As head of content operations at global distributor Banijay Rights, Richard Clarke knows the importance of effective media operations management and the challenges arising from the industry’s ongoing migration to the cloud.
Greater than the sum of our parts
Almost six months after Take 1’s acquisition by Unicorn company, Verbit, Take 1 CEO, Louise Tapia, provides an insight into how the team is collaborating with their fellow media and entertainment sector specialists at sister company, VITAC, to provide end-to-end accessibility services.
Content Choice and Sustainability
In recent years, the choice of video services has multiplied, as large media organisations add a plus symbol to their established brands and roll out new platforms. In addition, many incumbents in the VOD space are now supplementing their main subscription models with AVOD options. In some cases, these ad-funded tiers will be differentiated with new content, but at the very least they will require new versions of the original media files with markers for ad insertion. Linear TV has not been left behind, evolving its offering with more content choice, and diversifying with themed FAST channels.
The Changing Face of Business Resilience
It’s almost a cliché to talk about how the last few years have changed live broadcasting.
Broadcasters kept going even though events were canceled, and companies like Dejero kept them on air producing great content. The need to shift working practices to distributed models where people could work from home came almost overnight.
We heard from many of our customers that they already had the capacity to handle remote workflows and connectivity with their existing Dejero solutions, but hadn’t had a reason to harness its full power until the pandemic.
From an overall business resilience perspective, we found these new ways of working provided new challenges and created a level of vigilance that we have never seen before. Resilience has always been a primary focus for broadcasters who demanded increasingly robust forms of business continuity to ensure they stay on air—or risk the loss of advertisers, audiences and, ultimately, revenue.
Spectra Logic: Spectra Vail
Spectra Vail® is a distributed multi-cloud data management software that unifies and simplifies data access, usage and protection across on-premises storage, multiple clouds and storage platforms. For media organizations managing digital assets in a distributed workflow, Spectra Vail software allows users to leverage on-premises applications and native cloud services no matter where content is created or stored, fostering collaboration by providing universal access to data in a single namespace and automating digital asset placement across multiple clouds and sites.
Object Matrix: MatrixStore
It is essential in any media workflow that assets are kept safe, yet accessible, at every step of the process. MatrixStore is a media-focused private and hybrid cloud-based solution, built on digital content governance and object storage, that enables media companies to better organise and share their archives. MatrixStore offers smooth and seamless integration with existing workflows as it is designed to work with multiple widely used third party solutions. This integration combined with the user-friendly interface means that users can find and access their content quickly, anytime, anywhere, helping to use their time to the greatest effect, getting their content delivered more quickly and maximising monetisation opportunities.
The University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin): Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE)
Researchers in UT-Austin’s LIVE (UT-LIVE), Directed by Professor Al Bovik, have singularly pioneered the use of visual neuroscience to create picture and video quality measurement and monitoring tools that control the quality and bandwidths of a large percentage of all streaming videos, television, and social media. Their breakthrough inventions include the iconic Structural Similarity (SSIM), Multi-scale SSIM (MS-SSIM), and Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) “reference” visual quality tools, which delivered dramatic leaps in performance when introduced, and are still dominant today. These tools are used today to control the quality of most streaming and social media pictures and videos in the US and beyond. Bovik and his team also disrupted the field by inventing the first accurate and practical “blind” visual quality models (BRISQUE and NIQE), using models of neuro-statistical distances, at the neural level, between distorted and distortion-free visual signals. These tools are also globally marketed and used in numerous industry applications, including inspection of streaming and social video uploads, control of cameras, and remote video transcoding in the Cloud.
FilmTrack: BaM Shortlist – Monetize
Accedo One: Hybrid Monetization for Video
Hybrid monetization has become a particularly hot topic as of late, fuelled primarily by macroeconomic uncertainty caused by major global events. Some of the big players, such as Netflix and Disney, have already announced the introduction of ad-funded tiers to supplement their existing subscription offerings. At the same time, reports show that an increasing number of users are willing to accept some advertising in return for lower subscription fees.
Vubiquity: BaM Shortlist – Manage
With growing consumer demand for content across an increasing array of platforms, territories and languages, suppliers are creating and localizing massive amounts of new content and resurfacing existing libraries. This immense content volume requires high-quality metadata for accurate and compelling content description to power search, discovery and recommendation.
