Exclusives

Several members of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) opened IBC 2019 show in Amsterdam with new feature announcements, new services, and even new hires. Here’s what Adobe and GrayMeta, Gracenote, Mediamoprh, EditShare and NAGRA shared to kick off the conference.

GrayMeta

AI-powered metadata company GrayMeta announced additional functionality to its GrayMeta Curio Extension for Adobe Creative Cloud, offering improved time and efficiency for editors who are using the extension.

Through the GrayMeta Curio Extension for Creative Cloud, editors can easily find, edit and compose digital content faster and more efficiently. The extension enables users to access digital archives within the Adobe application and find specific details of assets, all while using insights created via machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“By bringing all the asset metadata to the editing platform, users can take advantage of data intelligence in their native creative environment, further reducing time and effort for the creative professional to realize their vision,” said John Ying, SVP of product management for GrayMeta.

It marks just the latest streamlined content creation within Adobe Creative Cloud applications by the company since this year’s NAB Show, with Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop also getting GrayMeta’s attention: Editors can utilize GrayMeta’s in-house Football Detection AI model in Adobe Premiere Pro to quickly identify when key events within a football match take place; are able to find exact assets easily by searching for content directly within Adobe Premiere Pro; and can now line up work by selecting multiple assets to download, specifying whether original or proxy content.

Using GrayMeta, editors are also now able to import time-based OCR (optical character recognition) metadata created by machine learning services, as markers or clips into a project; access GrayMeta’s full suite of machine learning technical cues; import the texted lower 3rds and textless-tail detections generated by GrayMeta machine learning services, directly into the timeline as markers or clips; and import transcription speech-to-text AI results directly into their project as an SRT (SubRip subtitle file) based caption file.

Gracenote

Nielsen’s Gracenote kicked off IBC by announcing the launch of a new Video ID Distribution System, one geared toward enabling content creators and owners of media programming to more easily distribute all content associated with global OTT services, smart device manufacturers and cable and satellite TV providers.

Using the Gracenote ID Distribution system, both studios and networks will be able to register content with Gracenote‘s Video Database and in turn obtain connected Gracenote IDs, to better enable search and discovery in program guides, interfaces and OTT catalogs. Content companies can also submit their own descriptive metadata, tags and imagery to Gracenote, which will review and prepare for distribution.

“For years, the industry has relied on Gracenote to help organize numerous and vast catalogs of popular TV shows and movies,” said Simon Adams, Gracenote’s chief product officer. “With the growing popularity of new original programs and short-form video, our global customers face new challenges connecting users to all the content they have to offer. The new Gracenote ID Distribution system will help creators and owners secure the broadest possible distribution of their programming while providing leading VOD and OTT services a means to easily identify and access relevant metadata for next-generation search and discovery experiences.”

Gracenote IDs and metadata are touted as being able to provide common links between TV series, seasons and episodes, related TV and movie genres, celebrities, and other descriptive information. Content companies will be able to submit movies, TV programs or short form video content for inclusion in Gracenote’s Video Database, which brings together metadata, linear schedules and VOD/OTT catalogs for more than 85 countries, and receive certified Gracenote IDs at the beginning of the lifecycle for any piece of content.

Mediamorph

Content Value Management (CVM) cloud platform specialist Mediamorph announced a new offering for intelligent storefront merchandising, a solution that tracks and automates how content is positioned on the storefront, in order to increase monetization and ensure compliance for the content provider.

The expanded CVM platform solution will drive a better VOD user experience, while also more effectively marketing and monetizing licensed content, Mediamorph said.

“With so many platforms and more titles than ever, we found most media and entertainment organizations are manually managing how they merchandise their content,” said Rob Gardos, CEO of Mediamorph. “Sitting at the epicenter of the entertainment industry, Mediamorph realized that Content Acquisition and Programming teams not only need to track rights, dates/windows, contract terms and ensure compliance, but also want to leverage rules and automation to better exploit the content they are licensing. This incredibly powerful functionally is setting the standard to not only increase revenue, but also enable a better user experience throughout the industry.”

Via a single view, Mediamorph’s CVM platform allows clients to quickly manage, edit and filter collections more efficiently, and ensure that the right content is available at the right time and at the right price.

NAGRA

Content protection and multiscreen TV solutions provider NAGRA came into the show with several new partnership announcements, and kicked IBC off with yet another, sharing that telecommunications company Vodafone will extend deployment of NAGRA security solutions across its operating companies.

NAGRA’s cloud-hosted and operated security services platform cloud.SSP will help protect Vodafone TV service (VTV) in set-top boxes, browsers, devices and connected TVs. It marks the first major rollout of the NAGRA Security Services Platform at scale to multiple countries (including Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy and Romania). Based on a SaaS model and using a multi-tenant cloud platform, cloud.SSP supports each operator market as a single tenant, with secure device authentication and session management features.

“Securing both the content and the service is key to Vodafone and NAGRA security solutions are best-in-class,” said Nuno Sanches, group head of fixed product development at Vodafone. “As we continue to roll out VTV to more of our operating countries, we rely on NAGRA to ensure that we remain at the forefront of service protection and provide the very best product offering to our consumers.”

Thierry Legrand, SVP EMEA for NAGRA, added: “We are delighted that Vodafone has decided to extend our security solutions to all of its operating countries and we will continue to support them as they extend their service even further. With NAGRA cloud.SSP, Vodafone is able to benefit from scalable service protection, ensuring they are fully prepared.”

EditShare

EditShare, a tech provider specializing in collaboration, security, and intelligent storage solutions for media creation and management, announced it is appointing industry vet Stuart McGeechan as its new VP of customer success, where he’ll be charged with building high-performance teams and programs that amplify customer engagement and enablement.

McGeechan — who brings more than 35 years of experience in systems integration, program management and professional services to the role, with stints with both Cisco and NDS Group — will be responsible for training, support, and professional service teams.

“Customer experience is at the heart of EditShare’s core values. Our mission is to simplify storytelling and enable our customers to be incredibly successful. From the moment they place the order until the time they turn it off and go home, the Vice President of Customer Success owns the experience of that customer journey,” said Conrad Clemson, CEO of EditShare. “We are building a world-class customer success model that moves from reactive response to proactive outreach. It’s a model in which we envision connecting with the customer to let them know that we can make their experience better.

“EditShare already has the core technology platform that we can proactively enhance. Stuart has the passion, vision and experience to expand how we engage with our customers and channel partners, and the success they can achieve with EditShare.”