can take a long time to download it.”

The time it takes to download is the other half of the equation, as the content might be safely archived but not immediately accessible when it is needed.

“It can take a long time to get the content, so in many cases you need to plan around it,” said Savva Mueller, director of product management at Masstech Innovations.

PRIVATE OR PUBLIC?
Some of the issues surrounding cloud archiving can also be overcome by creating a private cloud as opposed to utilizing a public cloud-based solution from Amazon or Microsoft.

“Public [cloud] at a price per gig can add up, and that can be a hard model to justify for archiving,” said Palmer. “Local storage to your own cloud servers can be a larger upfront cost, but you own that [cloud server] forever.”

Such a solution could be hosted externally or in a company’s own data center, and could take advantage of the economy of scale. A lot of this depends entirely on the type of content that is being archived and when it might be needed.

“If you are looking at a news model then a privately hosted model could be better,” added Palmer. “There is immediate access and the storage cost is low.”

By contrast, for short-term storage with a finite amount of data, a public cloud could be the better option. Yet the public option does mean giving up some control.

“There are still a lot of execs out there who are worried about the cloud,” noted Tedial’s Batista. “The content may not be secured and that can be a problem.”

In some cases these concerns are magnified based on where the public cloud may be located.

“You don’t have control where the data is stored,” said Luther. “Why would anyone trust that their content might not end up on a server in China and be replicated even before it is officially released in America?”

For the coming year, Munson expects that demand for cloud storage will continue to grow, even as issues such as file size, security and cost need to be addressed.

“The use of cloud infrastructure will become more commonplace,” she said. “It is no longer an experiment. We are seeing the industry take techniques from high-performance computing and tie it to video production.”

NEW YORK—MAM technology specialist Tedial is set to take part in the upcoming CCW 2015, where it will showcase the latest developments for its media IT suite, the Tedial Evolution. This IT architecture provides a flexible, scalable system with integration for multi-site, multi-format, multi-platform organizations and Business Process Workflow. Tedial will highlight the latest developments of the Evolution that offers a new user experience to speed up manual and automate workflows.

Tedial Evolution

The first new feature is a true Object Relational Database. With the database, the Evolution features a new set of tools to manage group entities. The entities are then logged as assets, which can now be a repository for all shared information. Assets are categorized as members of multiple entities, according to their user needs.

The Evolution also features live logging; metadata cataloguing during live ingest. Single click operation has also been added to the system, offering a new HTML5 user interface with one button commands and multiscreen and multi-platform operations to manage tasks, validate media or monitor workflow status from mobile devices.

Tedial also announced it has implemented IMF schema within its MAM and workflow systems, as well as the AMWA FIMS AS-11 specifications.

CCW 2015 will take place Nov. 11-12 at the Javits Convention Center in New York. Tedial will be located at booth 757.