Connections

While dozens of members of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) are at this week’s IBC conference in Amsterdam, announcing new technologies and new partnerships, Kaltura is going a different route. They’re announcing a new alliance.

The New York-based company announced Sept. 7 that it was launching the VR Alliance, with the goal of promoting an open virtual reality ecosystem with technology providers, app developers and OTT players. Geared toward how VR will operate in the OTT world, the alliance already has VR content and distribution company Inception, app company 24i, supply chain company Encompass and video tech company Harmonic on board.

At IBC, Kaltura and its partners in the alliance will be showing off a mix of 360 video and VR in the OTT space, along with a virtual reality store that’s currently in beta and will launch later this year.

“The opportunities for creating exciting, immersive viewing experiences for sports events, concerts and other types of content are endless, and also open up new monetization options. Our experience in helping customers negotiate their OTT journeys means that we are ideally placed, together with our ecosystem partners, to help them navigate the emerging VR landscape,” said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura co-founder, chairman and CEO.

Inception CEO Benny Arbel added: “VR is quickly becoming the best way for consumers to truly immerse themselves in new experiences. In addition to having some of the best VR content, the Inception app has the most cutting edge technology for viewing VR, and we are excited to work with Kaltura to provide this technology to OTT players.”

Here’s a quick look at what some of MESA’s other members are up to this week at IBC:

GrayMeta

Metadata mining gurus GrayMeta Sept. 7 announced a major partnership at IBC: the integration of GrayMeta technologies with Microsoft Azure will now enable users to search and find content in all Microsoft Office products, including network emails.

At IBC, GrayMeta will be showing off how the Azure integration into its metadata technologies helps offer a customized experience for entertainment and broadcast companies. At IBC, GrayMeta also launched its MetaFarm product, an automated metadata extraction management platform.

“Our use of Microsoft Azure delivers an advanced search toolset. By combining metadata and machine learning, users will now experience unprecedented productivity and employees can focus their newfound time on growing the business. As machine learning technologies rapidly evolve, new capabilities and avenues for productivity are being added everyday,” said Tim Stockhaus, CEO of GrayMeta.

At IBC, GrayMeta also announced that media industry veteran Josh Wiggins has joined the company as chief revenue officer.

“It is great to be joining GrayMeta at a time when it has developed its powerful platform to solve the industry’s metadata challenges,” Wiggins said. “Content owners need an increasing level of metadata sophistication to ensure swift and consistent search and discovery results as it has become clear that poor metadata planning and execution can damage revenue opportunities.”

NexGuard

It was a busy summer for forensic watermarking technology NexGuard.

Acquired by the Kudelski Group from Civolution in July, NexGuard is in charge of protecting more than $90 billion in content revenue for approximately 530 clients worldwide. And right around the time NexGuard was acquired, the company announced a new customer, with global content company ZEEL Entertainment Enterprises deploying its forensic watermarking system at its Mumbai facilities.

At IBC, NexGuard will be showing off its solutions for protecting content anywhere.

“Online piracy in India and worldwide is indeed a major threat for the overall media and entertainment industry. With P2P platforms and illegal re-streaming services flourishing in the subcontinent, we sensed a strong need to deploy solutions to protect our most important asset – our content,” said Sunil Buch, chief business officer for ZEEL. “Using NexGuard forensic watermarking, we can now trace the source of illegal copies of each video asset at any point of the content lifecycle. This enhances our content security by many folds, and above all, it acts as a powerful deterrent against piracy.”

Oracle

At IBC, Oracle will have several of its offerings on display, including its recently announced Oracle Data Cloud’s B2B Audience Solution, which supports account-based marketing at scale, covering 400 million-plus business users and a million addressable U.S. companies.

It’s believed to be the largest business-to-business (B2B) audience data marketplace, with the goal of making programmatic and data-driven B2B marketing easier.

“Our B2B audience solution is designed to provide the digital targeting flexibility and scale that B2B marketers need,” said Rob Holland, group VP of the Oracle Data Cloud. “Our account-based marketing backbone recognizes that effective digital B2B marketing should support a company’s sales goals by focusing on the accounts it is trying to reach.”

The solution integrates proprietary insights from Oracle BlueKai, Datalogix, and AddThis, and is boosted by strategic partnerships from leading B2B data providers Bombora, Dun & Bradstreet, FullContact, Gravy Analytics, HG Data, Infogroup, PlaceIQ, and TransUnion, along with predictive analytics from Leadspace.

Premiere Digital

In today’s content distribution environment the sheer volume of titles, retailers and territories can be daunting, and there’s no sign of that slowing down. Enter Premiere Digital’s Storefront Manager, which gives users the ability to analyze, manage, market and monetize content in a single system. Premiere Digital will put Storefront Manager front and center at IBC.

Storefront’s exception-based dashboard and filtering allows users to see what’s important and then act on it. Users can update and market availabilities to a globally interested audience via Facebook, determine if content is live where it should be at the price it wants and see how they stack up against the competition.

Also at IBC, Premiere Digital will show off its Portal system, which gives clients 100% visibility to what’s happening at all times, from order to delivery. iTunes, Netflix, Google Play and Microsoft all use Portal.

Premiere Digital is now in London to compliment facilities in Los Angeles and Bangalore.

Prime Focus Technologies

At IBC, Prime Focus Technologies will unveil upgrades to its Clear Media ERP, with additional templates for versioning automation and enhanced workflow for its Clear Broadcast Cloud; a new “Story Teller on Air” appliance feature that helps create stories from MAM/Archive for on-air playout in Clear Cloud MAM; new, scalable dynamic ad insertion features that embed SCTE-35 markers for non-scripted live streams in Clear Operations Cloud; and availability of DAX Production Cloud on Android devices.

“Empowering our customers to better manage changing consumer demands efficiently through latest technologies is our prime focus,” said Ramki Sankaranarayanan, founder and CEO of Prime Focus Technologies. “Whilst continuing to help companies virtualize the content supply chain, PFT is committed to addressing specific customer challenges at department level, with cutting-edge technology innovation. Our slew of industry-first product upgrades at IBC is a testimony to that.”

Prime Focus Technologies also announced that Netherlands-headquartered Television, Entertainment & Reality Network (TERN) channel INsight TV is now using the cloud-based Media ERP solution Clear, marking Prime Focus Technologies’ first 4K implementation.

Signiant

Signiant will be using its time at IBC to unveil product enhancements across its accelerated file transfer portfolio, each geared toward supporting media and entertainment companies’ ability to latch on to new technologies and respond quickly in today’s changing businesses world.

“We recognize that our customers are dealing with a high rate of change, while also facing pressure to reduce costs, optimize resource utilization and drive operational efficiency,” said Cory Bialowas, SVP of product management at Signiant. “Technological advances are always exciting, but they can’t just stand on their own merits in today’s business climate.

“There’s an imperative to innovate in ways that provide customers with tangible benefits in the near term and well into the future, so our resources are directed toward solving the industry’s most pressing problems — with the reward for Signiant being customer loyalty and an on-going dialogue with industry leaders.”

Signiant’s flagship Manager+Agents solution — which specializes in scheduled, system-to-system delivery of large data sets — now includes increased flexibility with local object storage support, including a new M+A interface to S3-compatible local object storage offerings covering NetApp, EMC ECS and IBM Cleversafe. Signiant SaaS Media Shuttle platform is also now easier to deploy at scale, with several Signiant companies replacing FTP altogether with Shuttle, thanks to an enhanced administration API.

Additionally, the library of supported file types for CloudSpeX has expanded to include QuickTime.

Sohonet

Before IBC kicks off, Sohonet got a jump on the action with a pre-IBC demo of its latest product, ClearView Flex, which allows for post-production editing and grading sessions in real-time, from anywhere.

ClearView is being touted as one of the more secure remote collaboration solutions out there, allowing for fast review and approval, with high-quality, real-time streaming via dedicated ClearView endpoint. It gives key creatives and production executives live, encrypted ClearView sessions, on any mobile device or PC.

Sony DADC New Media Solutions

Sony DADC New Media Solutions (NMS) will show off the abilities of its recently launched Ven.ue Unlimited. Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, the service offers secure streaming access to any type of content from Sony and others, using any format, for a flat monthly fee.

The managed distribution service aims to give broadcasters, aggregators and retailers access to more than a million hours of premium licensable content.

“We designed Ven.ue Unlimited to reduce total cost of ownership and time to market as well as enable our customers to rapidly expand their content catalog,” said Scott Hamilton, president of Sony DADC New Media Solutions. “A good supply chain is critical, but it should not be a barrier that prevents you from acting quickly and aggressively growing your brands with consumers.”

Technicolor

Technicolor will have plenty on display at IBC, but likely nothing more impressive than the company’s high dynamic range (HDR) premiere single-stream delivery solution, an end-to-end HDR transmission fix that’s opening eyes in the broadcast space.

Technicolor HDR distributes every major HDR format, unifies workflows so that all content can be rendered on any display, and guarantees 100% backward compatibility with legacy standard dynamic range (SDR) equipment. One new customer announced for IBC includes Keepixo, a provider of software-based solutions for IPTV and OTT.

“The deployment of HDR by service providers throughout their complete broadcast chain needs to be done smoothly to ensure backward compatibility with legacy equipment.” said Jerome Blanc, COO of Keepixo. “By working with Technicolor, we are able to prove the flexibility of our video encoders and transcoders to add different flavors of HDR technologies.”

ValueLabs

ValueLabs will show off its Digital Asset Management System (DAMS), an enterprise-wide, end-to-end system geared toward managing the ingest of assets for on-demand business needs, via an asset distribution interface (ADI) specification. DAMS has an automated workflow management engine, along with a unified assets and metadata repository, and can integrate with new third-party DRMs, including HLS, Smooth Streaming and MPEG-DASH.

Verizon Digital Media Services

At IBC Verizon Digital Media Services will unveil upgrades to its end-to-end digital media platform, and show off the enhancements of its Volicon Media Intelligence service, which has integrated Verizon’s Slicer app, a software element of the Uplynk Video Streaming service.

The integration allows Volicon Media Intelligence users to launch OTT offerings quickly, leveraging existing Volicon hardware infrastructure. Volicon Media Intelligence service is currently deployed at more than a thousand broadcast locations worldwide.

“The Uplynk Video Streaming service is ideal for TV networks, stations, affiliates and any other Volicon Media Intelligence service-enabled operation looking to light up new OTT channels quickly and economically,” said Ted Middleton, chief product officer at Verizon Digital Media Services. “The worlds of traditional broadcasting and over-the-top delivery are converging, and in this case, we’re actually combining workflows from both worlds in one location for our customers.”

Xstream

Delivering a flexible, cost-efficient, scalable and proven OTT platform is the name of Xstream’s game, and the company’s latest advancements in helping media and entertainment companies monetize their assets and engage with subscribers will be on display at IBC.

Specifically, Xstream will show off its cloud-based and modular video management system MediaMaker, an end-to-end solution for the sourcing, management, optimization and delivery of internet TV solutions. IBC will see Xstream offering an inside look at the turnkey solutions it put together for Spark New Zealand OTT, SVOD service Lightbox, Canal Digital Go, Nabi Go and others.

Wazee Digital

Cloud-based video management and licensing services company Wazee Digital will unveil enhancements to its flagship Core MAM offering, enabling content owners and rights holders to publish and manage content on a YouTube channel directly from the Core app (through an automated workflow or discrete asset selection) and maintain term structure and consistency across a database for keywords.

“Audiences are viewing content across multiple platforms, including social media, and YouTube is one of the biggest — reaching more 18-to-49-year-olds than any cable network in the U.S. Therefore, it made sense for us to give Core users a way to manage in three clicks what they used to have to do in two applications and 10+ clicks,” said Harris Morris, CEO of Wazee Digital. “As the world consumes more and more media outside of linear broadcast, managing multiple digital endpoints is done most efficiently in the content management system. Unlike many social-media publishing tools that focus only on digital publishing, ours can distribute both digital- and broadcast-quality content — and handle both workflows — all from a single platform.”

Zoo Digital

Zoo Digital will have more than one technology to tout at IBC.

The company will be showing off its eScreener service, which allows for secure, early release screenings directly to Apple TVs, iPads or via playback in screening rooms. The service features two-factor authentication, blocking of concurrent log-ins, both visible and forensic watermarking, and heavy digital rights management (DRM).

Zoo Digital will also be launching its next-gen compliance editing service, which allows for the creation of versions of TV and movie content that complies with different requirements in different territories. The legal, cultural and editorial requirements of any single territory are covered, keeping everything from sex to violence in mind.

“As we expand in the Middle East, South Asia and Asia Pacific, our compliance editing service opens up a world of market opportunities,” said Zoo president Gordon Doran. “For content owners it means they can reach new audiences in specific territories by preparing compliant content for digital distribution. Similarly for in-territory broadcasters it enables them to offer their audiences a far wider range of sought after premium TV and movie content.”