Exclusives

LAS VEGAS — Members of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) brought a variety of new offerings to the annual NAB Show, covering digital asset management offerings, cloud solutions, security and content protection technologies, and more.

Here’s a look at what AlterMedia, Advantage Video Systems (AVS) and Digital Bedrock had to share.

AlterMedia

AlterMedia is touting its new release Studio Suite 12 at the NAB Show. Demonstrating it for MESA, Joel Stoner, the company’s CEO, founder and owner, called 12 a “ground up rebuild” of the company’s application, built for the browser.

Studio Suite has been on the market for more than 20 years and the company has customers in 55 countries around the world, he said.

With the rebuild, the company decided to “focus it towards the web,” he said, noting “the primary access point is now the browser” rather than a desktop application. The rebuild launched in September and “most people love it,” he said, noting it features the most improvements ever made to a Studio Suite release. “We literally started over,” he said, noting that, among the most significant changes made to Studio Suite are its new look and the fact that it’s now a single file versus multiple ones, making it “much easier” for users to make modifications.

Studio Suite is studio and production management software that does full customer relationship management (CRM), equipment inventory and maintenance, budgeting/scheduling/tasks and project management, rates and invoices, basic MAM and “much more, targeted at any organization that produces content,” Stoner told MESA before the NAB Show, adding: “We integrate with” Quickbooks, Xero, Outlook/Google/Mac Calendars, Twillio, Box, DropBox and Google Docs.

As an NAB promotion, AlterMedia is offering 20% off the price of Studio Suite 12, Stoner said.

Advantage Video Systems

This is the 16th year in which Advantage Video Systems (AVS) has exhibited at the NAB Show, Jeffrey Stansfield, its president, CEO and owner, told MESA. One key development it’s touting this time is the new 6,000-square-foot studio and demo facility it opened in March in Van Nuys, California, he said.

“The idea of the facility is to create an environment where people can go and try out and demo equipment in a full working environment as opposed to going to a storefront … and having a camera sitting on a desktop or having a server in a rack that’s not connected to anything,” he explained. It’s designed to address “one of the biggest problems in the industry,” which is the fact that many professionals want to try new cameras, lighting and storage systems or other devices and new technology and services but can’t do so easily or in a cost-effective way, he said.

The new, larger studio in downtown L.A. that Stansfield talked about at NAB last year is temporarily closed for upgrades and should open in June or sooner, he said.

The company is also using this year’s NAB to talk about its Digital Asset Management (DAM) Team Building services (ATS-Asset Team Services), he said.
AVS is also planning to launch its own TV video channel and multiple video podcasts focused on a wide variety of subjects, including an entertainment and technology news show, he told MESA. Production already started on the podcasts and the company will “produce about 20 episodes before we go live, so that way we have a full year of content” out of the gate, he said.

Digital Bedrock

In its second NAB Show, Digital Bedrock is seeing a significant uptick in interest about its digital preservation services among attendees, according to Linda Tadic, founder and CEO of the Los Angeles-based company. “The word is getting out” now, she said.

It likely also helps that the company has a far more prime location on the show floor this time than it did in 2017, she said, noting Digital Bedrock was “way back … in the corner” of the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) South Hall last time.

The company’s database “already has over 2 million files in it” – probably about 2.3 million as of April 9, she told MESA. And “every single day, we’re adding like 100,000 files minimum” to the database, she said.

“Obsolescence factors are really a big concern that we’re hearing from people,” she also told MESA at the show. That’s “good for us because we’re already thinking of that” and can help customers overcome such issues, so they can access their content in the future, she said.

Digital Bedrock is demonstrating at NAB “how digital preservation is more than storage and backup,” according to Tadic. “We perform this complex work for clients so they can focus on creation, and sleep better at night knowing their valuable assets are secure and being monitored,” she told MESA ahead of the show.

The company’s clients include a major independent Emmy Award-winning studio, director Stephen Soderbergh, producers, film archives, distributors and educational institutions, she pointed out, adding that, at NAB, the company is demonstrating its “core applications.”
Digital Bedrock is also “describing the process of how we preserved” Soderbergh’s film “Logan Lucky,” and will continue on with his latest movie, “Unsane,” and future titles, she said.

The company recently announced an agreement with Soderbergh and his company Fingerprint Releasing, under which Digital Bedrock is preserving the digital masters for “Logan Lucky” and “Unsane.”

DAM Tour

MESA, on April 10, held its second 2018 NAB Show Digital Asset Management (DAM) tour, a nearly three-hour guided tour of nine MESA member companies in the media management provider space, across the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Mary Yurkovic, director of Smart Content for MESA, led a group of media and entertainment executives and content owners through the booths of Ooyala, Google Cloud, Globecast, IBM, Microsoft, Prime Focus Technologies and Qumulo. The stop at Microsoft’s booth also included presentations by Microsoft partners Teradici and GrayMeta. Each stop featured dedicated speakers sharing the latest with their asset management technologies.

“It’s speed-dating for digital asset management,” Yurkovic said of the tour. Like others taking part in the tour, she often joked about the name of the tour, telling those on the tour the booth number for the next stop if they wanted to get there on their own or they could “just follow the DAM signs.”