Connections

MESA Members Tout Their New Products, Services on MESA’s DAM(n) Tour

MESA members highlighted their latest products and services 21st Oct as part of the virtual Take the DAM (n) Tour!, showcasing the hottest media management offerings in the market today. The presentations kicked off the recent Introducing the MESAverse event.

Here’s the first of two stories providing a brief look at what each company presented:

BeBanjo
Dan Meyer, sales manager for BeBanjo explored a theme that he said is “becoming more and more important amongst our customers [and] that is the growing need for flexible” VOD and linear workflows to “enable future success.”

BeBanjo customers and the market as a whole have “shifting requirements and needs for a more flexible workflow to plan and schedule their content,” he noted. A VOD-first and flexible planning workflow strategy will “help enable the future of TV distribution,” he said. To that end, BeBanjo is providing a simple Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tool to enable that to happen, he added.

“As consumers continue to adapt and change the way they view their content, it’s important to adapt to these new forms to provide the best possible content and experience to your viewers,” he told attendees.

“Those streaming services that can master this are really reaping the benefits whereas those who haven’t are more and more likely to struggle to grow efficiently, especially in the long run,” he predicted.

It is, meanwhile, “often overlooked that the ability to plan content efficiently and effectively will be a key factor in success over the next few years and, as competition becomes even more fierce, everyone is looking for that long-term, sustainable success,” he added.

“The need for these flexible workflows both for linear and for VOD content is a key silent driver for success,” he said, pointing out BeBanjo has been developing planning products to support existing scheduling offerings that combine planning and scheduling in one unified SaaS solution.

EditShare
What EditShare has been seeing throughout the pandemic is that “people are looking at how they can embrace the cloud in some way in the media production part of their workflows,” according to Stephen Tellamy, CTO at EditShare.

His company provides its customers with three options for their journeys to the cloud: Cloud Sync, which is scalable; Remote Proxy Editing; and end-to-end cloud production, he noted.

Tellamy provided quick demonstrations of Remote Proxy Editing and Edit in the Cloud Production workflows, noting that while some of his company’s customers have opted to move entirely to the cloud, others are opting for a hybrid of on-prem and cloud.

“Every customer sort of has the cloud on their mind and what they’re unsure about is … they don’t know where to go or how to go,” so they turn to EditShare for help figuring out the right balance, he added.

Convergent Risks
Convergent Risks turned the spotlight on its new Sanctum HUB Management Portal.

“Everybody’s involved in security in some shape or form” and some viewers of the event may be going through a security assessment, Matthew Gilliat-Smith, EVP of the firm, noted.

“The whole process can be quite cumbersome,” he pointed out. Therefore, Convergent Risks realised it would be great if those going through an assessment could have a tool to help them through the process, he noted, adding it saves time.

The Sanctum HUB Management Portal is initially being used by studios and freelancers now, he said, adding initial feedback has been promising, with users saying the app is “very helpful” and reduces time.
Matt Lody, CTO at Convergent Risks, provided a demonstration to viewers via video.

Whip Media
Mike Sid, chief strategy officer at Whip Media, touted the company’s tracking solution for linear free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) during what he called Whip’s “stop on the Damn Tour.”

“You have seen FAST” performance tracking, one of the company’s newest products, “whether you know it or not,” he told viewers, noting “you can find it in things like” the Roku Channel, Amazon’s IMDb TV or Pluto TV online streaming services.

The free, ad-supported FAST offering comes as many viewers are experiencing “subscription fatigue” from all the pay streaming services they’ve signed up for, he said.

FAST provides a “great way for companies with large libraries of somewhat older content … to really monetise it … get it out there quickly in front of a lot of eyeballs and make some money” from it, he explained. Content companies then share the ad revenue, he added.

Automation is used by Whip to provide customers with “improved visibility and tracking in an environment” they can control, according to the firm. The “end result is clean, consistent performance data for FAST channel analytics” by platform, time slot and title, across all FAST channels and all mapped to customers’ internal IDs, metadata and content suppliers, according to Whip.
Media company Tastemade was Whip’s launch customer for FAST, he added.

Whip has already had its performance tracking product on the market for a while, he pointed out. For 13 years, it has aggregated performance data from more than 1,100 platforms globally on behalf of more than 30 customers, including Hollywood studios, according to the company.

Digital Nirvana
Ed Hauber, business development manager at Digital Nirvana, spotlighted the knowledge management software company’s latest offerings.

Digital Nirvana’s AI and machine learning solutions “empower” broadcasters, multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) and over-the-top (OTT) service providers to create content faster and easier by way of automating the extraction generation enhancement and the integration of various forms of metadata, he said.

Using a video, he highlighted four of the company’s latest offerings: Monitor IQ, its AI-driven compliance logging and monitoring solution; Trance, its SaaS-based application for the auto-generation of transcripts, captions and caption translations; professional caption and translation services; and MetaDataIQ, the Saas-based metadata automation tool for the generation of speech-to-text and video intelligence metadata that it announced in July for content producers using the Avid media platform.

The company’s most recent announcement was MonitorIQ 8.0, in August. Digital Nirvana removed security vulnerabilities, increased resiliency, made the system faster to navigate, and enabled new streaming technology with significantly lower latency from live video, it said.

IBM Security
Alden Hutchison, market partner at IBM Security, discussed how to leverage the zero trust framework to secure remote workforces.

“Business priorities are driving the digital transformation” and organisations’ users are “accessing your environment from anywhere and often from devices that are no longer managed by the company,” he pointed out. Meanwhile, “application and data is being shared by multiple systems, AI [and] machine learning through vendors and partners, and your infrastructure has spread across multiple clouds in a hybrid operating environment,” he said.

All of these trends have “resulted in a much more complex security environment,” he pointed out. And “at the same time that your complexity has grown, the threat actors have continued to ramp up their attacks against the end users,” he said.

There are “three steps to follow” to achieve a more secure workforce,” according to Hutchison, who pointed to: tacking the highest risks first; applying the IBM zero trust governance model and methodology; and implementing the required technologies and capabilities.

The highest risks include ones that come from virtual private networks, he said. Meanwhile, phishing has grown over 600% in the past year, he told viewers, noting: “Employees are working in isolation and they have become easier targets because of that,” he added. “Phishing emails and their attached malware are exploiting vulnerabilities on their” operations support systems (OSSs) and in the browser, which then “allows the threat actor to leverage that end point to access your environment,” he warned. At the same time, more business interactions are occurring on smartphones and other non-corporate devices and that is “introducing new threat vectors, such as texting, to introduce malware to end users.”

Other risky activity is also being done outside the traditional office workspace, such as working outside of secure web gateways and using social media while working, he added.

Alteon
Alteon recently launched the latest version of its flagship product, Alteon Cloud, Matthew Cimaglia, co-founder of the company, pointed out.

Having a proxy-based workflow is “really critical” today because it means anybody who needs to and has permission to access that workflow can do so “without having to download potentially terabytes worth of data,” he said.

“The biggest issue that we’re facing today is the fact that there are slow Internet speeds a lot at home or in some coffee shops that people are working out of in these remote situations that we’re in today,” he said.

Alteon is “working with IBM on building a desktop upload tool leveraging Aspera, so we know that that’s going to increase the percentage of upload speeds significantly,” he told viewers.

“There are still some limitations today that exists because of some slower Internet speeds.” But there are positive signs, he pointed out: “We’re really banking on the fact that over the next year — if we’ve learned anything from COVID – that the telecommunications industry has really accelerated their plans to build fibre optic networks, to put in higher-speed Internet hubs. And then we are also seeing a lot more 5G” hot spots popping up.