Connections

NEW YORK — Sony will be showcasing new end-to-end workflow solutions at NAB in Las Vegas that are designed to help its many professional customers thrive amid the rapidly changing media landscape, according to company executives.

There are “many changes happening in the media industries and our customers need to transform their operations,” Katsunori Yamanouchi, president of Sony’s Professional Solutions Americas (PSA) group, told reporters at a pre-NAB press briefing March 20, pointing to the company’s theme: “Powering Today. Transforming Tomorrow.”

The company’s customers can use Sony’s latest solutions for High Dynamic Range (HDR), 4K, IP and media workflow to help them transform their operations, he said. The Sony group’s “main focus” is on two areas: content value and workflow efficiency, he noted.

The “massive changes” taking place in the media sector include changing viewing behaviors in favor of mobile devices and streaming, he said, adding: “Our media customers [have] got to change also the way to distribute content.” In addition, there are “many new entrants in the media industry” that are arriving amid the “massive consolidation” being seen among existing players via “unprecedented merger and acquisition activity,” he said.

But there’s “two key elements” that remain “consistent” despite all the changes we’re seeing, he said. One of them is “content is always king,” he said, predicting “this will not be changed whatever happens,” he noted. The other element is that Sony’s customers are working to “transform their operation in a more efficient manner,” he said.

Noting that “Sony will always be known as a camera company,” as well as “a company that brings the best technology in hardware” to the market, Alex Rossi, PSA marketing manager, pointed out at the news briefing that its latest and greatest pro cameras will be “front and center” at its NAB booth. A massive video wall — 32 feet wide by 18 feet high — at the booth will showcase footage shot on Sony’s new 8K studio camera that will be used at the Tokyo Olympics in summer 2020, he told reporters. Sony will also heavily tout HDR workflow solutions.

Also touted at Sony’s NAB booth will be its latest pro audio devices and the booth was also arranged to showcase Sony’s workflow efficiency solutions, Rossi said. Sony’s latest over-the-top (OTT) and cloud computing solutions from its Media Solutions Division will be featured as well, he noted.

As part of a decision to “integrate even further with our consumer division this year,” there will also be a consumer Bravia TV area at the booth to “show off the best of the end result” of Sony’s pro solutions,” Rossi told reporters. The company was “tempted to bring” its 8K Bravia TV that was touted at CES, but decided that might have been “too much 8K and we didn’t want to give the wrong idea,” he said.

All the booth features were designed to stress that the company is “very much committed to bringing the full solution to the customer, and we’re going to be expressing that in great detail” at the Sony NAB news conference April 8 in Las Vegas, Rossi said.

John Studdert, VP of the group’s recently-created Media Solutions Division, reiterated that, “for years now, we’ve been building up this new Solutions Division, but with purpose-built products.”

Echoing comments he made when the company announced that new division last year, he said Sony “started to realize, with feedback from our customers,” that those customers “needed us to start connecting some” of those solutions because “they needed an end-to-end workflow around certain applications and, in certain cases, they needed us to also take it over,” either by a managed service or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approach.

The “good news” for the company was that “because of our presence with hardware within the broadcast and production community, we have really long-lasting relationships – many of them over 25 years,” and those customers had been “coming to us” and providing their “pain points,” Studdert said. So, Sony had been “building these solutions up with their input, so that they could better monetize the content that they have and drive the efficiencies out of the businesses as they need to do,” he said. In addition to cloud solutions, the Media Solutions Division has also developed automated workflows for companies that want to keep their workflows on-prem, he pointed out.

“This is the part of Sony that’s really changing,” Studdert said, adding: “Yes, we make great cameras and we’ll always make great cameras…. But to be in synch with our customers, we have to also help them with their business model because we need them to survive.”

Sony is hearing that production companies are under “tremendous pressure” from broadcast networks to lower production costs, Studdert went on to say. One way to reduce costs is to decrease the turnaround time from production to editing to airing, he said, noting that with Sony’s latest cameras, “we’re able to take the proxy file directly out of the camera, send it to” Sony’s Ci media cloud services unit and Ci will “automatically transcode that to the flavor that the editor wants” as part of an edit-ready proxy, and the content will be “automatically pulled down,” so the editor can start working on it, he said. This is just one way that Sony’s Media Solutions Division is helping its customers adapt and take advantage of the changing nature of today’s workflows for video content including reality TV shows, he said.