HITS

LAS VEGAS – The big story for ZOO Digital at the 2017 NAB Show was the launch of ZOOdubs, which it says is the entertainment industry’s first cloud-based dubbing platform.

“Previously, we had an online subtitling system called ZOOsubs [and] we’ve adapted that” to now offer dubbing as well, Christopher Reilly, ZOO Digital VP of technical services, pointed out to the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) at the show.

“What we’re really trying to do is open up the dubbing space,” he said, explaining: “What we’ve had for a long, long time is a workflow management system tied to an online localization platform. And what we’ve always done for our customers is given them full access to that system, so they can see exactly where their projects are, review the content that we’ve created, download it [and] adapt it.”

With ZOOdubs, “we want to do the same thing with dubbing,” which has up until now been “a closed process where” dubbing studios typically dub movies and TV shows, but the work they’re doing is “not necessarily visible to the client,” he said.

Using ZOO’s online system, however, the company is allowing clients to record and collaborate during the dubbing process, while all the work being done with the content remains visible to them, he said.

One major trend that Reilly said he sees in the industry this year is “more and more content going to more and more locations” through an increasing number of platforms – “which is great for a company like us” that’s providing services for that content delivery. He pointed to the growing number of over-the-top (OTT) platforms that are delivering such content “in tons of territories,” and the information that must be captured for all that content.

He noted that ZOO also does “a lot of metadata capture, so when you’re watching a movie” the viewer can know exactly who is on screen, what they’re wearing and what they’re driving. “People just have this hunger for that fine-grain level of detail [about] what they’re watching,” he said.

Also at the NAB Show:

FilmTrack

The top story for FilmTrack at the show was the addition of Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality to its platform, which it said improves workflows and “provides a more secure way to authenticate users across multiple applications.” SSO enables organizations to better manage companywide applications, offers a heightened degree of security and allows IT departments to easily manage users and align with company policies to safeguard their businesses, it said.

As FilmTrack deals with “more and more enterprise clients,” SSO has become a “big piece of the puzzle” because user adoption becomes easier with it, Gary Davis, the company’s EVP of operations, told MESA at the show.

If every application that somebody is using requires a different user name and password, “you have issues with adoption, you have issues with management,” and there is “risk” on the security side of the equation also, he said. “We can provide an easier security matrix” for clients by using SSO, he noted.

Three FilmTrack clients have already started taking advantage of SSO as part of a beta integration test: Okta, Ping and Microsoft’s Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), Davis told us.

But “we have it structured, so we should be able to handle any partner,” he said. FilmTrack is “still maintaining our own security structure for those clients that don’t take advantage of the single sign-on,” he added.

Feedback from the initial clients using SSO has been good, he told us, noting: “It does what it’s supposed to do, which is what you want, right? It’s not the sexiest thing in the world, but it’s very functional.”

FilmTrack, meanwhile, is seeing “more eagerness and less trepidation about moving to” Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions among companies, he went on to say, adding it’s become “more acceptable and mainstream” than it was even a year ago.

Mediamorph

Mediamorph is “expanding our scope,” CEO Rob Gardos said, telling MESA at NAB that his company will be launching a Mediamorph Marketplace in the second half of this year. The Marketplace will initially target operators, he said, pointing out that, now, “generally, they’re using vendors to support the encoding of media, the enrichment of metadata, the trailers … all those pieces of the puzzle.” With the Marketplace,

Mediamorph will be “enabling distribution customers to centralize that because we’re sort of tracking everything” as content comes in, he said, adding this service is something that the company’s customers have been looking for.

At this year’s show, Mediamorph underscored its role in the M&E industry as a bridge connecting content providers and content platforms in the increasingly complex world of video distribution. Its cloud-based enterprise software and data management platform streamlines the content supply chain, helping companies manage deals and content rights, track content consumption, and enable data-driven decisions to maximize revenues.

“With the transition to digital and the transition to video on demand broadly across the entire ecosystem, and everybody merging and morphing and doing bits and pieces that they didn’t do 10 years ago, you’ve got this massive explosion of digital assets that are going everywhere,” Tim Rottach, Mediamorph VP of marketing and partnerships, told MESA at the show.

He added: “It started off slow, but it’s really multiplying and now there’s more revenue in digital, and so it’s more important” to companies, who want to be involved in more of it, but face the “challenge of managing the supply chain [with] all the different pieces.”