Discovery

LAS VEGAS — Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) used the NAB Show to debut a suite of AI-led micro services, all custom-made for media and entertainment enterprises.

“Our AI-led micro services harness the collective power of machine wisdom, PFT’s AI and ML consulting expertise and CLEAR Media ERP application software to help sports and entertainment businesses explore new possibilities on the back of ‘data,’ save time, reduce cost, unlock new revenue opportunities, and deliver greater value to their viewers,” said Ramki Sankaranarayanan, founder and global CEO of Prime Focus Technologies. “Custom-made for M&E enterprises, CLEAR Vision Cloud will help drive automation across specific business use cases in the industry.”

Vision Cloud, a suite of micro-services tailored for M&E, is built on top of models available from Microsoft, IBM Watson, Google Vision and more, along with custom models developed by Prime Focus itself. The services include automatic content segmentation, thumbnail generation, scene description, and play-listing.

PFT also demonstrated a sports model for automatic metadata extraction, via multi-pass inferencing technology for action tracking.

While built for cricket, the capability can be extended for other sports, helping to facilitate automatic, In-app event notifications, configurable highlights and auto analytics.

“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,” Sankaranarayanan said. “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.”

Also at NAB:

Western Digital Goes Purple

Storage solutions firm Western Digital used the waning days of NAB to unveil a new surveillance-class storage solution, microSD card with high capacity, and capability for continuous high bit rate recording.

The Western Digital WD Purple SC QD312 Extreme Endurance microSD card is geared toward designers and manufacturers of AI-enabled security cameras, smart video surveillance and advanced edge devices that are used to capture and store video at higher bit rates.

With the migration to 4K and higher video resolutions, cameras need to be able to store both video and raw data to facilitate AI capabilities, which is why Western Digital debuted to WD Purple SC QD312 Extreme Endurance microSD card.

“The complex storage requirements of the growing security camera market are set to push the status quo with modern advanced edge and smart video devices. Surveillance customers look to durable and reliable devices with intelligent monitoring to save time and investments,” said Oded Sagee, senior director of devices for Western Digital. “With the microSD card introduced today, we are leveraging the power of 3D NAND to ensure no-compromise, primary, on-camera storage for high bit-rate video and advanced functionality for some of the latest AI-enabled smart cameras.”

SHIFT’s Uptake

The process of migrating three million existing Wiredrive users to the new SHIFT platform is well underway, according to SHIFT CEO Kai Pradel, and “the feedback has been great,” he said.

He touted how the company — which is a combination of MediaSilo and Wiredrive, and the umbrella brand for MediaSilo, Wiredrive, SafeStream and Screeners.com products — is seeing uptake of its desktop application, which is allowing for accelerated uploads, and easier log-in capabilities.

“Our tools for better metadata extraction and cloud-based AI services to search for files are seeing a lot of usage,” he said.

SHIFT was also the lead presenter of the April 7 Cybersecurity & Content Protection Summit during NAB, with Alex Nauda, CTO for SHIFT and Screeners.com, sharing how certain threats to pre-release content are often overlooked.