M+E Daily

LAS VEGAS — The monster job of handling an unprecedented file transfer load, looking into GenAI for rights management, efficiencies in video delivery technologies, and partnerships to advance localisation efforts. Here’s what Signiant, Zixi, RSG Media, and OOONA brought to NAB.

Signiant

More, bigger files, in more places, with more complexity. More work — happily — for Signiant.

Jon Finegold, chief marketing officer the company, was among the busier people on the NAB Show floor, constantly holding court around the bustling Signiant booth. For good reason: file sizes are up 65 percent in the last five years. The company handled more than 2 billion files last year alone. Two-thirds of file transfer growth has come via international markets, and the overall number of destinations where content is flowing is up 50 percent.

Pick of number in the file transfer market, and it’s gonna be up. Way up.

“All of that is really good news for Signiant,” Finegold said. “We’re seeing a continued growth of cloud, but also on-prem is growing faster post-pandemic. Across the industry pressures are being felt on costs, and we’re able to drive down costs and drive efficiencies simultaneously.”

The combination of Signiant’s Media Shuttle SaaS offering, the system-to-system large file transfer service Jet, and Media Engine, the media management service that users search, preview, and interact with assets across Signiant-connected storage, was on full display at NAB, an all-in-one highlight for how broadcasters, production houses and sports leagues are handling today’s file loads with ease.

Live sports producers Manchester City, World Rugby, and RUV Slovenia, post-production houses Blazing Griffin, DigitalFilm Tree, and Cinema Maquina, and film distributors Blue Ant Media, A24 Distribution, and Deluxe Media Entertainment are among those all-in on what Signiant provides.

Zixi

A wide range of product updates centred around improved live video delivery performance over IP with cost reduction at the heart of it all was the name of the game for Zixi at NAB. And if there was one word that would sum up those advancements it had to be “efficiency.”

“On all fronts, customer relationships, enhancements to the Zixi Enabled Network, we’re focused on driving profitability,” said Harjinder Sandhu, director of product marketing for Zixi. “It’s about reducing the amount of compute you need, and the egress cost pain points.”

One of those upgrades is high-performance networking leveraging the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) resulting in efficiency improvements that only takes a fraction of processing power. This lets a customer deliver more than three times the amount of Zixi traffic with associated costs of compute reduced by two-thirds, Sandhu said.

There was dynamic latency optimising live IP video based on real-time network conditions, a unique Zixi offering that automatically finds the lowest possible latency based on network conditions.

Zixi’s “Error Concealment” replaces frames containing errors with skip frames while keeping audio in sync. “Timeline Normalization” improves downstream decoding and playback of video streams for broadcasters by fixing timelines in the transport stream introduced by upstream encoding and processing. And “Smooth Live Midroll Insertion” allows for the insertion of an ad into a live stream output.

“Zixi is mature, and our Zixi Enabled Network features 1,000-plus companies with more than 400 technology partners,” Sandhu said. “When you pick Zixi for your content delivery, you do it to keep your engineering and operations costs down.”

Ad Insertion Platform, Encompass, Red5, Singular.Live and Videon Labs were among the companies showing off their partnerships with Zixi during NAB.

RSG Media

Shiv Sehgal, EVP of audience analytics for RSG Media, may have had the analogy of the entire NAB Show, when he compared today’s streaming environment to a college dorm room: “There’s a lot of work getting done, but it’s a mess.”

Manual processes connecting retail data to viewership data, incomplete information driving programming decisions, the wrong audience segments being targeted, an overall incomplete picture of content rights … messy, indeed.

RSG Media’s entire business model — from rights management, to finance and royalties controls, to scheduling, to analytics, to advisory services — is centred around cleaning up and making sense of the mess, delivering tools help clients unlock the full potential of their IP.

“RSG wants to have reporting versatility that’s supportive of our clients,” Sehgal said, adding that the company is utilising both AI and ML for better forecasts and optimised tools. “What’s beyond a chatbot? We want to be able to leapfrog the competition, and get [GenAI] applied to real workflows that are human-centric, and support the content acquisition side.

“People want a more modern research experience, and that means understanding who the user is.”

One of the more recent partnerships by RSG to accomplish just that has been with invenioLSI, with the goal of managing the demands of finance, acquisitions, rights, forecasting, and more with as little friction as possible. Their partnership combines invenioLSI Content Financials and RSG Media RightsLogic to simplify the supply chain.

“We’re helping clients manage all sides of what they own, and it’s proving essential for small to mid-size clients,” Sehgal said.

OOONA

Media localisation firm OOONA came into NAB with major momentum, with new partnerships and a new education and training platform announcement for translators.

First there was the relaunch of cloud-based training platform OOONA EDU, which gives educators the ability to create personalised lessons, featuring self-paced courses, webinars, and workshops, all geared directly toward media professionals.

Security firm Convergent Risks is collaborating with OOONA to introduce a new security course for the media and entertainment industry, to help clients prepare to respond to unforeseen threats and actual security events.

“Proactive staff security training is paramount in order to mitigate most common security threats,” Mathew Gilliat-Smith, EVP at Convergent Risks, said a statement before NAB. “Our collaboration with OOONA on its revamped educational platform is a sensible avenue to provide comprehensive training on security threats at a global scale. We believe this initiative will provide a common set of security training best practices that apply to all full-time staff and freelancers working in the M&E sector, meeting the needs of content owners and addressing common studio requirements.”

Also prior to NAB was an announced collaboration between AVTpro, ProZ.com and The POOOL, OOONA’s online directory dedicated to media localisation industry professionals. The collaboration will see The POOOL update its talent profile details to include ProZ.com profile information and links, and display the AVTpro Certification badge on translator profiles on both The POOOL and ProZ.com.

“Our mission at The POOOL is to increase the visibility of media localisation professionals so they can be discovered quickly and easily by language service providers requiring specialised support,” Shlomi Harari, global account manager at OOONA, said in a statement before NAB. “Integrating the AVTpro badge in The POOOL directory was a priority for us. Cross-referencing member information with ProZ.com, the world’s most comprehensive platform for language professionals, will further enhance the value we offer both to professionals and to language service providers who use our services.”