M+E Connections

NEW YORK — Avid, Cisco and IBM were among the many members of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) that showcased their latest products and services at NAB Show New York Oct. 18-19 at Jacob Javits Convention Center.

Avid: Taking advantage of the decision to co-locate the Audio Engineering Society (AES) New York 2017 convention with NAB Show New York this year, Avid touted its latest offerings at both sides of the Javits Convention Center.

The latest news from Avid was on the AES side as the company announced a new version of Pro Tools that, it said, “empowers users to take on virtual reality” (VR) projects with Facebook 360 Spatial Workstation. The new version includes updates to integrated Dolby Atmos workflows and is “more powerful than ever for users at all levels,” providing Pro Tools First, Pro Tools and Pro Tools HD users with “new features and improvements that accelerate workflows and expand their creative toolsets,” Avid said in a news release.

Audio professionals working on VR projects can now produce immersive, full-sphere, surround sound content from start to finish in Pro Tools HD. Users can easily edit and mix audio in a 3D space with support for first-, second- and third-order Ambisonics (360-degree surround sound) formats across Pro Tools HD tracks and busses, and then output and deliver to the required formats for playback, it said.

On the NAB side, Avid turned the spotlight on several products it recently announced for media clients, including Media Composer First, a free, “full-featured” version of its video application for Mac and Windows computers. Since announcing it in July, there have been “over 60,000 downloads of it,” meaning Avid’s attracting new users, Alan Hoff, VP of market solutions, told MESA.

Cisco
Cisco focused on the latest developments for its IP Fabric for Media, which helps organizations migrate from a serial digital interface (SDI) router to an IP-based infrastructure.

“We are bringing in some new third-party controllers — specifically EVS’s S.CORE Master platform – as a top-level broadcast controller,” Frank Lavin, systems engineering manager for Cisco’s M&E Group, told MESA at the show.

Cisco also introduced border-leaf technology that he said “allows you to connect two fabrics that are geographically separate.” That’s handy in a place like New York City, where real estate is “very limited for a lot of our broadcast customers” and they “want to preserve the space for actual production” including camera crews and talent, explained Samira Panah, operations director.

A company can now use a location in New Jersey, where real estate is “much cheaper,” but you can still “provide the same functionality as if the equipment was residing” in New York City, she said.

IBM
IBM’s blockchain and Watson artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives were spotlighted by the company at NAB Show New York.

Blockchain can help solve major challenges facing the media and entertainment industry today, according to Peter Guglielmino, CTO of global M&E at IBM. Blockchain addresses several pain points the industry has been trying to solve, including challenges around digital rights management, he said during the panel “Making Blockchain Real for Media & Entertainment” Oct. 18. Benefits of blockchain include the ability to reduced transaction time from days to seconds, remove overhead and other costs, and reducing tampering, fraud and cybercrime, he said. “We can’t wait 24 hours or longer for a transaction to be committed,” he told attendees, adding: “We have to be able to make that happen much more quickly.”

Hyperledger, an open source business blockchain framework backed by IBM and other companies, was designed to serve as a foundation for developing blockchain applications or solutions with a modular architecture, according to the company. Hyperledger Fabric allows components such as consensus and membership services to be plug-and-play and also enables confidentiality and scalability in business environments, it said.

Executives heading the recently launched IBM Watson Media also discussed at the show how the company is bringing the cognitive power of Watson to video around the world. IBM Watson Media is a new suite of AI-powered solutions on the IBM Cloud that analyze images, video, language, sentiment and tone solving for “key industry challenges from compliance to advertising to search and discovery,” the company said. David Kulczar, senior product manager, also moderated the “Joining the Competitive OTT Landscape: How Not to Do It” panel Oct. 19.