M+E Daily

LAS VEGAS — New version releases, new security partnerships, and new awards to take home. Here’s what Eluvio, EZDRM, Brightspot, and PallyCon shared during the 2024 NAB Show.

Eluvio

Eluvio came into the NAB Show armed with a new release (dubbed “Casablanca”) of its Content Fabric content distribution and storage technology, and new Creator Studio, Content Analytics, and AI Content Understanding applications for the Fabric application suite. The company left Las Vegas with an NAB Product of the Year Award for Casblanca and its applications.

“The new release is centered around increasing profits and improving efficiencies,” said Michelle Munson, CEO and co-founder of Eluvio, speaking from a room overlooking the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. “It’s a new era for people looking to replace legacy distribution, with turnkey sites that are really easy to do at scale.

Content Fabric offers a content-native approach to distribution, with the Casablanca release providing monetisation of any digital media content, streaming or downloading, without the need for CDNs or third-party cloud partners, with the Fabric protocol running decentralised over TCP/IP on a global network of nodes. And it is fast: Fabric delivers low-latency live and VOD adaptive bitrate streaming in under a second for 99 percent of clients, this with DRM and forensic watermarking for live video included.

The Casablanca release also improves on Eluvio’s Universal AI Content Tagging and Search service, with generative AI tagging of video and images inside both Fabric. Tags are recorded in the metadata of Content Objects and unlike with other AI content tagging workflows, neither the content or metadata move since the AI metadata is directly addressable across recorded live streams or video archives. “The big thing is not having to move the data,” Munson said. “It stays with the media.” All content and metadata are usable directly via Fabric’s streaming pipeline for ad inserting, clip creation and more.

The highlight among the upgrades to Fabric’s application suite would be the new Creator Studio app, allowing for the easy management, distribution, and sale of media in Fabric direct to consumers or business partners.

It allows for simple creation of branded media property sites via automatic web UIs, and built-in media sales covering subscription and PPV, for live sports streaming, premium VOD, and video archive services. There’s also a new Content Analytics and Reporting app, covering both the performance metrics, and delivery quality of service. The updated Fabric application suite also includes version two of AI Clip Search, Video Editor, Media Wallet, and Embedded Player.

To learn more about Casablanca and the application suite, due for a summer release, click here.

Besides touting Casablanca, Eluvio was all over the NAB Show detailing its technologies and weighing in on industry issues, with Eluvio president and co-founder Serban Simu presenting at CDSA’s Content Protection Summit, and Munson speaking during the IABM Industry Breakfast Briefing panel; at the Main Stage Theater of the Capitalize Zone for the presentation “Content Fabric – Your Next Generation Distribution for Premium Live Streaming, PVOD, FAST Channels, and Video Archive Monetization at Scale”; on the panel “Leveraging the Power of Generative AI to Deliver Personalized Content at Scale”; and at the Women Connect Leadership Summit luncheon executive panel “The Future of Story: Tech Trends & Audience Engagement.”

The use cases for Eluvio’s Content Fabric have already been varied and successful, from premium VOD and electronic sell-through for studio content, live event streaming, and GenAI clip generation and content licensing. The new Casablanca release should ensure that trend continues.

EZDRM

For Olga Kornienko, COO and co-founder for industry security mainstay EZDRM, the 2024 version of NAB was memorable for its differences from 2023.

“Last year there was a bad case of pessimism, and it may be too early to say what 2024 [will bring] but the pessimism is gone,” she said. “The recession didn’t happen, and while there have been [content owner] budget cuts, there’s still a buy vs. build mentality internally [for DRM].”

Steve Christian, CMO of EZDRM concurred: “Very few people tend to build their own DRM structures nowadays, it’s so specialised.”

That’s continued positive news for EZDRM, whose DRM as a service offering has been a must-have for both content owners and distributors for more than 20 years now. “Security has been top of mind for a lot of companies,” Kornienko said. “We’ve been very busy.”

Case in point: Santa Clara, Calif.-based company Agora and EZDRM announced right before NAB a collaboration to bring content protection to live broadcasting, with Agora integrating real-time engagement capabilities with EZDRM’s content protection solutions for streaming.

“We chose to work with EZDRM because of their innovative solutions and commitment to providing security in a way that is transparent to the overall user experience,” Tony Zhao, CEO and co-founder of Agora, said in a statement. “Our partnership is important for our customers who require interactive live streaming with robust content protection. By integrating their cutting-edge DRM technology with our real-time engagement platform, we can now offer a cohesive solution that delivers unparalleled user experiences across a variety of applications, from sports broadcasting and betting to real-time karaoke. We look forward to working collaboratively to create comprehensive resources for customers and push the boundaries of secure, interactive live streaming.”

Christian also touted EZDRM’s work with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA https://c2pa.org ), an open technical standard that aims to allow for easy tracking of the origins of different media types.

With deepfakes and AI-generated content becoming more prevalent, he said organisations like C2PA will be critical in consumer trust of what they’re seeing in media and entertainment.

“We see this as the next stage against content of unknown provenance,” he said. “If you know where it comes from, you trust it more. You pay more when provenance is associated with it. That’s the future.”

Brightspot

Content management system (CMS) provider Brightspot came into NAB touting its partnership with software solutions and support services provider Chetu, with the goal of helping Chetu clients use Brightspot’s API-first platform to deliver and execute CMS projects quickly.

The partnership will see Brightspot’s API-first platform open to a new audience of developers and end users, according to Sandeep Hulsandra, chief strategy officer at Brightspot.

“As a leader in delivering custom CMS solutions, Chetu offers unparalleled expertise to guide clients through the ever-evolving digital landscape,” he said. “With Brightspot’s flexible, integration-ready architecture, we’re excited to empower Chetu’s customers with the content platform and tools they need to deliver world-class digital experiences.”

The partnership is indicative of Brightspot’s goal of expanding its partner ecosystem, Hulsandra said, with yet another partnership announcement expected in the coming months.

“We’re delivering on our goal of providing more implementations and delivery of professional services,” he added. Waypath Consulting, Material+, AITHERAS, Bannockburn, THINKware and more already partner with Brightspot to deliver services and ensure seamless integrations.

Hulsandra said Brightspot was also at NAB to keep an eye on larger media and entertainment trends. And he noticed what many did: generative AI seemed to be the dominate theme of NAB 2024.

“Broadcasters are looking at GenAI to do some of the heavy lifting as an automation tool, make things less difficult and cost-prohibitive,” Hulsandra said. “We want to make it simple for any broadcaster to give users that personal experience.”

PallyCon

Parag Manikpure, head of marketing for INKA Entworks’ content security and multi-DRM solutions subsidiary PallyCon, said his company continues to see rapid adoption of its anti-piracy offering, with customers’ feedback noting several benefits:

• They can monitor the whole world for piracy of what they own, instead of just specific regions
• Illegal content can be taken down in real time
• And PallyCon comes back to clients with piracy demand data, and audience insights

“The pain point [for content owners] is often they’re unaware the piracy is happening,” Manikpure said. “We provide what they need, highlight where [piracy is] happening, provide real-time enforcement, and give clients global coverage, 24-7. No one else is doing that in the market.”

And the pricing? Nothing up front.

PallyCon was also showing off its DRM License Cipher solution, which combats vulnerabilities in software-level DRM solutions, addressing most weak points, including reverse engineering of content decryption, tampering with license request responses, and compromised content keys.

DRM License Cipher aims to be a shield against software-level DRM vulnerabilities, with advanced encryption techniques, whitebox cryptography, and AppSealing, an application security solution that ensures the user’s service application is armed against threats.