HITS

By Jeff Berman and Chris Tribbey –

This is the first of two stories previewing some of the cloud solutions being showcased at this year’s NAB Show in Las Vegas. Members of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) representing the workflow solutions space at the 2019 NAB Show discussed here include Akamai, AWS, Caringo, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Prime Focus Technologies and Qumulo.

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

Akamai

Akamai’s cloud services offer powerful benefits for the enterprise, including greater productivity, enhanced efficiency, significant cost reductions and simplified IT management, enabling mobile services that employees increasingly use when accessing corporate data and applications. For enterprises looking to take advantage of everything that cloud services have to offer, Akamai provides a suite of solutions that simplify, protect and enhance the performance of web sites, web applications, media delivery and other cloud-based technologies.

The solutions are built on the Akamai Intelligent Platform, the world’s largest cloud-based platform for securely distributing and accelerating web content, enterprise applications and online video. SL3324

Amazon Web Services

AWS has a mountain of solutions ready to show off at the NAB Show,

Visitors to AWS’ booth will find demonstrations of advanced, cloud-based media and machine learning services, tackling all points of the media supply chain, with a specific spotlight on content creation, including the company’s “studio in the cloud” services supporting visual effects, animation, and editing workloads.

Studio in the Cloud helps eliminate geographical and capacity constraints via virtual workstations, cloud rendering, and storage for content creation, giving content creators the ability to scale their infrastructure, reduce rendering times, and enable collaboration worldwide.

One AWS innovation new to this year’s NAB is Media2Cloud, a framework for media archive ingest to the cloud. The serverless ingest offering that supports both production and archive migrations within one workflow, expanding and contracting to match processing needs around the creation of standardized assets and descriptive metadata.

Alex Dunlap, GM of AWS Elemental, will take part in the April 9 panel “Video Storytelling as a Service: How Cloud Helps Broadcasters Streamline and Become Go-to Digital Destinations,” while Hector Leano, industry marketing lead of M&E for AWS, will take part in the April 8 panel “The Future of Transportation.”

On April 9-10 at the Westgate, Amazon Web Services will hold a brand new AWS Workshop event, offering two days of hands-on labs and workshops, geared directly toward the media and entertainment crowd. SU2202

Caringo

At the NAB Show, Caringo will showcase the latest with its content-focused storage platform Swarm, which provides organizations secure access, distribution and long-term retention. With both S3 and NFS access to the same content, Swarm protects files at exabyte scale and enables streaming and longtail video-on-demand, centralized backup, distribution for collaboration and tape replacement, the company said.

Since last year’s NAB, Caringo has introduced a simple way for organizations to get started using Swarm by offering it on the Swarm Single Server Appliance. This new solution was designed to meet the needs of small- to medium-sized content-driven organizations, according to the company. The on-prem, S3-accessible, object-based storage device contains all the hardware and software organizations needed to keep archived content online, searchable, web-accessible and secure, it said. The device requires only one-quarter of the hardware of a typical object storage deployment and organizations can easily scale and add capacity as needed by simply plugging in another appliance, Caringo said.

With several storage experts planning to be on-hand at NAB, the Caringo team will showcase how Swarm can streamline workflows by enabling on-demand access from the archive, it said. The Caringo team will also show integration with widely used asset and content managers.

Caringo will also be featured at the JB&A Pre-NAB Technology Event on Saturday, April 6 and Sunday, April 7, which it said will be a must-stop event on everyone’s NAB itinerary for a jump-start on the new technologies that will be seen on the NAB Show floor. SL13310

Google Cloud

Google Cloud helps media and entertainment companies get their content to every corner of the globe, and available to users on demand, using massive infrastructure and a global network, running on the same secured infrastructure that powers Google. With the company’s solution, clients can render workloads at peak times, launch new applications, and live stream video to mass audiences.

John Honeycutt, VP of telecommunications for Google Cloud, will take part in the April 9 panel “The Evolution of Cloud in Media.” SU218, Wynn Salon – F

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure’s cloud storage solutions are geared toward offloading the heavy lifting associated with datacenter management, providing a range of solutions that include flexible, low-cost scalability. Everything from premium, secured disk storage for Azure Virtual Machines to “blob” storage (massively scalable object storage for any type of unstructured data) to LRS file storage (allowing for simple distributed, cross-platform file storage migration, without changing code) is made available.

Mark Miller, senior director of Azure Media & Entertainment at Microsoft, will take part in the April 9 panel “Leveraging SRT and Cloud Broadcast Services to Accelerate Production in the Azure Cloud,” and Azure is a sponsor of the April 7 Cybersecurity & Content Protection Summit, where Joel Sloss, senior lead of media and entertainment security for Microsoft Azure, will present “Get it to the Cloud (Evolving Your Edit Pipeline).” SL6717

Prime Focus Technologies

Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) will showcase the latest innovations in CLEAR Media ERP Suite, including automation-led solutions and proven managed services, at the upcoming NAB Show 2019. PFT’s latest solutions also include Vision Cloud, a host of AI-led micro services that are ready-to-deploy, offering automation and data to accelerate the adoption of AI within specific M&E business use cases.

“With Media ERP, our focus has always been to help M&E enterprises solve specific operational challenges through automation, on the back of ONE software. The latest additions to our solutions & services will continue to enhance automation for our customers, assisting them in their collective effort to manage supply chains, while reducing Total Cost of Operations,” said Ramki Sankaranarayanan, founder and global CEO, Prime Focus Technologies. “We’re particularly thrilled with the progress we’ve made on the AI/ML front with Vision Cloud, and we are extremely excited to be taking our AI-led micro services to the market for solving real business use cases.”

PFT’s patent pending Machine Wisdom technology, Vision Cloud, is a native media recognition AI engine that synthesizes and focuses on the most diverse & relevant annotations to deliver actionable search results that are meaningful and contextual. The engine’s ready to use AI-led micro services deliver automation and data to accelerate the adoption of AI within M&E businesses.

PFT’s transformational cloud-based solutions help media and entertainment (M&E) enterprises leverage automation to solve the key challenges they face in today’s multi-platform universe – from creation and acquisition to delivery and distribution. These solutions, combined with PFT’s wide array of technical and creative Managed Services will help customers drive automation-led efficiencies to achieve lower Total Cost of Operations (TCOP) and unlock new monetization opportunities. SL9605

Qumulo

“As the leader in Hybrid Cloud Storage, Qumulo will be announcing a major expansion” to its cloud offerings prior to NAB, according to Molly Presley, its global product marketing director. In its NAB booth, the company will demonstrate the industry’s first CloudStudio, “tools to automate and simplify file system analytics, and new performance advancements for intensive rendering and streaming workloads,” she said. SL12111