Connections

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

Here’s the second of two stories providing a brief look at what each company presented. The first can be read here.

Richey May Technology Solutions
Arnel Manalo, director of cybersecurity services at Richey May Technology Solutions (RMTS), discussed cybersecurity trends and how his firm is working to keep Hollywood safe.

“I’m just a security nerd,” he admitted, adding: “I absolutely love security.”

Discussing the state of cybersecurity before the pandemic, he noted that the M&E sector started taking up a “big chunk of the attacks.” One reason: there’s a lot of money to be made by targeting the sector, he pointed out. Each compromised record costs about $154 so cybersecurity attacks can be very costly for M&E and other organisations, he said.

Ransomware continues to be a major issue and “I don’t think it’s going to go away anytime soon,” he predicted.

Ransomware defence services that RMTS provides to customers include: user awareness and training; perimeter defences including AV/malware detection on email, firewalls, etc.; endpoint defences including AV/malware and EDR/MDR; and segmented and distributed environments including the spreading or segmenting of critical systems to decrease the impact of attacks, he said.

Then there is the “final line of defence” when all else fails: having a backup strategy, he said. Important questions that every organisation’s leaders need to ask include: How often is data backed up? Where is it backed up? How long will it take to recover? Have you even tested the backup? “It’s something you definitely need to add to your arsenal,” Manalo added and then moved on to briefly discuss new infection techniques being used by bad actors. The latter includes deep fakes and the bad guys searching for disgruntled employees who may be willing to help them for the right price, he noted.

Sony
The spotlight was turned on Sony’s Ci media cloud platform by Michael Potts, senior director of customer success and services at the company.

Now in about its eighth year, Ci: was built on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS); auto scales at a large level; started supporting build your own storage (BYOS); and offers a “zero-downtime” feature release about every three weeks, he said, adding the company continues to add new capabilities to its popular share functionality.

Sony started Ci out with Workspaces for production collaboration and expanded into Catalogues for Enterprise Media Management. Support for live streaming was added as well in recent years, Potts noted.

Common use cases for Ci today are: centralised cloud acquisition, cloud-enabled edit workflows, high speed sharing, collaboration and review/approve, and archive, he said.

One of the newest capabilities that Sony added was the ability to turn on multi-factor authentication at the user and company network levels as an extra security feature, Potts said.

Synamedia
Simon Brydon, senior director of sports rights anti-piracy at Synamedia, touted his company’s new Synamedia OTT ServiceGuard solution that was announced Oct. 7 and launched a couple of weeks ago.

The new, “state-of-the-art” service is a “must have for any OTT service provider to stop your content being hacked,” he said.

Discussing trends in OTT piracy, he said: In a nutshell, “people used to steal the content … . Now they’re hacking your service … . They hack into the service of the OTT provider” and then sell IPTV scripts.

Common OTT service vulnerabilities include: hacked/jailbroken devices, authorisation tokens and concurrency mechanisms, he said. The proactive defence approach that Synamedia takes to fight it involves three layers: Layer 1 in which there is a weekly scan of all IP addresses; Layer 2, IPTV networks detection; and Layer 3, pirates entity clustering. “If I explained how to do this in detail, we’d need another hour or two,” he said.

Synamedia’s intelligence and strategy services include: threat analysis, development of an action plan and then delivery including reports on targeted pirates, intelligence for actions by third parties, reports on the impact of performed actions and working with law enforcement bodies, he noted. He added: “DRM just does not do it. It is easily hacked.”

Vistex
Amos Biegun, global head of rights and royalties at Vistex, focused on industry trends and the SAP Rights and Royalty Management by Vistex, cloud edition that was announced in August.

In a video, the company explained that the huge shift to streaming video content and away from movie theatres and other devices and platforms caused rights management activity to soar as well. Contracts and royalty calculations, of course, can become very complicated.

“You can’t go to market without content,” Biegun pointed out, adding: “You can’t get content to consumers without distribution. And you can’t actually build a marketplace without consumers consuming your product. Without the underpinning of the rights that you have, the contractual rights that you’ve obtained and your obligations and both the royalties you are due to receive for the distribution or the monetisation of the content and the royalties you need to pay for those parties who have helped you obtain that content, this business goes nowhere.”

Vistex is adding “more machine learning and artificial intelligence to our solution to make it much easier for you to know not only what to sell but what you should sell and what your audience is looking to consume, and that makes the entire sales and avails cycle much better, much more efficient, much smarter,” he went on to say.

Key benefits of SAP S/4 HANA rights and royalties include the strong partnership Vistex has with SAP and it being the only solution that manages cross departmental rights and royalties so that your entire IP library can be stored in one application, he explained. It is also a highly configurable and rules-based solution with unparalleled functionality,” while Vistex has strong implementation and support infrastructure and also has proven itself when it comes to working with large volumes of data and extreme complexity, he said, adding a prediction: “It will only get more complex.”

Qumulo
Andrew Keating, senior director of industry marketing at Qumulo, touted his company’s Studio Q remote video editing studio solution that it launched in May.

Studio Q: lets users create a studio in the cloud, on demand; unlocks cloud-based mezzanine-level editing; features Adobe Creative Cloud applications; and delivers fast and seamless collaboration, according to Qumulo. It “orchestrates multiple different best-in-class, industry standard solutions together,” combining Qumulo, Adobe Premiere Pro and Teradici solutions into one package to launch a “fully capable studio in the cloud,” according to Keating.

Studio Q leverages AWS Quick Start and can create 10 remote workstations in less than one hour from scratch, Qumulo says.

“Data is not the same as it was 10 years ago and, as we all kind of continue to grapple with the pandemic, it might even be fair to say that data is not the same as it was two or three years ago,” Keating told viewers. “We’ve seen exponential data growth and management of unstructured data has changed fundamentally as well,” he pointed out, adding you can’t just put data in cold storage because companies tend to continually need to access and use these “hyperactive” data workflows.

As cloud migrations continue, companies are increasingly trying to figure out how the cloud fits into their data management strategies, he went on to say.

Meanwhile, “managing unstructured data is a real pain,” he said, pointing to such issues as vendor lock-in, cost and complexity. Qumulo significantly simplifies enterprise data management and is cost-efficient, he noted. Another positive: the company offers strong customer support with Qumulo Care, he added.

BuyDRM
Gabe Elton, director of sales at BuyDRM, provided details on his company’s latest two products for 2021.

They are: KeyOS MultiMark Server that he said is “going to be rolling out within the next couple of weeks” and will be followed KeyOS MultiMark Service, a watermark as a service offering.

BuyDRM’s new Multimark Watermarking Server provides just-in-time watermarking with DRM, Christopher Levy, the company’s CEO and founder told the Video Security Summit on Oct. 19. “It’s really the only off-the-shelf watermarking server in the business that will support a variety of different watermarking kits as it evolves,” he said at the time. “Our goal in 2022 is to… create a service architecture around the server and roll out a service, just like” the company’s KeyOS Multi-key Service, Levy noted.

“We’re getting ready to enter alpha trials” on the server in Q4, he said, adding it’s targeted at companies that want to end piracy of their content. Alpha trials for the cloud-based KeyOS Multimark Service are planned for Q1 2022, according to BuyDRM. It features an on-the-fly watermarking process and is targeted at companies with extensive piracy and clients who want to use watermarking on an “as-needed” basis or only when necessary, according to the company.

BuyDRM serves more than 20 billion licenses a year and 70 million plays a day, Elton said Oct. 21.

PacketFabric
PacketFabric arrived on the Damn Tour on the heels of recently closing on the acquisition of edge storage company RSTOR, Dave Ward, PacketFabric CEO said.

“What this means and what we’re trying to do is be a cloud data core, [providing] not just connectivity to the cloud and how you get to the cloud through your workflows,” he said.

Explaining further, Lisa Gerber, director of business development, M&E at PacketFabric, said: “We have now not only access to all of these services that are already within the public clouds who we’re partnered with so closely but now we get to have this addition of companies and post/visual effects production companies being able to access their data more quickly more often at the edge in ways that were limited in other cases. And so now it can really all work together in unison.”

PacketFabric is “doing this a number of different ways,” she said, explaining: “One of the ways that’s really exciting that we’re doing this [is] with post and with visual effects. We also are moving into a really exciting space of working with some of the studio facilities and stages who, up until now, were quite limited in how they were able to transfer data [and] move footage. They were using Sneakernet quite a bit. They still are.”

But there is a better way that “makes everybody’s lives easier” – and that is by “working with the facilities to get them connected to the cloud,” she said. Meanwhile, it is also “just really convenient to have more of an end-to-end offering for the industry” now, she added.