HITS

The winter edition of the “M&E Journal,” published by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and geared toward senior media and entertainment executives who oversee their companies’ digital futures, is now available online.

The 96-page publication features insights from two dozen MESA members, from Birlasoft to Sohonet, with the issue’s main focus centered on the tools, processes and technologies transforming the media and entertainment industry today and in the future.

Along with the cover section — “Intelligent Hollywood” — the publication tackles the latest New Workflows hitting in the industry, from back-office automation, to production in the cloud, to content financial solutions. Here’s what leaders from Applicaster, Entertainment Partners, Invenio Business Solutions, KlarisIP, Nuxeo and Wasabi had to say:

• Mark Cokes, VP of marketing for Applicaster, stresses that choosing a platform-based approach to developing and managing a direct-to-consumer (D2C) strategy addresses the main
challenges media companies face in reaching their audience across multiple platforms, requiring constant iteration to thrive in a world where the audience’s attention is constantly
challenged by new content, new entrants, and new technology.

• Mark Goldstein, president and CEO of Entertainment Partners, looks beyond the paperless benefits of modernization, and focuses on how automation actually minimizes risk. With exponential growth in content creation and internationalization of production and consumption, executives and producers are staring down a tsunami of complexity. Tightening privacy legislation, labor updates and scarce knowledgeable resources are creating a perfect storm amid which the rules of compliance shift daily. How is technology addressing the challenge?

• Kedar Patwardhan, global head of Invenio Business Solutions’ M&E business, looks at the options for M&E today in discovering the right content financials solutions, and how granular visibility into content production budgets, spending and cash flow is absolutely crucial.

• Ross French, senior director, and Alex Akers, manager of consulting for KlarisIP, discuss the rights and metadata agility imperative, and how digital distribution is creating more channels than ever for content exploitation. Media companies must ensure that both rights and descriptive data related to their content are effectively shared with their business teams through repeatable, reliable processes and tools that allow stakeholders to make timely decisions in exploiting the content and maximizing licensing revenue.

• Uri Kogan, VP of product marketing for Nuxeo, offers ideas on how to bridge the video production and distribution gap. Media companies have a myriad of different siloed systems that contain business-critical content and data, and these systems typically are not connected in an intelligent manner. But they can be.

• David Boland, director of product marketing for Wasabi, examines the cloud’s role in the future of media production. More video content is being produced than ever before and at higher resolutions and frame rates. This ballooning data load is overwhelming the capacities and economics of on-premises storage. Finding the balance between which data to keep local and which to store in the cloud is key to reduce cost and speed time to market.

Beginning Thursday, Feb. 6, look for stories from the winter edition of the “M&E Journal” every week in the “M&E Daily” newsletter.