M+E Daily

By Chris Tribbey

The Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) asked its members attending the NAB Show to highlight what they offered at the annual confab. This is the second of three stories sharing their responses.

EMC Corp. may be holding off on sharing a lot of its latest news for its EMC World 2016 May 2-5 in Las Vegas, but that didn’t mean the company wasn’t holding out on everyone at the NAB Show. Tom Burns, CTO of EMC’s media and entertainment division, shared with MESA two major announcements at the show, one broad, one focused on a partnership.

First, EMC had several major media workflow enhancements geared toward content creators and delivery providers, and TV and sports broadcasters, covering 4K, IP-based broadcast and multi-platform delivery solutions. “At EMC, we believe the media industry is all about creating and delivering great stories,” Burns said. “To help media companies accomplish this, we continue to challenge the status quo of storage and solutions by leveraging next generation IT technologies.

“Our goal is to give our customers and partners a simple-to-manage, future-proof foundation for their business and workflows so that they can continue to adapt and transform in this rapidly evolving industry.”

On the 4K workflow front, EMC teamed up with Pixspan, Aspera and NVIDIA to announce a new uncompressed 4K solution for IT infrastructures, promising performance increases of 50-80% in storage and bandwidth. Imagine Communications and EMC announced a partnership that pairs Versio, Imagine’s cloud-capable channel playout solution, and EMC’s Isilon scale-out NAS storage system, to help broadcasters fulfill channel play-out “across geographically dispersed network operations.”

EMC also announced a partnership with Anevia, to provide a cloud DVR service for cloud-based multi-platform content delivery, for both telco and media companies.

Lastly, EMC joined the growing ranks of technology companies tapped by NBC Olympics to help with the upcoming summer games, with EMC and Presidio providing production data storage during the real-time digital broadcast. NBC Olympics will use EMC Isilon storage to deliver high-res images and uncompressed files for its live TV and online broadcasts.

“The flexibility and reliability of the EMC Isilon systems have provided NBC Olympics with a robust storage system which is extensible to meet the needs of today with an eye on tomorrow’s data growth,” said Timothy Canary, VP of engineering for NBC Sports Group. “We’re pleased with the agility of the product range as well as the architecture which allows seamless use across multiple continents.”

Dolby

It wasn’t a surprise to see Dolby tout both Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos at NAB Show … the company would be remiss if it didn’t wow attendees with its high-dynamic range and object-based sound solutions.

But for Giles Baker, SVP of the company’s Broadcast Business Group, the real takeaway from the NAB Show was the excitement among broadcasters for AC-4, a new audio format meant for next-gen video and audio services, including Internet streaming.

AC-4 has already been standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), adopted by the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB), and Dolby has partnerships with Vizio, Sony and TP Vision to incorporate Dolby AC-4 into TVs.

At NAB, Dolby announced another AC-4 partnership: Samsung Electronics, which will bring AC-4 enabled TVs to market in 2017. The inclusion of AC-4 will allow for broadcasters to easily include everything from alternate languages to services for the hearing-impaired, in one simple end-to-end format.

“Adding Samsung to the growing list of CE manufacturers, SOC providers, and professional partners that support Dolby AC-4 brings Dolby one step closer to offering consumers revolutionary personalized and immersive broadcast audio experiences,” Baker said.

Samsung Visual Display R&D team added in a statement: “With its excellent feature set and ease of implementation, it was logical to include Dolby AC-4 in our products now to ensure our customers have this new technology to support the upcoming ATSC 3.0 standard and other standards worldwide. The home entertainment landscape is ever-evolving, and we are excited to offer Dolby AC-4 as a next-generation audio solution for our customers.”

GrayMeta

At the NAB Show, metadata solutions company GrayMeta had already announced a new partnership with 3rdiQC, with the latter using GrayMeta’s MetaFarm to extract and analyze a quarter century worth of data. But GrayMeta wasn’t done.

The company followed up with another announcement: Crawford Media
Services had bought GrayMeta’s Iris software, for its media operations to manage digitization, asset management, post-production and more.

“We’ve been using GrayMeta’s reference media player since 2013,” said Steve Davis, CTO for Crawford Media Services. “We’re delighted that its successor, Iris, addresses today’s most pressing advances and problems in media operations — collaboration among parallel workflows, people interacting with automation, and an ever-increasing reliance on metadata to glue them all together.”

Iris can instantly tell Crawford’s operators whether media files are correct and to spec, and speeds up workflows by allowing Crawford’s operators to preserve any and all metadata that comes in. Iris is capable of playing any video and audio format on any computer, using any output method (DVI, HDMI, SDI etc.).

“Service providers like Crawford are the creative commons of the media industry, where the rubber hits the road,” said Mark Gray, president of GrayMeta. “Crawford has been a longtime thought leader in the archive, modern production and asset management spaces, and shares our commitment to the industry to treat data and metadata in the best possible way regardless of the equipment, software, automation and people who create them. With this purchase, Crawford is fulfilling the promise we had in mind for Iris.”

RSG Media

For John Curran, director of media analytics at RSG Media, the NAB Show was a great one. More and more, major cable networks are inquiring into the company’s new data-science driven promo planning and management system, Media Mantra.

“Unlike traditional systems, Media Mantra provides marketing teams unique insights and intelligence by discerning the best use of limited promo time and budget to meet campaign goals,” he said.

Media Mantra was created exclusively for programmers and marketing and research teams, using data science behavioral-based targeting and machine-learning algorithms, in order to make promos more effective. The offering identifies which viewers to target, how to target them, and where (in network, via sister-networks, or off-network).

The service measures the effectiveness of promotion campaigns, determines which shows and times are most effective for any specific show, tracks campaigns on a daily basis, and offers a cost and benefit analysis for both cross-channel and off-network promotion planning.