In this video Rob Tucker, CEO of Meta, discusses 5 problems that arise through bad data, 5 benefits of having great data and 5 steps that you can take to go from ‘awful’ to ‘great’.
Metadata Transformation: Six Steps to Success
Six steps to guide your business through a metadata transformation process to deliver world class entertainment experiences and become a future-proofed business.
In this paper we’re going to focus on Metadata in the context of the Media & Entertainment Industry and why it’s the most important thing you need to consider right now. We’re going to give you an outline of the steps you need to go through to get from where you are today, to where you need to be, to drive world class entertainment experiences.
Context
Most M&E companies are already well underway and at different stages with digital transformation initiatives. Whether you’re just starting your move to the cloud, or deploying a second or third generation cloud based value chain, most people have an idea about the systems that work for them, and they are going to deploy in their chain. This is unquestionably important - picking the right systems for your users and your business are critical decisions.
However, an area where a lot of companies struggle is having a clear strategy of exactly what metadata, attributes and values they will configure and pass across that chain. Where should the key assets of your business - the titles - be managed, and how and where should that title catalogue be enriched and with what attributes?
Unless you’re a brand new business, you’ll have legacy considerations, meaning catalogue data is managed and being enriched across a number of different systems, by different users, with different skills, methods, terminologies and governance processes - if there is any overall governance at all.
Meta Case Study • WarnerMedia Localisations
Meta worked closely with WarnerMedia to create the Meta Localisation Manager. This turbocharges localisation processes, helping to connect with global audiences.
WarnerMedia understands that localisation is about much more than just language. There are a myriad of social, political, and cultural idioms, as well as technical nuances and requirements, that all need to be considered when distributing content internationally. As a leading provider of high quality entertainment and trusted journalism, WarnerMedia has a rich history of pioneering technological innovation.
The Challenge
In 2018 Time Warner and AT&T merged to become the new entertainment giant: WarnerMedia. This merger was the catalyst for significant technological transformation within the newly consolidated group, and the announcement of the HBO Max streaming platform further signalled the intent to position the business as a leader in direct-to-consumer streaming entertainment.
SVP of International Operations for WarnerMedia, James Crossland, recognised an opportunity to replace legacy technology and help maximise the value of WarnerMedia’s immense catalogue. A complete overhaul of the International Supply Chain was begun, with best-inclass vendors meticulously reviewed & selected to support the newly defined business and its objectives.
WarnerMedia tasked Meta with housing their title catalogue in 2018, and shortly after, Meta went live with their content metadata platform, which was very well received by internal teams and users for its intuitiveness and ease of use.
The management of content localisation had historically been handled through multiple custom-built internal software solutions, spread across the organisation, so the decision was quickly made to start afresh. With Meta already housing the international title catalogue, the company became the natural candidate to handle the new localisation ordering & management processes.
In Conversation with Zorroa
In this IABM TV interview, Marc Stevens (CEO, Zorroa) gives an overview of Zorroa’s ML platform including who it’s built for, it’s common use cases, and how it is helping organizations solve challenges in the ML space.
2021 predictions – Never.no
Scott Davies (CEO, Never.no) gives his predictions for the Broadcast & Media Industry in 2021.
Object Storage for Preservation of Digital Video
To preserve digital video, you need the scalability, reliability, searchability and accessibility of Swarm object storage.
Every day more and more video is being produced—newsreels documenting historic events, epic series we binge watch, marvelous movies, documentaries and mocumentaries, DIY and product demos/promotion. There is an endless amount of video content that can be viewed with just a quick click.
Consider these statistics:
- Mobile video consumption rises by 100% every year. (Insivia)
- By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic — 15 times higher than it was in 2017. (Cisco)
- Users view more than 1 billion hours of video each day on YouTube. (YouTube)
Why Preserve Digital Video?
Preservation of digital assets often leads to longtail economic value for the owner, and video has become an increasingly important means of communication, education, entertainment and historical documentation.
The case for preserving digital content is clear, but what is not so clear is the best way to store those assets and how to retrieve them when needed.
How Should I Preserve Digital Video?
You should preserve digital video using a solution that gives you scalability, reliability, searchability and accessibility—and nothing does this better than object-based storage. With Caringo Swarm, scalability and reliability are in our DNA. And, we’ve specifically worked towards making sure that you can find (using our metadata search capabilities) and access your video files and even specific clips of video files (using Partial File Restore).
Where Can I Learn More About Storing Digital Video?
This month, we will host two live webinar events where you can learn more about storing digital video assets.
Bigger, Stronger, Faster: Digital Video Growth for 2021, Brews & Bytes episode 14
On January 21, join Eric Dey, Caringo Head of Product, Ben Canter, Caringo Global VP of Sales, and Adrian J Herrera, Caringo VP Marketing, as they discuss:
- Factors that will drive on-prem and cloud storage growth in the digital video market
- Different storage and content distribution requirements for M&E, Sports Video, Broadcasters, and VOD services
- Modern strategies for tiering video assets to increase storage cost-effectiveness
Register now to watch live or on demand.
Building a Complete, On-Prem Object Storage Solution, Tech Tuesday
On January 26, Chris Kehoe, Fujifilm Head of infrastructure Engineering, joins Ryan Meek, Caringo Principal Solutions Architect, and Jose Marcos, Caringo Sales Engineer to discuss how to build a complete, on-prem object storage solution with Caringo Swarm and FUJIFILM Object Archive.
Enhancing operational efficiencies for a leading Spanish media giant through AI-enabled multilingual translation, transcription, and closed captions
CLIENT
A major international entertainment company and the most extensive media enterprise in the Spanish-speaking world.
OVERVIEW
The explosion in OTT platforms has created new opportunities for traditional media companies to reach larger audiences worldwide. As a worldwide distributor of Spanish-language content, this organization is no exception – and the company now offers its programming on virtually every major OTT outlet.
BUSINESS CHALLENGES
With a massive archive of premium, high-demand content natively produced in Spanish, the company needed a faster and more efficient means of generating subtitles for archived content and then creating time-code-accurate sidecar files in English and other languages. Producers also required the ability to create captions automatically for new, original content. An essential requirement was the ability to output translated subtitles needed to conform to the global OTT platforms’ individual style guides on which the content would be distributed.
Previously, the media enterprise relied on a completely manual process by which bilingual personnel would listen to the content and create captions line by line. The company also needed a more efficient method for generating high-confidence Spanish transcriptions from the audio used as a base for creating translated captions.
SOLUTION
The media operation has drastically improved these workflows with Trance, Digital Nirvana’s AI-based, enterprise-grade, cloud-based platform for transcription, closed captioning, and translation. Trance has saved the technical team many hours occupied by manual translation tasks through automated, multilanguage caption generation. For example, Trance can generate closed captions for a typical one-hour program in under two hours – a process that could take a highly skilled translator up to 15 hours working manually.
In addition to generating Spanish closed captions automatically from the original audio, Trance then creates an English caption file. Users can see the Spanish and English captions in a single interface, each in a separate window, as they appear with the video. This makes it easy for operators to validate the captions’ quality and ensure that the English version captures the appropriate context. Trance uniquely preserves the frame-by-frame time codes from the original caption file, making the process of generating and delivering captions in additional languages even faster and more accurate.
For newly produced content, Trance’s STT engine applies advanced AI-based algorithms to generate a highly accurate transcription automatically. Since Trance can be configured to create transcripts in up to 25 languages, the company can meet OTT platforms’ requirements to deliver transcripts and captions in English and Spanish.
DIFFERENTIATORS
This robust media enterprise chose Digital Nirvana’s Trance over competing for captioning solutions based on the following unique capabilities:
- Ability to generate translations almost instantly using existing closed-caption files and then export new, publish-ready sidecar files for OTT platforms.
- A rapid turnaround time that is virtually unheard of in the captioning industry, with the ability to reduce the captioning time for a specific program from 15 hours to less than two.
- Features for maximum captioning efficiency and ease of use, such as preserving original time codes and applying them to new caption files, and the ability to view caption streams for multiple languages in a single interface.
How Content Delivery Networks Accelerate Dynamic Content?
Industry surveys show that if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, over 50% of users will terminate the visit. From social media to online shopping, the content we consume on the internet is becoming increasingly personalized, interactive, and dynamic. In this blog post, we are going to talk about how content delivery networks accelerate dynamic content.
Static v.s. Dynamic Content
There are generally two kinds of web content on the internet: static content and dynamic content. If you can still remember, back in the old days of the internet, most websites appear to be the same in front of everyone. Texts, pictures, links and videos won’t change based on your identity, behaviors or location. We call this static content. Nowadays, however, websites and applications leverage advanced analytical engines and AI-based algorithms to make sure each user is viewing personalized and customized content. When you shop in an online store, for example, the recommended items are dynamically displayed based on your browsing history and preferences. We call this type of content dynamic content. In a traditional sense, static content can be cached on an edge node and served close to the users but dynamic content cannot.
How CDN Accelerates Dynamic Content
So, how to make sure dynamic content does not become a bottleneck for website and application performance? What technologies can content delivery networks offer to accelerate the delivery of dynamic content?
In the first place, a CDN is a distributed edge network that can serve content from as close to the users as possible; it typically has a multi-tiered caching architecture within which technologies such as intelligent routing is used to increase content delivery efficiency.
For dynamic content, intelligent routing plays an important role in its acceleration. Specifically, content delivery networks intelligently monitor the running status of the whole distributed network and calculate the best routing for a certain delivery to ensure faster and more stable connection. True dynamic acceleration optimizes all parts of the route including first mile (origin to CDN), middle mile (within the CDN cloud) and last mile (CDN edge to user).
Another core technology in dynamic acceleration is TCP optimization. TCP is a communication protocol that can be used to connect devices to the internet. While TCP is known for accuracy and reliability, it trades off the speed. So we need to apply optimization technologies onto the transport layers that use TCP protocol to ensure optimal web performance. Advanced TCP optimization technology can help avoid Internet congestion, recover packet loss, and select optimized paths to deliver dynamic content to users.
Once the connection between origin server and the user is reliably established, pre-fetching can be done to optimize dynamic delivery even more. Prefetching is the loading of a resource before it is required to decrease the time waiting for that resource. With the arrival of HTTP/2, server push is available to send site assets to users before they’ve even asked for them. This helps to effectively accelerate rendering and decrease content loading time.
Nowadays, most web pages are a hybrid of dynamic and static content. Site operators increasingly prefer to deliver the entire site through a CDN to improve performance and to manage key components of each site experience. Whole-site delivery has different flavors at different vendors and differs by the efficiency of identifying static and dynamic content, and whether it applies dynamic acceleration techniques to the dynamic part or simply fetches from origin.
Future Trends
As you can see, modern services and applications require dynamic content to be effectively and efficiently delivered to a globally distributed audience. To respond to this trend, content delivery service providers are working on edge computing functions, advanced compression techniques and even new coding languages to increase delivery efficiency. With these technologies coupled with the robust CDN infrastructure in place, companies and organizations will be enabled for more powerful content innovations in the future.
To access more content related to cross-border content delivery, streaming best practices, edge security, and tech trends in Asia, please visit www.baishancloud.com for more information.
Back to the Future at 24i
This year, more than ever, most of us are looking forward to a new fresh start in the new year. I’m excited that 2021 sees me joining 24i as Sales Director Operator Solutions, responsible for driving the growth and momentum of a company I’ve been part of in the past!
Although I joined 24i just a few days ago at the start of January, I’m not new to the Amino Group. I was part of Amino’s sales team from 2006 to 2014. and was fortunate to have worked at Amino when it pioneered IPTV Set-top Boxes (STBs). Amino has been shaping the Pay-TV industry for decades, and helping leading brands expand their streaming businesses is a natural progression in my career journey.
I’ve been in the TV and video technology industry for over 20 years, holding senior sales roles for several key industry players. During my career, I have witnessed the transition from hardware to software and, more importantly, from on-premise to software-as-a-service (SaaS) infrastructure. I saw first-hand how the enthusiasm over the unlimited potential opened up by these ground-breaking developments was coupled with challenges for media organizations and SaaS vendors alike. There is a clear need for managed services to maximize reliability and efficiency during this transition, especially as many operators run complex hybrid architectures that leverage existing on-premise and newer cloud infrastructures.
I’ve been impressed how 24i’s industry-leading end-to-end solution delivers a turnkey multi-screen solution for Pay-TV operators and content providers. Our solution portfolio enables customers to benefit from managed services. Media companies can scale up as they grow their business by offering excellent OTT video user experiences across all devices. I have watched several industry players struggle to manage and monetize their content, and I appreciate the value that 24i’s ready-to-deploy software solutions adds. Operators and content providers can control their content management and unify the user experience with best-of-breed no-coding management tools, leading to unrivaled gains in time-to-market.
It is powerful to see Youfone, a joint Amino and 24i customer, deploying our end-to-end architecture platform, including Smart Apps and Smart Video, to launch the Netherlands’ first Android TV service. This deployment covered everything from content ingestion and encoding to customer care and content distribution. The project was ready to be launched in just five months, instead of the typical 12 to 18-month timeframe for a project of this complexity. This time-to-market cycle is phenomenal and shows the breadth and flexibility of the Amino and 24i solutions portfolio.
I’m also excited by 24i’s product innovation roadmap that demonstrates that the company will continue to invest in best-of-breed solutions for its customers. This thirst for continued innovation is complemented by a consistent execution strategy that delivers on the 24i vision. 24i knows very well that media organizations need scalable and agile solutions, and I’m looking forward to offering precisely that to operators and content providers.
As we all know, the world became a different place in 2020. I believe in the power of human connection, but while I cannot meet customers face-to-face right now, I’m looking forward to virtually meeting existing and future 24i customers.
This will be a fascinating year for the industry. I am looking forward to helping 24i build strong relationships and become a strategic partner that enables leading content companies to grow and enhance their streaming businesses.
Hot Topics in Tech: A Year of Brews & Bytes, Part 2
A look back at Brews & Bytes (B&B) webcasts on broader topics around storage, technology and the world in which we live
This week, we continue taking a look back at our year of Brews & Bytes (B&B) webcasts with a dive into the broader topics that address storage and technology. While most of these involved bringing in experts from partner companies, we also had a couple of episodes that featured our team in casual discussions.
Just Caringo Discussions
How Object Storage Can Help You in the Roaring 20s!
To kick off our series, AJ invited our CEO Tony Barbagallo and VP of Sales Ben Canter to talk about where storage is headed in the coming decade. Because, if you want to experiment, it is often best to start close to home. When these three get together, it is always an interesting discussion, and this was no exception.
Storage Trends to be Thankful For!
For our Thanksgiving episode, AJ was joined once again by Tony Barbagallo. This time, TW Cook, Caringo VP of Engineering & Support, rounded out the guest roster. The three of them took a few moments to reflect on how storage has evolved over the last decade and shared stories about times that organizations were thankful for their storage.
With a Little Help From Our Partners
On-Premises and Cloud Storage — Friends or Foes?
David Boland, Wasabi Director of Product Marketing, and Eric Dey, Caringo Director of Product, joined AJ for a lively debate regarding on-premises versus offsite/managed storage. If you’ve been debating whether you want to keep your data onsite or move it to the cloud, this is a good discussion to check out.
Using the CIA promise to protect data (…the other CIA)
We have many partners that we’ve worked with over the years, but Xenit has been a Caringo partner since almost the beginning. To discuss how to ensure the Confidentiality, Integrity & Accessibility (CIA) of data, AJ hosted Toon Geens, Xenit CEO, Ronny Timmermans, Xenit Managing Director, and Ryan Meek, Caringo Principal Solutions Engineer. Having joined Caringo in 2006 as a developer, Ryan worked closely with Xenit on some of their very first object storage implementations.
Everything Online: How Global Connectivity Benefits Our World
AJ and Tony were joined by Phillip Buckley-Mellor, Infrastructure Designer for BT Service Platforms, in this episode where they tackled a number of issues around trends in connectivity and services, as well as what information should be online, searchable and accessible.
Storing Data: When Does Dense Make Sense?
Scott Hamilton, WD Sr. Director of Product Management and Marketing joined AJ and Eric to discuss how organizations can keep pace with data growth by storing data more efficiently.
Looking Forward to 2021
We are looking forward to our first Brews & Bytes of 2021! The topic is Bigger, Stronger, Faster: Sports Video Growth for 2021 Doug Cole, LH Computers, Owner, and Jeffrey Lowe, Caringo Sales Manager, will join AJ to discuss the shifting paradigm from traditional online, offline, nearline and archive storage models to storage that can give sports video teams and broadcasters the capacity for bigger archives, stronger workflow models, and faster content delivery to go with their new budgets in 2021.
Register now to watch live January 21 or on demand.