M+E Daily

NEW YORK — IBM Aspera, Ooyala and Thinklogical were among the many members of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) that showcased their latest products, services and strategies at NAB Show New York Oct. 17-18 at Jacob Javits Convention Center.

IBM Aspera
IBM Aspera used the show to tout the enhanced performance now being offered across the Aspera High Speed Transfer platform. The enhancements allow users to transfer more data at higher speeds with improved reliability, using industry-standard encryption and failsafe bandwidth control, according to the company.

One “primary” area of focus for the company in New York was showcasing the Orchestrator workflow tool, Jonathan Solomon, Aspera strategic initiatives engineer-streaming, told MESA at the show. It “interfaces with almost 200 third-party tools for media processing, or any processing, so anything from transcode to antivirus, publishing — obviously transfer is in there” also, he said.

New features offered in Orchestrator 3.1 include “some new plug-ins” that were added in response to “customer requests” – among them FFprobe for media file analysis and “some additional direct interface features” for Amazon S3 cloud storage, he said. New plug-ins are also available for Dolby QC and Aspera on Cloud, according to Aspera.

The Orchestrator 3.1 release built upon the 3.0 release to add new functionality that Aspera said improves workflow developer collaboration with version control, easier deployment and added testing capabilities, along with visualization enhancements for the dependency chart and dashboards.

New automation functionality within Aspera on Cloud, meanwhile, helps users quickly configure event-driven transfer workflows, according to the company. Organizations can streamline content delivery workflows by allowing transfers to be triggered by an action such as a submission to a shared Inbox or shared folder, or an application program interface (API) call, it said.

The Aspera on Cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering is now hosted in 28 data centers spanning all market-leading clouds globally, according to the company. The service has been translated into multiple languages, including Chinese, French and Spanish, Aspera said. Since the April release of Aspera on Cloud, more than 2,500 organizations have used the service to send, share and upload over 15 petabytes of data across global distances and between multiple clouds, it said. Growth of the Aspera customer base has also been “fueled by” the new ability to purchase through the IBM online marketplace in 59 countries and via an expanded set of IBM global business partners and system integrators, it said.

There’s a new capability to “tether” and centrally manage high-availability clusters running Aspera High-Speed Transfer Server version 3.9 (v3.9), Solomon pointed out. Customers can now bring their own server as part of the Aspera on Cloud solution, he said, explaining that a lot of customers still have their own servers on-premise and “don’t want to use our servers in the cloud…but they want to attach it to this interface.” So, the company is “allowing what’s called tethered nodes” (servers) in the 3.9 release to allow that, he said.

The company also again spotlighted its Aspera Streaming for Video solution, powered by FASPStream technology, which now offers a new ability to quickly and easily launch and monitor connections within a simple web-based user interface, the company said.

Ooyala
Ooyala showcased the latest features and enhancements to the Ooyala Flex Media Platform, including extended support for the Interoperable Master Format (IMF).

The Ooyala Flex Media Platform provides a unified framework that optimizes the entire content supply chain, which customers can customize to meet their specific needs. The platform leverages automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline video workflows and processes, connect teams and tools for greater collaboration, and enable richer metadata and analytics that power critical new insights and a single source of truth throughout the entire content supply chain, according to the company.

With IMF support, customers of the Ooyala Flex Media Platform can “significantly reduce the costs and improve the efficiency of their multi-version, multi-platform distribution needs,” according to the company. IMF is a file-delivery standard created by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) that reduces the number of different versions of a video file required for distribution to viewers in different markets and on different platforms around the world.

Prior to IMF, thousands of different versions of a widely distributed motion picture – reflecting various combinations of subtitles, metadata, audio, formatting and other features — would be required in order to support multiple-market-segment distribution.

The efficiencies offered by IMF – increasingly embraced by major studios and subscription video on demand (SVOD) services — have been estimated to achieve savings of 25% or more in storage and “versioning” costs, Ooyala said.

It was the first industry event that Ooyala exhibited at following the recent Ooyala and Telstra announcement about the completion of a management buyout of Ooyala. Building on the success of Ooyala under the current management team, combined with Telstra’s new focus on its Telstra2022 strategy, the transaction provided the foundation for the next phase of growth for Ooyala, the companies recently said.

“Obviously the biggest trend in the industry that everyone’s talking about — that we’re all seeing — is the demand for original content,” Jim O’Neill, Ooyala principal industry analyst, told MESA at the show. “The number of pieces of content that consumers are demanding is, I think, beyond anything the industry has ever seen,” he said.

And what is increasingly being seen is that if you are distributing content, “it has to go not just to your market, but to multiple markets — and it has to go there quickly,” with subtitles and also must be “acceptable to censors” in certain markets, he said.

Also being seen is that “sports is breaking the barrier” of over-the-top (OTT) streaming video services “in a very big way,” he said, pointing to the growing shift away from viewing linear broadcast TV. “Millennials are walking away from pay-TV in droves,” he said, predicting the next generation after them – dubbed “Generation Edge” – will be “even more aggressive in their abandonment of traditional cable television.”

Also significant will be the launch of 5G, he said, predicting “when 5G comes, traditional cable, traditional broadband to the home over wires disappears.” The next-generation mobile technology will “radically change things” and offers superior latency to traditional broadcast and cable TV, he said, predicting it will become “the best smart pipe available.”

Thinklogical
Thinklogical used the show to again showcase some of the products it introduced at the NAB Show in Las Vegas in April.

“We really simplify a lot of the challenges people have in trying to control computers remotely,” Robert Ventresca, VP of Thinklogical worldwide marketing, told MESA at the show.

The company’s solution handles video “extremely well,” he said, noting the company supports 4K and high dynamic range (HDR) – “super high bandwidth, high resolution video, so we’re a good solution for infrastructures where you need to do high-quality creative editing, color correction, digital intermediate, post production type of environments,” he said.

Thinklogical is “a little bit outside of the mainstream in the sense that what’s happening in media and entertainment…is everybody’s talking about going to the cloud; everybody’s talking about appropriating IP technology,” he noted.

Although those are “good solutions,” he said: “They’re not always the best solution for every problem. We’re not IP. We’re not a cloud-based solution. We’re a premise-based solution. We’re sort of an independent network, if you will. But we’re really good at being the infrastructure for post production, digital intermediate, visual effects type of environments because of the quality of what we deliver.”

Meanwhile, “as media and entertainment organizations move more into the cloud, they’re still struggling with the fact that once you bring that data back down into the facility, there’s still a lot of latency, there’s a lot of delay, there’s a lot of challenges in getting a crisp, high-quality image to the editor, and we can solve a lot of” those issues, he said.

He added: “We can be sort of the last mile…for a cloud-based solution when we’re enabled within the premise infrastructure, so if you’re building out a post house or upgrading a post house, our infrastructure will make it easy to take that cloud information and then distribute it within there, without losing any additional quality or any capabilities. So, it really makes it a lot easier to get that hybrid environment.”

Thinklogical is also supporting 12G-serial digital interface (SDI), he pointed out, saying, “the demise of SDI has been greatly exaggerated” because many organizations “still find” that to be very important for what they’re doing.

The company’s systems are “highly secure,” he also said, noting its markets include the defense and government sector.

Products that Thinklogical introduced in recent months include an all-in-one solution for extending virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) architectures in media and entertainment.

Its recently introduced TLX Client Integration module — a full-featured virtual machine processor combined with a high-performance keyboard, video and mouse (KVM) extender — eliminates the need for a separate client device in VDI implementations, and the system can be installed in point-to-point applications or implemented in conjunction with a Thinklogical matrix switch, according to the company.