Exclusives

By Jeff Berman and Chris Tribbey –

This is the third of three stories previewing some of the new workflow solutions being showcased at this year’s NAB Show in Las Vegas. The first two previews can be read here and here.

Members of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) representing the workflow solutions space at the 2019 NAB Show discussed here include Sony, Teradici, ThinkAnalytics, Veritone, Verizon Digital Media Services, Vistex and ZOO Digital.

Here’s a quick look at what each company is bringing to the show:

Sony

Sony’s booth at NAB 2019 will feature a new area showcasing artificial intelligence-based video analytics, according to Alex Rossi, senior marketing manager for media products at Sony Electronics Professional Solutions of America.

Providing details on Sony’s booth during a pre-NAB press briefing March 13, he noted the company will also demonstrate its latest Alpha and Venice cameras, as well as tout 8K native and 8K upscaled video content on a 98-inch Sony Bravia display. That’s designed to state that, “while we are focusing on 4K HDR applications, we do have our sights firmly set on the future, which may not be too far in the distant future,” he said.

The new theme of the Sony Electronics Professional Solutions Americas (PSA) group, meanwhile, will be “Live Your Vision,” Katsunori Yamanouchi, the division’s outgoing president, disclosed.
Sony will focus on two “core values” areas at NAB this year: Workflow efficiency and content value, he said. To improve workflow efficiencies, Sony is using its intellectual property (IP), cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) and Intelligent Media Services, he said. On the content value side of the equation, Sony is focused on enriching content with resolution, High Dynamic Range (HDR), wide color gamut and high frame rate (HFR), he told reporters.

New Ci media cloud service features to be spotlighted at NAB include integrated AI, which Sony said eliminates costly manual logging and transcription processes, enhances discoverability and search ability, and instantly makes transcriptions available for curation. C11001

Teradici

Teradici will collaborate with several partners at NAB to showcase Cloud Access Software delivering editorial and VFX design workloads remotely from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and on-premises private data centers, according to Ziad Lammam, Teradici VP of product management and marketing.

“The focus will be our latest Cloud Access Software features – including performance enhancements, management and orchestration service and artist tablet devices – all remotely delivered from a multi-cloud environment,” he said. SL6717

ThinkAnalytics

At NAB, ThinkAnalytics will “showcase our content discovery, real-time viewer insights, and enhanced metadata solutions, which help our customers around the world boost engagement, reduce churn, and increase loyalty” and average revenue per user (ARPU) “by delivering personalized experiences at the right place and the right time for the viewer — driving the engagement economy,” said company CEO Gabriel Berger.

He added: “We will highlight two different customer use cases that utilize personalized experiences that are proven to boost engagement.” SU7525

Veritone

Veritone will use NAB to show off the main use cases for its Digital Media Hub, including monetization and access and delivery, with live simulations showing how it supports live event services offering, with a team working on site to ingest and tag content.

Digital Media Hub gives rights holders to ability offer secure, cloud-native global access to their content to stakeholders and monetize content via e-commerce functions. That combo gives rights holders a means to enrich metadata from host broadcasters in near-real time, making critical assets available for immediate delivery and monetization.

Also at NAB, Veritone Attribute and Veritone Content Licensing Services will also be featured. SU4324

Verizon Digital Media Services

Verizon Digital Media Services’ integrated platform will see new capabilities launched at NAB, including 4K encoding, multi-content delivery network availability, and closer integration with partners, the company announced April 1.

“VDMS has designed its platform with simplicity in mind, enabling content owners to more easily deliver the highest quality linear, live and on-demand video experiences to consumers,” said Ralf Jacob, president of Verizon Digital Media Services. “Traditional TV broadcasters have set the standard in high-quality video delivery but on the VDMS platform, uninterrupted streams with high-fidelity audio mean that any content owner or service provider can deliver the best big screen experience online, even in 4k.”

The top minds behind VDMS will be speaking during the week, starting April 8, when Darren Lepke, head of video product management, takes part in the panel “Best Practices for Video Packaging, Playback, and Low-Latency Delivery.” Iván Markman, chief business officer for Verizon Media, will be part of the April 8 panel “Media-Morphosis: The New Media Business Landscape,” while Mary Kay Evans, CMO for VDMS, will be on the April 9 panel “Equality and Diversity: All Talk, No Action?” Lastly, Jacob will be on hand for the April 10 discussion “How Broadcast Can Overcome OTT Challenges in 2019.” SU3605

Vistex

“Intellectual property rights are the lifeblood of content companies, and managing contracts, rights exploitation, revenue, and expenses in an increasingly complex consumer environment is creating challenges across the media and entertainment industry,” according to Amos Biegun, Vistex global head of rights & royalties.

“Vistex solutions provide a central hub for rights that enables aggregators to maximize the return on intellectual property, irrespective of format or business unit, as well as offering the ability to analyze results and collaborate internally enterprise-wide, and externally with partners and customers,” he said, adding:

“There is little doubt that content will remain ‘king.’ With more content being developed and consumed faster across so many more platforms, the industry is faced with ever-increasing volumes of data that needs to be aggregated and analyzed. By leveraging Vistex solutions, both licensees and licensors gain precise insights into content distribution, rights clearance, royalty audits, scheduling, payments and more.” Those solutions will be spotlighted at the company’s booth. N6214

ZOO Digital

ZOO Digital is bringing a number of new offerings to the 2019 NAB Show, including the launch of its ZOOstudio ecosystem, a service ecosystem that aims to simplify localization for content owners; increase vendor collaboration and reduce supply chain wastage.

Designed to address the challenges of OTT distribution, ZOOstudio provides content owners with a centralized system for ordering, tracking and managing all the services required to create localized content packages. ZOO’s collaborative approach sees services such as dubbing, subtitling, metadata localization and media processing delivered either by ZOO as the end-to-end vendor or in combination with clients’ other preferred global vendors.

The ZOOstudio ecosystem brings together ZOO’s existing, battle-tested platforms. It enables content owners to have all their vendors working together in one cloud system, with assets and reference materials shared between vendor workflows to increase efficiency and reduce duplication. With a single point of order and fulfillment, content owners are no longer required to track projects across multiple vendor-specific systems; ZOOstudio gives full visibility and live consolidated status reporting across all vendor production workflows.

“The time has come for service vendors to work together to support content owners to achieve their goals. In ZOOstudio, we have created the single ecosystem that clients need to centralize and manage their end-to-end services across all vendors,” said ZOO president Gordon Doran “Content owners will be able to share reference materials, assets and data across global workflows to simplify and speed up content distribution.”

Additionally, ZOO Digital will expand its cloud dubbing services through a global network of ZOO-enabled dubbing studios (ZEDS), with more than 50 in-territory ZEDS having joined the vendor’s cloud dubbing services network.

ZOO has created the ZEDS global network in direct response to the boom in demand for dubbing talent capacity from its content owner clients. ZEDS are highly reputable, independent dubbing studios located in key territories for distribution. ZOO Digital has trained each dubbing studio to use ZOOdubs, its industry-first and award-winning cloud-dubbing platform, in order to record and manage the dubbing process. This unique partnership approach means that ZOO can work with any studio across the world with the right credentials. It enables coverage with a far wider talent pool than if the provider were to rely on owner-operated studios.

Lastly, ZOO Digital will unveil cloud-dubbing innovations for faster time to market, including lip sync dubbing, casting and audio creation.

This next phase of refinement for the localization vendor’s award-winning cloud-dubbing service is in direct response to the huge pressures its clients face in the entertainment industry. This includes an industry-wide need for far more efficient ways to localize and prepare the most sought-after TV and movie content for expectant audiences around the world.

The first innovation assists with lip sync dubbing. The skill of matching the translated and dubbed audio with the actor’s lip movements on screen is notoriously labor-intensive. ZOO’s lip sync innovation cleverly analyses the script to identify where mouth movements could occur onscreen and shows them as a visual representation or viseme on the timeline.

Another innovation automatically converts text to speech to speed up the creation of audio description streams. The efficient production of audio offers content owners choice and flexibility when it comes to services such as audio description, especially when a TV or movie title needs to be launched quickly in a new market.

The third innovation is auto casting. This uses cloud software to automate a first stage of the casting process by efficiently matching the voice of dubbing artists with the original actor’s voice. This assists with casting sound-alike characters from ZOO’s extensive database and ensuring the quality of dubbed voiceovers. SL6024