M+E Connections

LAS VEGAS — Day two of the NAB Show saw a full return to years past of the event, with a jam-packed convention center and more events than there was time to attend them. Here’s what some of MESA’s membership had to share.

Vision Media

Streaming platform and secure screening specialist Vision Media used the NAB Show to launch a beta offering of its new, free secure screening Starter Plan, a solution geared toward helping creatives of all sizes share movies, TV shows, and other media. Oh, and celebrating nearly 40 years in the business was part of the plan as well.

Vision Media is best known for its secure streaming solutions which allows users to share videos with both teams and audiences. Today it offers secure digital streaming for major studios and promotion services approved by all major entertainment guilds and groups, with its digital solutions — including Screener Passport, self-serve streaming services with VMxStream, and FYC and guild sites with VMxAwards — allow content owners to offer high-end viewing experiences across major viewing platforms. Vision Media keeps it all secure with DRM, session-based watermarking, and protected viewing windows.

The new beta Starter Plan allows anyone interested to share videos using studio-grade tools, and the free offering ensures content owners, producers and creators of all sizes can share securely, as well as collaborate internally.

“Vision Media is excited to offer free secure screening and increase access for more independent studios, SMBs, and content owners to share their films, TV episodes, and creative stories.” said Vision Media CEO, Tim Shanahan. “It is important to us to not only continue to serve established studios and guilds with our best-in-class screener solutions, but to provide a path for all creators to amplify their voice and share their content with tools they can trust.”

The Starter Plan gives users the ability to brand screening rooms, giving each a unique look and feel; add and import metadata directly from IMDb; secure videos with unique, visible watermarking; and share with viewers.

For more information, visit visionmedia.com/beta.

NAGRA

NAGRA announced it is the latest company to join the Amazon Web Services ISV Accelerate Program. The membership further expands NAGRA’s relationship with AWS and will help increase access and utilization of content protection and distribution solutions for the media and entertainment industry. The program helps AWS Partners drive new business by directly connecting participating ISVs with the AWS Sales organization.

AWS ISV Accelerate Program members are held to the industry’s highest standards and must undergo a comprehensive evaluation to gain acceptance into the program. NAGRA participated in a thorough architectural and security review to ensure the quality and design of our solutions. Proof of customer excellence was also reviewed to validate the successes NAGRA customers have achieved across industry verticals.

Customers leveraging NAGRA technologies for content and service protection, watermarking and video streaming platforms increasingly leverage the cloud to drive operational efficiencies and leverage software as a service and platform as a service (SaaS/PaaS). Through the completion of AWS Foundational Technical Reviews (FTR), and acceptance into the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, NAGRA has improved customer access and provided added peace of mind that NAGRA solutions can rapidly scale to meet new business requirements. The AWS ISV Accelerate program also allows NAGRA to better collaborate with AWS field sellers to meet customer needs globally.

“Joining the AWS ISV Accelerate Program is a key milestone as we continue to develop our relationship with AWS and strive to make our solutions as accessible as possible to as many media and entertainment providers as we can,” said Sebastian Kramer, SVP of business development and product line management for NAGRA. “Our teams are actively engaged with AWS to support our customers with their migration to the cloud alongside realizing new co-sell opportunities with our industry-leading solutions.”

NAGRA successfully completed the FTR for NexGuard Forensic Watermarking in December 2022 and OpenTV Video Platform and Active Streaming Protection in February 2023. These validations assure customers that NAGRA solutions, on AWS, utilize AWS services both efficiently and effectively. Examples of NAGRA customers using such solutions include Claro Colombia, Vodafone Group and StarHub.

LucidLink

Don’t call LucidLink a storage company, though accessing content is at the center of what the company does. Don’t call it a cloud company, though that’s certainly a major part of how it operates.

“What we truly are is collaboration enablement and infrastructure,” said LucidLink CEO and co-founder Peter Thompson. “We allow access to storage and done in a universal way, where workflows don’t have to change.”

LucidLink came into the show with the announcement that it was launching a seamless workflow for live sports and broadcast production, thanks to a new integration with EVS and Adobe.

The combination of LucidLink’s high-performance remote collaboration Filespaces technology, EVS’ live production tools, LiveCeption and content management solution MediaCeption, and Adobe’s editing and production platforms in Premiere Pro enable creative teams to quickly ingest live events, edit, and stream to audiences in as near to real-time as possible, from anywhere in the world.

Thompson said the integrations mark another example of LucidLink constantly improving based on feedback from its users, and how “everything we do is about optimization and efficiency.”

And it’s working: for the Academy Award-winning Best Animated Short film The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, a team of 120 creatives across 20 countries used LucidLink to create the film, a remarkable achievement using remote capabilities, a first for the Oscars.

The film relied on LucidLink for production workflow collaboration during the height of COVID-19 lockdowns and marks a new era of remote and hybrid filmmaking, made possible by LucidLink’s Filespaces.

“With a combined team of industry professionals and newcomers, we needed a solution that not only fit our budget, but that also worked intuitively,” said Ben Wood, animation senior support specialist for Nonemore Productions. “With LucidLink, we never lost a file, were able to onboard team members in a matter of minutes, and ended up with a better, more cost-efficient option than the virtual machines we were initially vetting.”

Thompson said creative teams are turning to LucidLink because the offering is completely platform agnostic on the front end, and with both mobile and browser version of what LucidLink offers on the way, expect more content to be created using LucidLink.

Technicolor

Advanced HDR by Technicolor saw a new feature debut at NAB: “diffuse white,” which enables effective and dynamic graphics management for live sports, enhancing the ability to dynamically manage graphics inserted into live broadcasts that include standard dynamic range (SDR) and high dynamic range (HDR) formats.

As broadcasters explore the opportunities offered by HDR, production workflows must adapt to the growing complexities associated with supporting the delivery of content in today’s hybrid market of HDR and SDR TVs used in homes, restaurants and sports bars across the world, according to InterDigital’s David Touzé, System Architect for Research and Engineering, and Valérie Allié, Group Director of Video Solutions, in a podcast interview for journalists.

“Graphics insertion has presented constraints for broadcasters seeking to adopt a single master workflow that integrates HDR and SDR content. As graphics are inserted in the HDR single master, graphics must be properly managed and remain stable when converted to the SDR output stream,” Touzé said. “Dynamic down-mapping, enabled by the new Advanced HDR by Technicolor feature, addresses this challenge, ensuring graphics remain stable in down-converted SDR streams and still maintain the creative intent of the HDR content.”

The new Advanced HDR by Technicolor feature enhances broadcasters’ ability to effectively — and dynamically — manage luminance levels to deliver the best image quality across HDR and SDR content. It will help broadcasters and content creators better manage conversions between SDR and HDR by carefully managing luminance levels.

The new feature represents a significant development in how the broadcast industry manages the rapid transition from SDR to HDR content, Technicolor said.