Business

NEW YORK — Sony has created a new Media Solutions Division within its Professional Solutions Americas (PSA) group to better meet demands for cloud services and take advantage of the enormous opportunities that the cloud provides, according to John Studdert, VP of the new division.

Sony’s been offering a wide range of media workflow solutions for several years, but they’ve been spread out across multiple parts of the company until now, he said during a Dec. 11 news briefing with reporters.

“We had these disparate groups that we had been building over the last several years,” offering “purpose-built” solutions for customers, he said, adding that in the past: “We saw an opportunity in the market, we went to solve that opportunity and then each of those businesses had been operating on their own.”

Sony “didn’t see a need for bringing the pieces together because we were solving a particular problem” in each case and “the marketplace wasn’t looking for much more than that,” he said.

But, in the past year, Sony has “really seen an acceptance of the cloud” — specifically the public cloud — that just wasn’t there a few short years ago, he explained, adding “the customers have changed and we’re changing with them.”

If Sony “had talked about this two years ago, the fear of moving content onto a public cloud was clear as day,” he told reporters, pointing to “some very famous technology icons in the market” who said they’d never trust the cloud. But a whole lot has changed in just a year and “almost every single large media company now is engaged in use in a public cloud for their content, so the acceptance has skyrocketed,” he said. One main reason for that change of heart is probably that those running the media companies realize that cloud security’s superior to what they could offer on premises, he said.

The consolidation of all the Sony media workflow technologies and its solutions capabilities into one organization will allows the company to work effectively with all types of customers, helping them anticipate, address and overcome their workflow challenges, the company said.

Sony’s already seen some initial success in combining some of its disparate workflow solutions, with various developers working together, Studdert told reporters. One “nice success” so far has been in the over-the-top (OTT) distribution space, he said, explaining: “We can now take content straight from one service” where it’s a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering and “move it straight out for distribution, and we’re talking to several customers about that now.” One key factor is that, “probably more than ever before, people are looking for global distribution of the content that they own and control,” he said.

The new division also intends to take advantage of growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) functionality, according to Studdert, who said “it’s going to be a big part” of its future plans and predicted “it’s going to be enormous.”

Already, the division is “heavily looking into” AI in the way it’s “aggregating content” and how it’s “smartly applying metadata to it,” Beth Anderson, head of business development, told reporters. AI can help “provide information associated with a file without a human being having to manually record the information in that file,” she noted.

There’s also “a lot of potential” seen by the division in providing capabilities including image recognition and machine learning, David Rosen, VP of cloud applications and services, said. Customers are “storing literally millions of assets with us right now and some have metadata, some don’t,” he said. Being able to go through all of a customer’s massive content library and asking if that customer would like image recognition added to all of it is a significant way to add value, he noted.

The Media Solutions Division recognizes that even the definition of who and what a “media customer” is has changed, expanding to include not just traditional broadcasters and production companies, but also multi-channel networks, OTT producers and video-on-demand (VOD) services, telecommunication brands and more, according to Sony.

The division “combines many of Sony’s technology resources designed to help media customers maximize, and monetize, content distribution, as well as drive efficiencies at every stage of the media production lifecycle — from content acquisition to distribution to archive,” the company said in a Dec. 13 news release.

Based on the unique needs of an organization, the use of just one or several of Sony’s solutions can “help streamline and automate workflows, freeing creative professionals from redundant or administrative tasks so they can focus on creating and monetizing compelling content,” Sony said. Those solutions can also “deliver budgetary relief, providing services that otherwise tie up capital and operating expenses,” it said.

“Media customers are faced with more challenges than ever before,” Studdert said in the announcement. “They need to deliver ‘anytime, anywhere’ to the ever increasing number of distribution platforms,” he said, adding: “The challenge our customers are faced with is to do all of this efficiently, effectively, with high quality, and with the same amount of people or, in many cases, fewer resources. At the same time, they need to reduce costs and eliminate redundancies. What we’re able to do now is provide a variety of solutions that meets the specific needs of our customers using our cloud and software solutions with a high degree of agility.”

The formation of the new division is the latest example of Sony’s efforts to “continually expand its professional solutions offerings, enhancing and developing options for real-time and non-real-time production” such as its XDCAM air, Media Backbone (MB) Hive, MB Navigator X, Memnon digitization and Ci cloud platform, all of which are now included under the new Media Solutions Division umbrella, it said.

Sony also bought broadcast automation software and services company Crispin Corp. in April, a move that Sony said at the time would help It offer new workflow application solutions in content distribution and management. The acquisition allowed Sony to add master control automation and asset management.

The recent addition of Ven.ue to the PSA family, meanwhile, added OTT and cloud-based content distribution and management capabilities, Sony noted. Crispin and Ven.ue are now under the Media Solutions Division umbrella also.

Sony solutions technologies are already helping customers achieve their goals, Studdert pointed out during the news briefing. Since 2014, together with its partners and Crispin, Sony has been running 24/7 master control for PBS through its Public Media Management (PMM) cloud-based service, he said. The PMM service addresses unique needs of local stations such as archiving content to the cloud or localized branding, and it continues to sign on more stations, Sony said.

In addition to its foundation offering digital supply chain solutions to a variety of global brands, Ven.ue is being used as the complete end-to-end managed service solution for Funimation Entertainment, providing a full OTT VOD service encompassing avails-based ordering, ingest, processing, delivery, native app development, subscription management, digital and physical commerce transactions, analytics and reporting, Sony said.

Sony solutions, including MB NavigatorX and Hive and the Ci cloud platform, are all in use by broadcasters, sports networks, financial services companies and universities, it said.

Sony has built application program interfaces (APIs) for more than 100 on-premise and cloud-based devices, and actively distributes to more than 1,400 platforms globally, it said. Its application solutions are developed to optimize the power of cloud processing and distribution, and Sony’s cloud collaborative tools are growing based on feedback from media customers, it said.

The Media Solutions Division is made up of about 200 people, including almost 100 developers, across North America, Sony said. Its management and national accounts teams are all professionals with diverse backgrounds in technology, news production, engineering, marketing and product and software development, according to the company.

Asked by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) if any of those 200 people making up the new division will have to move their offices to be under one physical roof, Studdert said “no” and joked: “I don’t even know in the future that we need a roof.”