Exclusives

For a dozen years now, there’s been a company in Burbank, Calif. that Hollywood’s biggest companies have trusted with everything from disc to digital, from 4K to high dynamic range (HDR).

My Eye Media handles quality assurance, technical analysis and testing of digital content for the biggest Hollywood studios, major TV broadcasters, and top streaming services, with 250,000 unique titles evaluated, 500,000 program hours analyzed, and 1,250,000 man hours of quality control logged.

The company’s CEO Michael Kadenacy sat down with the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) about how his company has evolved with the industry, the increasing needs of studios to restore, archive, encode and transcode content, and what’s next for the company.

MESA: My Eye Media has been around for more than a decade. Just in the last few years, how much has My Eye changed as a company, how has it grown and adapted to the changing needs of the industry?

Kadenacy: It’s been an amazing journey since we opened in 2004. In those days independent quality control companies didn’t have their own infrastructures.

The few that were around in those days sent operators to the labs where product had been manufactured and used those bays. We were the first to invest heavily into a technically equipped infrastructure.

That turned out to be disruptive in the best possible way. We could control our evaluation environment with much more precision and scheduling became efficient when we didn’t have to rely on another facility’s capacity.

In recent years we’ve consistently innovated, upgraded and expanded. We have a 20,000 square-foot digital facility, approaching 20 quality control [QC] bays, a machine room that boasts more than a petabyte of 16G fiber channel storage, a 10G fiber connection to One Wilshire, and direct fiber connections to several client systems.

We employ more than 150 people worldwide with offices in California, New York, Seoul and Tokyo. All that investment has had a direct effect on our success. We’ve been early adopters on nearly every new technology pertaining to home entertainment quality assurance.

MESA: What’s it like running an independently owned post-production today, especially considering the rapidly changing needs of content companies?

Kadenacy: Staying nimble is the key. When we need to purchase new equipment or hire people with new skill sets, we don’t need a committee meeting and corporate approval to make it happen.

Our decision-making speed has been a key advantage for us and continues to be as we expand.

MESA: In March, My Eye Media launched its Storefront Testing and Online Retail Monitoring (STORM) metadata monitoring platform for studios and content creators. What’s been the response thus far, and what does Storm do that competitors don’t offer?

Kadenacy: The response has been nothing short of phenomenal. It’s a fantastic new vertical for us, and it’s our fastest-growing department. We recently hired a senior level SaaS (software as a service) system engineer who is leading our efforts on STORM. And STORM is just the first of several new tools that we will be rolling out in the next 12 months.

One major point of differentiation that we can offer with STORM is the use of our worldwide distributed workforce. We have operators around the world that can not only monitor online retail sites in local time, but can also capture data from local set-top box (STB) VOD services. The content owners have received this enthusiastically.

Combining the metrics from both online, game console and STB VOD offerings allows us to provide a comprehensive picture.

Additionally our proprietary cloud-based automation for gathering data from multiple retail sites is innovative and robust.

MESA: Can My Eye Media share some of its favorite post-production success stories, where companies in the M&E space made especially good use of My Eye’s offerings?

Kadenacy: My Eye Media was one of the first vendors chosen by one of the largest OTT companies to handle quality control for them when they decided to outsource the evaluation of their streamed content.

Our ability to be extremely elastic in a space that deals with major volume was key to our success there. We’ve been able to scale globally utilizing a distributed workforce with boots on the ground in more than 20 countries.

MESA: Speak a bit about My Eye Media’s proprietary MEMFIS (My Eye Media Facility Information System) software system … how does MEMFIS allow content owners to ease the workflow of any given project?

Kadenacy: MEMFIS is our secret weapon! We evaluated several off-the-shelf facility management systems before embarking on the development our own. That turned out to be the right decision. We can spin up new tools, portals, reports and API integrations for our clients far quicker and at less expense than if we had chosen to contract with a third-party provider. From scheduling to billing to report generation, MEMFIS has streamlined our entire operation.

MESA: My Eye Media’s offerings cover digital film restoration, archiving, distribution, encoding and transcoding, pretty much the entire post-production lifecycle of content. Speak a bit about how the company stands out in each of these areas.

Kadenacy: Our core competency is technical analysis. And in building the infrastructure necessary to service the QA/QC requirements of the content owners, we also gained competency in many of the traditional post-production services being offered by the manufacturing labs. The difference for us is that we offer these services as a value add to our analysis services. If we find a problem in a master there is a very good chance we have the skill set to quickly fix the problem. That’s of great benefit to helping our clients meet required timelines.