Exclusives

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — Screener web sites have become a staple in Hollywood, but – all too often – TV show and movie reviewers who use these sites have an absolutely miserable time using them and have made their opinions well-known via “mean tweets” and other forms of communication, according to Jared Vincenti, product manager at Boston-based secure video sharing tech company MediaSilo.

At the end of the day, content screener sites are important for networks to promote their new TV shows, but they’re “not really serving the end users very well,” he said May 25 at the HITS: Spring 2017 event.

To better understand what the main issues are, MediaSilo surveyed about 200 TV show critics and others who use screener sites. What the company found was that about 50% of those using the sites either missed a deadline or didn’t even bother to write a review of a program at all in some cases because of a technical issue at a screener site, he said, noting: “That’s a lot of wasted effort” by everybody involved.

About half of the reviewers polled had access to more than 20 screeners at a time, and that now means many different sites, each of them requiring user names and passwords, he said. That also means reviewers must use and remember multiple passwords because the sites tend to require different password elements, he told attendees. Also, not all the screener sites support all the browsers reviewers are using, and that creates a “huge fragmentation across the landscape,” he said.

Only 9% of the reviewers polled said they were satisfied with the screener sites and none of them said they were “very satisfied” with them, he said.

The three main problem areas that those polled cited were video playback and performance, “needing to juggle multiple logins and multiple standards” used by the sites, and a lack of compatible TV apps, he said.

There is a balance that is being done between “usability” and security when it comes to the screener site passwords, and “the usability is extremely low” right now in many cases, MediaSilo CTO Alex Nauda said. There’s also a major problem with security because many reviewers are sharing their passwords with other people who need to access the sites or storing them in an unsecure way.

MediaSilo would like to see more industrywide use of magic links, which are similar to password resets, Nauda went on to say, explaining that instead of entering a password at a site’s login page, the user enters an email address and a link is then sent to that email address to use. It’s not much different from single sign-on, he said.

One way to solve the problem of streamed content freezing at the screener sites every 10 seconds is for those maintaining the sites to combine their efforts and use fewer sites, he also said, adding that would create better service quality for users.

In a session called “Elegant Workflows for Intelligent Content,” Ian Cameron, VP of digital media at Expert System Enterprise, pointed out that Canadian media companies went through a round of “convergence” in the late 1990s because there was “fear in Canada that U.S. media [companies] were going to take over a lot of new media outlets” there. “As a result, what happened is that all the traditional forms of media — so publishing, broadcast, audio, digital — all merged [into] four companies,” he said.

One of the largest of those Canadian media companies is Rogers Media, which has multiple brands, Rachel Di Salle, its senior manager of content governance, said.

The company’s divisions had been “really siloed” off from each other and that had to change, she said, adding: “We sort of knocked those walls down to allow sharing to be really part of the mandate for us.” And “fostering” that sharing and “getting content into one centralized place has really been a focus and a goal for us” of late, she said, noting that Rogers turned to Expert System software for help on its “journey.”

“The beauty of this system” that’s offered by Expert System is that “when you run content through it, it will automate the process of tagging your content,” she said. Using an Expert System tool, Rogers built an easy-to-use thesaurus system that allows employees at the company who are searching for content to easily find any content from the company that can conceivably match the search term, she said, noting that not everybody uses the same word for similar types of content. She explained: “It does something that we have never seen before: it will give you a term and then it will give you alternate labels” that are similar to that term.

One key takeaway from the session was the importance of metadata in automating processes and workflows, and that using semantic enrichment tools is a key first step to adding intelligence to a company’s content for improved search and discoverability.

In the session “The Last Piece of the Puzzle: A Singular Vision Worth Embracing,” Andy Shenkler, chief solutions and technology officer at Sony DADC New Media Solutions (Sony DADC NMS), argued in favor of a business model where everybody can source content from a single repository geographically distributed to facilitate secure multi-channel distribution within a secure environment and predictable costs.

“We shut down all of our data centers globally and moved everything” — including rights management and mass distribution — to Amazon Web Services, Shenkler pointed out. Having all that data in the cloud now has “allowed us to get incredibly fast in our ability to turn things around” for clients, he said, noting “99 percent of everything that we deliver today is delivered the same day as it’s requested.” In the past, it sometimes took as many as five days to deliver on a service request, and in stark contrast, Sony DADC is now able to deliver playable content to some clients in only 24 minutes after a request is made, he said.

“As an industry, we need to fundamentally shift because the challenges that we’re encountering now are no longer technical – they’re emotional,” he went on to say. He added: “We run into the problem where we’re engaged with people who just simply can’t get past the way they’ve been doing something for 20 years.”

HITS: Spring is the largest gathering of the L.A. entertainment community’s most senior IT executives and technologists. More than 500 people attended HITS: Spring on May 25 at the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Los Angeles. Produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), in partnership with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), and the Smart Content Council, HITS: Spring is presented by Entertainment Partners, with sponsorship by Box, TiVo, Avanade, Amazon Web Services, Expert System, IBM, MarkLogic, MediaSilo, Microsoft Azure, Composite Apps, Deluxe, EIDR, HGST, SAS, Sohonet, Sony DADC NMS, Zaszou IT Consulting and Ooyala.

For more information visit HollywoodITSummit.com.