Connections

The Entertainment Supply Chain Academy (ESCA) was the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance’s (MESA) first brand, first community and the genesis for the Alliance, and its one-day events — hosted in cooperation with DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group — were the gathering point for efficiency experts looking to solve issues with the DVD supply chain, ending in the last 100 feet of physical distribution at retail.

For the Oct. 4 Hollywood Innovation & Technology Summit (HITS) Fall event, MESA asked their membership to submit ideas on presenting topics that embody ESCA and what efficiency or collaboration means in our industry’s digital future. The presentations made at HITS: Fall, across two-tracks, provided insight into blockchain, data governance, security, ontology and IT transformation which are all core principles for MESA’s mission and membership.

Here’s a brief look at what was presented:

• For “Post Production Pipelines on Google Cloud,” Todd Prives, product manager for Google Cloud, offered an overview of the core components of his company’s platform, covering computing, GPU, storage and networking, that comprise VFX workloads. He shared with attendees what VFX vendors such as Foundry (Athera) and Chaos Group (VRay Cloud) have built to run on the platform. Click here for audio of the presentation, and here for the Google Cloud slide deck.

• Thomas Stilling, head of product for Mediamorph, shared ideas on how to cater to today’s connected consumer by focusing on the data, in the presentation “A Hollywood Thriller: The Data Journey to Today’s Consumer.” Stilling looked at the key fundamentals and elements of a successful data journey for the business of content with anecdotes around workflows, and the potential for automation. Click here for audio of the presentation, and here for the Mediamorph slide deck.

• In “Give Your Ontology The Cognitive Diet It Deserves,” Ian Cameron, VP of digital media for Expert System, tackled the taxonomy and ontology needs of today’s high-performance applications, and how cognitive technology (specifically natural language processing) harvests the instances of object classes and relationships that occur in content, capturing the knowledge that makes (and keeps) ontologies healthy. Click here for audio of the presentation, and here for the Expert System slide deck.

• Jules Urbach, co-founder and CEO of OTOY, made the case for GPU cloud rendering, which is increasingly becoming standard in media and entertainment industry workflows, thanks to dramatic increases in GPU performance over the past decade (including the release of the first commercially available ray tracing GPUs in 2018), in the presentation “RNDR: A Decentralized GPU Cloud for Next-Generation Blockchain Media.” Urbach’s session looked at the economies of scale and revolutionary production efficiencies that a decentralized GPU cloud provides. Click here for audio of the presentation, and here for the OTOY slide deck.

• In the presentation “Automated Content Protection, Analytics and Monetization Across Social Platforms,” Eyal Arad, CEO of Videocites, explored automated machine-learning and video-based content identification for the discovery of IP across all social and video platforms. Arad’s presentation tackled three topics in particular: anti-piracy and monetization, social media viewership analytics, and storage optimization of large video databases. Click here for audio of the presentation, and here for the Videocites slide deck.

HITS Fall was sponsored by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Box, Ooyala, TiVo, Cognizant, DXC Technology, Gracenote, LiveTiles, ThinkAnalytics, Wasabi, Aspera, EIDR, MicroStrategy, the Trusted Partner Network, human-I-T, Zaszou IT Consulting, OnPrem Solution Partners, and Bob Gold & Associates, and was produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), in association with the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), the Smart Content Council and Women in Technology Hollywood (WiTH).