Exclusives

DAM Specialists Tout Offerings During Sept. 16 Take the DAM(n) Tour Event

On Sept. 16, 10 media management provider specialists shared their latest industry offerings during the second of two Take the DAM(n) Tour (TTDT) days held by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) this month.

More than 50 content owner company executives and MESA members heard from Deluxe, BeBanjo, Premiere Digital, 5th Kind, Croogloo, FilmTrack, Verizon Media, DXC, EditShare and GrayMeta as MESA’s content solutions strategists took attendees through guided tours of the DAM services that would have appeared on the IBC Show floor this year.

Here’s a brief rundown of what each presenter shared, and links to videos of their entire presentations:

Deluxe

Kristie Fung, VP of product management at Deluxe, discussed how her company is using its Showcase offering for streaming solutions, powered by the Deluxe One cloud-based platform, “to bring content owners and consumers together to reach what’s becoming, as everyone knows, an increasingly fragmented audience in today’s market,” she said.

Showcase offers studios, content owners and enterprise clients customised streaming solutions allowing them too easily share the right content with the right audiences at the right time, according to Deluxe.

The “specific use case” for it initially was as a screener platform but, to meet demand, “the platform has evolved into a virtual cinema platform,” Fung said. “In the absence of live events, it’s been an extension into theatrical experiences and bringing in loyalty members and also into live streaming events,” including corporate product launches and presentations, she noted. For the full presentation, click here.

BeBanjo

Dan Meyer, sales manager at BeBanjo, provided an update on what his company has been focusing on since its last tour, in April, and spotlighted its new linear and non-linear planning modules.

The session explored how the company is working with its customers to “bring benefits to both the long-term planning and also short-term scheduling workflows to allow them to streamline their operations, drive vital efficiencies, further exploit their existing catalogue of content” and how BeBanjo can help companies “look for new revenue streams out of that content” and be “successful in these quite uncertain times,” according to Meyer. For the full presentation, click here.

Premiere Digital

Carrie Moore, VP of product development at Premiere Digital, highlighted the company’s Premiere Digital Exchange (PDX) workflow solutions tool.

The title, asset and order management system, on the title level, “works to provide simple solutions for title creation and management,” while also working to support the tracking and management of asset inventories and provide “transparent” order tracking, she said.

From inception to delivery, PDX provides full visibility into order statuses, titles, metadata and assets with automated capabilities for asset ingestion and title management according to EIDR industry standards. The SaaS technology behind PDX is architected to be flexible, scalable and expandable to adapt to customer needs and evolving media workflows and metadata models, according to the company. For the full presentation, click here.

5th Kind

Steve Cronan, CEO, CTO and founder of 5th Kind, focused on the important role that his company’s creative asset management system plays in the work of studios including Marvel Studios and how 5th Kind’s CORE turns files into assets.

He explained how 5th Kind effectively manages and secures all of a client’s metadata, including artificial intelligence metadata, and assets across the entire production process.

A single unified cloud platform and user interface supports dailies and screeners review, marketing pipelines, real-time collaboration and live streaming to help address safe and secure remote production and work, according to 5th Kind. Leveraging its open application programming interfaces, the company provides integration for solutions including Box, Aspera and others. For the full presentation, click here.

Croogloo

Gad Tisch, founder and CEO of Croo Gloo, explained how his company is “digitising operations for studios and accelerating change in the production supply chain.” The company is “centralising data to generate actionable insights and secure studio assets,” he said.

Noting that shoots have been rolling again in Canada “for a few months now,” he said Croo Gloo has been “actively engaged in the return to production” there after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, “providing productions with a digital, contact-free application to coordinate, collaborate and communicate with studio and crew.”

The company helps integrate multiple silos of production data sources from disparate systems for data management and analytics. Croo Gloo has been implemented on more than 300 productions across 17 markets to date, Tisch said. For the full presentation, click here.

FilmTrack

Jason Kassin, CEO of FilmTrack, highlighted how his company’s cloud-based enterprise rights management software helps content owners streamline the increasingly complex rights landscape to make sure they don’t leave a lot of money on the table.

FilmTrack has been “re-platformed into a new technology stack using” application programming interfaces so that its “existing customers can use the new system without any migration” complexities, he said, noting FilmTrack keeps all customers’ data and metadata in one place. For the full presentation, click here.

Verizon Media

Roy Firestone, principal product manager for advertising technology at Verizon Media, demonstrated the company’s SmartPlay Prebid programmatic technology for long-form video that includes TV-style ad breaks.

Prebid “enhances our popular SmartPlay server-side ad insertion capability so that our customers – the world’s largest broadcasters and content providers – can remain innovative and competitive,” he said.

The technology is “low-risk, easy to implement, and works with current content workflows and ad servers,” according to the company, which notes that a Prebid vendor integrated into Smartplay enables demand partners to simultaneously bid on ad space and have those bids evaluated alongside other ad buys. For the full presentation, click here.

DXC

Sudipta Singh, CTO of technology, M&E and telecommunications at DXC, talked about the global shift to remote work and the digital nature of today’s media, and how they’re driving media companies to increasingly consider globally centralised cloud platforms for their data and other computing needs.

“The advances we are seeing in machine learning… are driving change across multiple ecosystems,” he said. An intelligent system for media workflows provides many potential benefits to companies because “we need all the help we can get,” he noted.

DreamWorks has partnered with DXC and its “sister company,” argodesign to build a cloud-based production platform that will enable intuitive and seamless access to millions of digital assets for computer graphics animation production, he said. For the full presentation, click here.

EditShare

Stephen Tallamy, CTO of EditShare, touted his company’s EditShare File System (EFS) and media-centric storage environment, as well as its Flow media management and remote access tools. The two collaborative storage and workflow solutions can be used for creating media on-premise or in the cloud.

The Flow asset management system “looks after all of your content throughout the production lifecycle” and it “can provide you with powerful automation tools to do all the tedious things that you don’t want to be doing,” Tallamy said. EFS and Flow “facilitate highly collaborative media workflows and environments,” according to the company. For the full presentation, click here.

GrayMeta

Scott Sharp, head of technology at GrayMeta, highlighted the company’s latest offering: Iris Anywhere, a browser-based version of its Iris QC quality control system that he said provides the “next generation of remote content review, QC and collaboration.”

“Media companies are facing real challenges today trying to access and view master assets remotely and using home broadband speeds, and it’s definitely been challenging over the last five to six months,” during the pandemic, he said.

At the start of 2020, the company had a plan to enhance Iris and enable remote view in QC, but “COVID accelerated those development plans” for the enhanced version of Iris QC that can run on-premise or in the cloud, he said. GrayMeta is “working very closely with a group of major content owners” for a pilot of Iris Anywhere that has been running the past few months, he added. For the full presentation, click here.

The first day of this year’s TTDT took place Sept. 9, with presentations from RSG Media, IBM, Whip Media Group, Vubiquity, Signiant, Sony Electronics, Caringo, Veritone, Digital Bedrock and KlarisIP. The tour was invitation only.