M+E Daily

LAS VEGAS — More than 50 MESA members exhibited during NAB. Here’s what a few of them had to share at the show.

Rightsline

Amazon Web Services, SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft, Box … they all know, and integrate with, rights and royalties specialist Rightsline. And it’s those partnerships that make Rightsline the best at what it does, according to Kira Baca, chief revenue officer for the company.

“We’re creating an ecosystem and making sure those integrations are seamless,” she said. “The days of API integrations being lengthy, arduous, and costly are over. Our goal was to have the most powerful finance system in media and entertainment and create a frictionless solution.

“Finding those partners is key, that’s where the best solutions come from,” Baca said. “The tides constantly change in this business and our job is to make the technology to support the strategy of the day. You shouldn’t have to change the technology to fit the strategy.”

Rightsline was at NAB celebrating the one-year anniversary of its acquisition of Real Software Systems and its Alliant platform, which was responsible for automating contractual rights, royalties, revenue and profit sharing of more than 70 companies. The combination of Rightsline and Alliant’s IP gave the company a solution that manages the entire lifecycle of IP monetisation across several industries

The acquisition also led to the late-2022 launch of Alliant Cloud, unifying the platforms further in order to increase workflow efficiencies and eliminate the need for self-hosted environments.

“Since the Alliant acquisition earlier this year, our mission has been to integrate the unique capabilities of our Rightsline and Alliant platforms to deliver a modern SaaS infrastructure that could provide our customers with the best of both worlds,” Rightsline CEO Patrick Arkeveld said at the time.

“Rightsline has always been a customer and industry driven platform. Our customers want to leverage the numerous benefits of cloud environments and with Alliant Cloud we are taking a major step towards unifying our platforms and delivering a best-in-class rights and royalties management platform for our customers.”

Box

Box may not have had a booth on the NAB Show floor, but Jade McQueen, senior managing director of media and entertainment at Box could be seen visiting clients and partners and sharing the latest from her company. And perhaps offering a hint on what Box had coming.

The content cloud specialist came into Las Vegas with the news it had been named a 2023 Fortune top 100 company to work for, coming it at No. 27 on the coveted list, which is based largely on feedback from employees.

That ranking came after Box was listed at No. 2 on the Glassdoor Best Places to Work and No. 11 on Great Place to Work’s Best Workplaces for Parents list.

“At Box, our core values like ‘blow our customers’ minds,’ ‘be an owner,’ and ‘make mom (or whomever you value most) proud,’ help us intentionally create an environment where our 2,500 Boxers around the globe enable the best possible experiences for our customers — and each other — through incredible dedication, service, product innovation, ethics, inclusive speech and action, as well as strong leadership and collaboration,” Jessica Swank, chief people officer at Box, said in a press release.

Box had also previously announced new enhancements to the Box for Salesforce integration on Salesforce AppExchange, which helps businesses connect teams to their content in order to work securely anywhere. Thousands of joint customers, including Principal Financial, Talend, Delta Wealth Advisors and NYCERS currently use Box with Salesforce and Slack. The new updates include Improved Salesforce federated search, enhanced custom folder structures, and an updated Box install wizard.

But coming out of NAB was when Box made the most waves, with the launch of Box Canvas, the company’s virtual whiteboarding and visual collaboration tool, built natively into Box, and the launch of Box AI, a new suite of capabilities that natively integrate advanced AI models into the Box Content Cloud.

“We are at the start of a platform shift in enterprise software driven by recent advancements in generative AI, and nowhere is the potential impact greater than in enterprise content,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, of the AI announcement. “We’ve seen a step function improvement in our ability to analyse and synthesise the massive amounts of data contained within an organisation’s unique documents, videos, presentations, spreadsheets, and more.

“When combined with AI, we will be able to unlock the value of this content and make every person in a company smarter and more productive. Content is an organisation’s most important data, and with Box AI we’re just getting started with how we’ll transform the way work gets done.”

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EZDRM

At NAB, Olga Kornienko, COO and co-founder of EZDRM, was all about her company’s new, patent-pending EZDRM WebRTC-DRM solution, which promises to enable true low-latency streaming applications without compromising the use of required, studio-approved DRM security. From eSports to auctions, live events to gambling, the use cases for WebRTC are growing daily, but doing so without a complete and standard approach to content security integration.

That’s what EZDRM’s goal is, with a solution based entirely on standard encoding technologies and native client-side, hardware-supported content security functionality, protecting low-latency WebRTC applications and its content just as robustly as HTTP ABR delivery systems.

“It’s completely player agnostic using full-stack DRM with all the robustness that offers,” Kornienko said. Put simply: “It’s very cool,” she said, smiling.

Key benefits of this approach include the ability to integrate into any existing WebRTC media workflow, offering full multi-DRM support across a full 100 percent of global client device types (Widevine, PlayReady, FairPlay, WisePlay), all while following open standards for player integration, including support for typical analytics monitoring tools.

EZDRM also used NAB to tout recent partnerships, including one with video hosting platform Infuse Video Partners, ensuring Infuse customers will be able to securely distribute long-form, personalised video experiences to viewers. And Kornienko made special mention of her company’s work with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), which looks to establish a standardised solution for tracing the origins — and evolution — of any piece of content, with the ultimate goal of combating misleading content … something that should prove crucial with the further emergence of AI video and audio.

“All show, we’ve been busy,” Kornienko said at her booth. “We’ve been chugging along and doing what we do best: simplifying DRM.”

Qvest

When you see opportunity, strike the iron’s hot. That was the mantra for media and entertainment software specialist and global system architect Qvest coming into NAB, with the company displaying major enhancements to its products and solutions for media workflows.

“As you see FAST channels rising, we saw an opportunity to have a coming out party for the U.S. market,” said Justin Karpowich, VP of sales of Qvest. “This NAB is a 100 percent media focus for us. You’re seeing more pressure on the supply chain and everyone is looking for customer-first solutions.”

Qvest brought those solutions, including Qvest Remote Editing geared toward efficient media workflows; as well as makalu cloud play-out, a pure, software-defined, cost effective and highly automated cloud play-out; and the latest nodes and flows of the media integration platform from Qvest partner qibb.

For, makalu the latest upgrade of the software-based play-out automation covers an extended range of functions and a revised user interface. For remote editing, Qvest showed off how the enterprise solution for location-independent video editing includes native and full integration of the Adobe Creative Cloud.

Qvest also announced its subsidiary HMS — a specialist in the development of broadcast automation solutions, acquired in 2017 — will be fully integrated into the company group and operate as Qvest Stream.

“Through the full integration of HMS, we will sustainably strengthen our cooperation and serve the needs of our customers in an even more targeted manner,” Peter Nöthen, CEO of the Qvest Group, said in a press release. “With the Qvest Stream team and their product expertise, we are now leveraging synergies at all levels, especially in the area of play-out solutions, which are in high demand. Customers and partners will particularly benefit from the global availability of these products as well as a close integration of consulting, sales, support, and operations.”

The full integration announces that Qvest has turned its focus squarely on software products for cloud-based media applications, the company said.