Cognizant Post NAB Report 2012 · 2012. 5. 14. · Solution Highlights Once again, Avid had...

NAB Report 2012

For Media & Entertainment

2012 NAB Report

2 COGNIZANT BUSINESS CONSULTING ‐ INFORMATION, MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT PRACTICE 2012

Contents

Introductory Note ........................................................................................................................... 3

Technology Category: Digital Asset Management .......................................................................... 4

Technology Category: Content Protection ................................................................................... 13

Technology Category: Transcoding ............................................................................................... 16

Technology Category: QC .............................................................................................................. 25

Technology Category: Content Distribution ................................................................................. 28

Technology Category: Storage and Archive ................................................................................. 31

Technology Category: Mobility ..................................................................................................... 35

Technology Category: Social Media Marketing and Analytics ...................................................... 37

Technology Category: Ad Sales Systems ....................................................................................... 39

Technology Category: Rights Management .................................................................................. 44

2012 NAB Report


INTRODUCTORY NOTE I would like to start by thanking those of you who were able to attend our dinner on Tuesday

night of the NAB conference. As in past years, it was a great success for us. We appreciated

the representation from nearly every major Studio and the numerous broadcasters. It felt like a

great networking event. We hope you enjoyed Cut. I would also like to thank those of you who

joined us for our demonstration of assetSERV (MAM BPaaS), Cheer Meter (mobile app), and

SMAAP (Social Media Analytics offering).

The following report contains our observations from this year’s NAB conference across a

number of key vendor categories. Our objective for this is to provide some insight and

hopefully help readers to focus attention on the vendors who might best meet their specific

needs.

As in previous years, we have provided our observations based on what we were able to collect

during the Show. Please note that we may not have been able to spend equal or sufficient time

with every vendor. Much of this was based on our team’s availability and vendor availability.

Omission or brevity should not be considered a criticism of a vendor or product. It could be the

by‐product of too many vendors and too little time.

Also note that we do have partners (and favorites) in this space. Examples include our

partnership with MediaBeacon to provide a cloud‐based MAM BPaaS offering and Fizziology to

provide services around Social Media Analytics. We have attempted to put into place the

validations that ensure an unbiased perspective in this report. In reviewing, I believe we have

done that.

Thank you again for all your support. I hope you find this useful. Please let us know if there is

anything we can do for you.

Frank Leal Practice Lead – Information Services, Media and Entertainment Business Consulting

2012 NAB Report


TECHNOLOGY CATEGORY: DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT BY BENJAMIN ROPKE ([email protected]) & DAVID LIU ([email protected])

Show Observations

In the Digital Asset Management space, companies continued

their growth and evolution from building standalone solutions

that simply manage assets, to flexible, cross‐platform solutions

that highlight process simplification and ease of integration

with other external systems.

Although there is some overlap, we have organized the asset

management solutions on show at this year’s NAB conference

into two main categories: Production Asset Management and

Enterprise Asset Management.

Production Asset Management solutions are focused on

managing a combination of work‐in‐progress and finished

materials, and providing support for the entire broadcast

supply chain including: feed acquisition, logging and tight

integrations with post production, master control, playout and

archive systems. In order to reliably provide this range of

functionality in the dynamic, and often chaotic, environment of

live News and Sports production, as well as 24 x 7 linear

distribution, products in this category tend to limit support to a

group of well‐defined video formats only.

By contrast, Enterprise Asset Management tends to focus on

the management and multi‐channel distribution of finished

masters and supports almost all formats (both time‐based and

non‐time‐based) with strength in archive management and

distribution workflows. However these products usually don’t

include some of the video‐specific capabilities that Production DAM systems do such as frame‐

accurate proxy browsing, shot listing and EDL exchange with non‐linear editing systems. Most

of the current cloud offerings in asset management fall into this Enterprise Asset Management

Category.

VENDORS AT NAB Avid

Cinegy

Dalet

Harris Invenio

IPV

MassTech

MediaBeacon

MediaBin

North Plains

OpenText

T3Media

Tangerine &

Prospero

Tedial

TMD Mediaflex

Vizrt

2012 NAB Report


Regardless of which category these solutions fall into, every asset management vendor that we

saw this year provided workflow automation or Business Process Management (BPM)

capabilities. There was definitely some variation with respect to the maturity and robustness of

these solutions, but it is clear that all the players in this space understand that providing the

ability to orchestrate workflows across the asset management ecosystem is now a “must have.”

Most vendors are also responding to the proliferation of smart phone and tablet devices for

corporate use and have extended their product support to mobile platforms, particularly for

review and approval workflows.

Search capabilities still vary somewhat between products, but there is a definite trend toward

the incorporation of advanced, enterprise search engines (like FAST and Solr) to provide

features such as faceted search and federation of search across multiple data sources.

Overall, as a result of the continued demand for quality DAM solutions in media and

entertainment as well as the continuation of healthy competition, products in this industry are

reaching feature parity. Due to this, we believe that DAM vendor selection decisions in the

future will rely more heavily on the strength of each vendor’s support capabilities, their

demonstrated ability to partner with clients, and their openness for integration.

Solution Highlights

Once again, Avid had significant presence at NAB. Interplay Production 2.6 is the latest version

of their media management and post‐production project management focused tool.

Enhancements on display included end‐to‐end support for ProRes, JPEG 2000 and various 3D

formats, as well as the ability to use a single instance of Interplay Production to manage

multiple ISIS installations.

Avid was also showing the latest version of their MAM solution: Interplay MAM 4 which was

released at the end of 2011. A new feature in Interplay MAM 4 is a unified media player called

Interplay Common Playback Service (ICPS) which allows for web‐based browsing, metadata

logging, annotation of media along with shot list creation. Also included was a redesigned

integration with Interplay Production to enable efficient exchange of media and metadata

between the two systems. Avid also demonstrated a new graphical, drag‐and‐drop workflow

design tool to support flexible workflow orchestration and monitoring.

Another key theme for Avid this year was distributed production workflows. They

demonstrated a new product called Interplay Sphere. Sphere uses the Morpheus technology

that Avid obtained as part of their MaxT acquisition to transcode “on the fly” and stream low

2012 NAB Report


resolution proxies to remote users in the field so that they can integrate media from their local

machine with media from centralized storage on the same timeline.

With this year’s Interplay improvements and the completion of the integration of the acquired

Blue Order and MaxT technologies, Avid should be able to take full advantage of its position in

the market created by the penetration of its other products. Avid will continue to be on every

broadcaster’s short list of potential Production Asset Management solutions and is likely to be

one of the market leaders in this space.

At this year’s show, Cinegy again positioned themselves as a software‐only company focused

on developing high quality tools for broadcasters that will run on commodity IT Hardware.

Highlights this year included the official launch of version 9.1 of Cinegy Archive and Cinegy

Desktop. This new version of Archive provides a new public API with both SOAP and REST based

web services to better support systems integrations. Cinegy Desktop 9.1 also includes an

improved editor with features such as an enhanced import tool (with support for P2, XDCAM

and generic MXF files), color correction and support for up to 256 channels of audio. The

combination of Cinegy Archive and Cinegy Desktop make for a highly capable, light weight

media management platform for smaller operations that don’t warrant an investment in a full

blown Production Asset Management implementation.

Also on show were the latest versions of Cinegy Air and Cinegy Multiviewer; software solutions

that run on commodity IT hardware, support conversion from SDI to RTP/UDP streams and

offer a compelling, lower‐cost alternative to using specialized hardware for playout and

monitoring. They also give broadcasters the ability to minimize their SDI video footprint in

favor of IP‐based streams and presage a future in which they may no longer need parallel data

and video infrastructure running throughout their facilities.

Finally, in addition to providing highly engaging and entertaining demos of their products,

Cinegy was the only vendor that offered visitors a DVD with all of their software on it to take

home and try for themselves (provided they contact Cinegy for a temporary license key of

course).

Dalet also had a significant presence at this year’s show. They announced Galaxy, the latest

version of MAM platform which is targeted for a year end 2012 release. Galaxy will serve as the

foundation of their enterprise offering (Media Life) as well as their domain specific packages:

News Suite, Sports Factory and Radio Suite.

Galaxy will also ship with a new workflow engine that can combine human and automated tasks

into a single workflow. It includes a graphical design tool that is BPMN 2.0 compliant as well as

2012 NAB Report


a library of connectors to standard media processing and media management technologies

such as transcoders, WAN accelerators and automated QC tools. It also included some basic

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) capability to report on key workflow performance metrics.

Additional Galaxy features include a redesigned UI, a new multi‐track video editor (One Cut), an

advanced Solr‐based search engine and a new NLE integration module (Xtend) with support for

Avid, FCP, and Adobe Premier Pro. With Xtend, Dalet is clearly trying to reduce their

dependence on Marquis Medway. Galaxy will also support new industry standards such as AS‐

02 and FIMS.

With the launch of Galaxy, the inclusion of a standards compliant BPM engine and support for

AS02 and FIMS, Dalet’s showing at this year’s NAB reinforces their position as a market leader

in Production Asset Management.

Harris once again held their prominent position in the North Hall at this year’s show where they

had their comprehensive range of broadcast products on display. For Media Asset

Management, they were demonstrating the capabilities of the latest version of Invenio. Of

particular note was a new BPM/workflow tool based on the Microsoft Workflow Foundation.

This new workflow engine is scheduled for final release in September of this year and will

include resource management capabilities to track and optimize the utilization of people,

devices and facilities involved in production and distribution workflows. It also includes some

lightweight Business Activity Monitoring that can be used to instrument workflows and drive

some basic dashboards.

Harris Invenio also now leverages Microsoft’s FAST technology to deliver powerful search

capabilities including facetted search and the ability to federate searches across multiple

systems.

The Harris team was also keen to note that in recent years, Invenio has been rebuilt from the

ground up using a Services Oriented Architecture. Nearly all functionality is exposed via web

services APIs, enabling simplified integration with other Harris systems as well as 3rd party

products. In fact, Harris confirmed that the Invenio user interface uses the same APIs that are

published for 3rd party integration.

This rebuild and its associated focus on workflow and interface standardization is moving

Invenio in the right direction. However, it remains to be seen if this will help Harris finally gain

some DAM market share in the U.S.

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IPV launched several new tools and enhancements to existing tools in order to help clients

increase productivity in live, fast turnaround production environments. IPV was demonstrating

their new version of SpectreView, their popular proxy browse and shot listing tool that now

incorporates support for a broad range of HD formats as well as legacy SD video formats. Also

on display was Curator, IPV’s Media Management module which includes search, configurable

live logging capabilities as well as proxy‐based browsing and creation of EDLs that can be sent

to NLEs for finishing. Of particular note was IPV’s full‐featured Adobe Premier Pro integration.

Adobe is visibly putting resources behind Premier to attract disenchanted FCP users and could

start to compete more directly with Avid. IPV also demonstrated Metadata Central, a new tool

built on their Teregator technology which provides powerful search capabilities across multiple,

disparate data sources. Like many other companies in the DAM space, IPV has also been

focused on incorporating workflow. Their BPM product is called Process Engine. Process Engine

utilizes Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation as the basis and includes a simple drag and

drop design interface as well as a long list of macros and web services to connect to common

media processing technologies. From our perspective, the IPV suite of products is better

positioned to help clients solve challenges in media management for work in progress than they

are to serve as a full blown DAM solution.

Masstech made significant progress this year, closing the gap between their product and some

of the leading solutions. At this year’s NAB, in addition to a new stylish user interface, they

unveiled a new product line called Diamond, and updates to their Emerald, Topaz and Iris

product lines. The new Diamond collection consists of workflow and interoperability apps that

provide simple drag and drop ‘gates’ for integrating simplified workflows and high speed

content transfers.

Masstech also showcased its other updates including a ‘News’ version of its Emerald 7.5LE mini

MAM for LTO tape archiving, high quality speed transcoding, and content management all

completely within an Avid iNews interface. In addition, Masstech announced that all of their

digital archiving and restoring solutions now come with support for IBM’s LTFS material

interchange and portability. All these new additions and updates seem to reinforce their goal

of giving their customers more value‐added features that help to optimize efficiency in digital

workflows.

MediaBeacon has done a good job at growing its service offerings to expand beyond its already

flexible DAM solution, and at the same time making key partnerships throughout the industry.

At NAB this year, MediaBeacon demonstrated their Digital Collection Management solution

that lets users connect one asset to multiple projects without making copies and using their

simple and intuitive user interface. In addition, they also showcased their Order Management

solution that allows users to instantly place orders for graphics, track status, receive final

2012 NAB Report


assets, and archive them when finished. From a partnership perspective, this year MediaBeacon

has teamed up with Ross Video to bring their asset and order management to Ross’ XPression

real‐time graphics technology in a solution called OpenMAM. Additionally, Cognizant has

partnered with MediaBeacon to deliver assetSERV, a cloud‐based BPaaS DAM solution targeted

at managing marketing collateral, which was also demonstrated at this year’s NAB.

MediaBeacon continues to show a leadership position in the Enterprise Asset Management

space while attempting to expand into Production Asset Management.

Autonomy, which is now an HP Company, was in the HP booth at NAB this year showing their

newest release of Virage MediaBin 8. Autonomy claims that this version of MediaBin further

leverages their IDOL technology to automatically tag and generate metadata about the assets it

manages. It also provides multi‐language support for asset logging and tagging. Given the

recent HP acquisition, we suspect it will be quite some time before a clear picture emerges as

to what the future holds for Autonomy, Virage and MediaBin.

North Plains was back at NAB this year, also presenting at the HP booth. North Plains continues

to offer its Telescope Media Asset Management platform as a licensed product but also as

Telescope OnDemand; a cloud‐based hosted solution, either in SaaS model or what they call

DaaS (DAM as a Service). DaaS adds human resources to administer a client’s Telescope

OnDemand instance and to assist in the curation of the collection of assets it is being used to

manage. North Plains Telescope seems to be exclusively within the Enterprise Media Asset

Management space. It supports a broad range of time‐based and non time‐based media and

includes visual annotation capability to support approval workflows. It also has a basic

workflow tool to help with support task management, but it is certainly not a full blown BPM

solution. North Plains also uses its own proprietary search technology that does not yet support

faceted search, although they did confirm that it is on their roadmap. When asked about the

implications of their recent Xinet acquisition, the North Plains team acknowledged that Xinet

fills a gap in their product line by providing support for workgroup level, work‐in ‐progress

media management. They also confirmed that while there will be some development done to

ensure that Xinet and Telescope can interoperate and smoothly exchange assets and metadata,

there are no plans to consolidate the two products into a single offering any time soon.

OpenText showcased two main products at NAB this year that they plan to make officially

available in May: Global Brand Management and Media Management 7.1. Global Brand

Management is the latest in a series of customer experience management solutions that

OpenText has introduced since last year. The solution provides enterprise‐wide workflow to

improve productivity and enrich user experience with faceted and expert search, enabling users

to drill down and find assets more quickly. It also offers the opportunity to create new digital

2012 NAB Report


assets in the form of subclips from a video, and extend integration and collaboration with

internal and external users, processes and applications.

As for OpenText Media Management 7.1, the latest version provides extended integration and

collaboration with internal and external users, processes and technology. It can also be

integrated with OpenText’s new Managed File Transfer solution to move large media files more

quickly and securely. The launch of Media Management 7.1 and the integration of the Nstein

technology that was acquired in 2010 should help OpenText Media Management continue as a

market leader in Enterprise Asset Management in 2012. However, in order to maintain this

position it will need a rapid revision to its UI technology. The bet OpenText made that Flex

would be the UI framework of the future has clearly not paid off.

OpenText also continues to offer Media Management On‐Demand, their hosted version of

Media Management that provides a SaaS solution for the management of marketing and

advertising collateral.

Tedial has become a strong new entrant in the US market with recent updates to their product.

At this year’s NAB, they showcased several new features in their Tarsys MAM solution. They

now are able to automatically extract closed captioning information during ingest, display it in

their proxy browse tool and re‐insert it during transcoding for distribution. Tarsys also includes

a new web‐based UI that simplifies collaborative working and adds additional functionality for

cataloguing, editing, and exporting media to third‐party systems. To enable the

implementation, monitoring and execution of production workflows in a full web‐based

environment, Tedial demonstrated its Ficus BPM engine, which has been a part of the product

line since its inception. Lastly, Tedial showcased their strong integration with HSM solutions,

including their own HSM solution called AST. This solution is tuned for media workflows and

keeps a global view of asset requests in order to optimize both full and partial file restores.

The big announcement by TMD at this year’s show was the launched of Unified Media Services

(UMS), a unified web services based API for the entire Mediaflex suite intended to better

support systems integration.

TMD was also showing added support for Closed Captioning as well as both Windows and Web‐

based Clients. The web client has cross platform support for most features, but does use a

Silverlight based video player. To address this TMD has added an approval app for iOS.

Mediaflex includes Avid and FCP integrations but has not yet added support for Adobe Premier

Pro. TMD also demonstrated strong search capabilities within Mediaflex, built on the open

source Apache Solr search engine which includes features such as faceted search. On the

workflow front, TMD has offered the Mediaflex BPM module for quite a while now. It features a

2012 NAB Report


graphical workflow design tool with pre‐built connectors for integration with 3rd party

technology products including encoders, transcoders, NLE’s, archive systems, QC systems and

storage platforms.

TMD also has history of doing Tape Library Management which positions Mediaflex as one of

the only vendors that combines Physical and Digital Asset Management into a single solution;

allowing clients to managed legacy assets that are still on video tape in the same system as

their digital assets. TMD also noted that this capability readily supports a growing number of

workflows that (based on storage constraints) require LTO tapes full of digitized content to be

ejected from the library, shelved and managed as physical assets.

In addition to its unique crossover capabilities in Physical Asset Management and Production

Asset Management, TMD Mediaflex also has more support for non‐video digital assets than

most in the Production space. It is definitely work a hard look by those who need a product

with the potential to span Physical, Production and Enterprise Asset Management.

Rather than showing a new version of Ardome at this year’s NAB, Vizrt instead showed the Viz

Media Engine. It is essentially a rebuilt, repackaged and rebranded combination of their various

asset management tools. It is intended to support the entire digital supply chain for broadcast:

from ingest, to edit, to distribution and archive.

The core asset management module has been rebuilt with comprehensive web services APIs to

support integration. Vizrt has also upgraded the underlying search engine from Lucene to Solr

to provide faceted search capability. Viz Media Engine also ships with an all new UI built using

the Google Toolkit and includes an HTML 5 video player for proxy browse.

Viz Media Engine also has an optional BPM engine for workflow which they OEM from Mayam.

As part of the Viz Media Engine Vizrt has also developed a new Avid integration called

VizConnect which uses the Avid Media Toolkit to provide fully supported interchange of media

and metadata with Avid Interplay. Also on display at the Vizrt booth was a new Adobe CS6

integration. The existing FCP integration is also still available with Viz Media Engine.

In Viz Media Engine, Vizrt finally has a modern asset management platform with a

contemporary UI and a solid API to support integrations. However, this is a bit of a reboot for

the product line and it took a long time to come to fruition. We'll have to wait and see if Vizrt

will be able to use it to make up the ground lost to its competitors in Production Asset

Management over the last few years.

2012 NAB Report


Thought Equity Motion announced a name change and is now known as T3Media. They have

split their service offerings into two distinct models: Licensing and Platform.

T3Media Licensing is the new name for the services Thought Equity Motion has been offering

for several years now. For content owners T3Media Licensing offers the opportunity to open up

new revenue streams by selling news, sports and stock footage content through their B2B/B2C

portal. T3Media provides the infrastructure to store and deliver the assets as well as the human

resources to digitize, segment, log and clear the content. T3Media typically establishes a

revenue share agreement with content owners to cover the cost of their services.

For video producers, the T3Media Licensing site provides access to a broad range of high quality

archival and stock footage. It also tools to enable producers to effectively search across these

libraries as well as the ability to clip, purchase, transcode and take delivery of content.

T3Media Platform is a new offering.

Essentially, T3Media has taken the experience, technology and services developed while

building T3Media Licensing and have packaged it as a hosted and managed DAM solution.

T3Media positions it as a flexible, scalable solution complete with DR redundancy targeted at

owners of large libraries of content who want to outsource the preservation of their archive.

Tangerine & Prospero also hosted potential clients in their suite at NAB to starting introducing

themselves to the U.S. Media and Entertainment market. Tangerine and Prospero are now

together under an umbrella organization called “To the New”. Tangerine is the Content Services

group which aims to help clients by create, manage and publish content on multiple platforms

while Prospero is the technology group focused on Systems Engineering, Software

Development.

Tangerine/Prospero recently partnered with Iron Mountain to build Iron Mountain’s Digital

Content Repository and are clearly looking to leverage the experience and technology

developed with other clients in future engagements. However, what was somewhat unclear

was exactly what their “Go to Market” strategy will be: licensed product, SaaS or business and

technology consulting. Regardless of which route they choose, based on the scale and

complexity of the Iron Mountain implementation, we suspect we’ll be hearing more from them

in years to come.

2012 NAB Report


TECHNOLOGY CATEGORY: CONTENT PROTECTION BY RACHIT AWASTHI ([email protected])

Show Observations

The underlying technologies that form the foundation of the

content protection space matured noticeably over the past year.

The focus last year was on proving the capabilities of the core

technology behind fingerprinting and watermarking. This year

the trend was to showcase how these and other key

technologies could be brought together under a common theme

to address a larger segment of the content value chain rather

than excel in isolation. Civolution’s SyncNow, a proof of concept

demo that allowed content consumers, advertisers, and content publishers to interact on the

second screen while watching the first screen, was an excellent example of this trend. It took

technologies such as fingerprinting previously aimed solely at content publishers looking to

control distribution of their content, and made it relevant to the end consumer via a second

screen application.

Another indication of this noticeable maturing was that companies are now thinking about the

bigger picture. Whereas in the past, each company seemed to have its own niche ‐ today,

overlapping products show that product classification is becoming more formalized. While it

remains to be seen if the market accepts Irdeto’s view of the content protection space, the

company took a stab at classification and clear segmentation of products based on target

audience. Its Piracy Continuum demonstrated to the market that the company has a strong

suite of products in each segment.

Lastly, the DRM space is increasingly in a concerning state of flux, especially with UltraViolet.

At this point, we are still waiting to see how the major players in the space (e.g., Verimatrix,

Widevine, BuyDRM) will shake out.

Solution Highlights

In keeping with the theme this year of finding relevant applications for content recognition

technologies, both Civolution and iPharro displayed applications, with Civolution impressing us

by creating a compelling story both for smart TVs and second screen companion devices.

VENDORS AT NAB Civolution

Discretix

iPharro

Irdeto

2012 NAB Report


Irdeto’s Piracy Continuum demonstrates the company’s long term bet on over‐the‐top (OTT)

adoption. ASG Atempo meanwhile has decided to put its weight behind Sony’s newest attempt

at being successful in the optical storage space.

iPharro showcased applications built around video content identification technology. iPharro

continues to extend its MediaSeeker Core Platform, which retains the ability to tweak the

density and granularity of fingerprints with Adaptive Video Fingerprinting. The UI will hopefully

become more polished with time. The system is video format agnostic and is easily interfaced

through a collection of APIs. With the focus now shifting to creating applications for its base

technology, the company classified the use of its technology into “upstream” (or cost saving)

applications and “downstream” (or revenue increasing) applications. Examples of upstream

applications of this technology include Versioning, Metadata Restoration, Media Redundancy

Prevention, and Archive Future Proofing. Examples of downstream applications of this

technology include TV Content Monitoring, Internet Monitoring, Client / Device based content

identification.

iPharro Media AdMon is an automated TV advertisement monitoring and detection software.

The system analyses a preselected list of TV channels for advertisements to be tracked and

provides detection information such as channel name and detection time within minutes of

airing. The product features difference detection capabilities that detect and highlight

differences between content versions. iPharro claims that AdMon customers see large savings

through the elimination of time‐consuming manual processes.

iPharro Media TVCM is an end‐to‐end TV content monitoring system that uses its MediaSeeker

engine to identify broadcast content in real time across multiple channels. This application

claims to be near real time, scalable, and can analyze up to 10 channels per using PC.

Civolution showcased three main solutions – SyncNow, an automated content recognition

system; its Teletrax media monitoring service; and the NexGuard forensic watermarking

solution.

SyncNow, incorporating technologies from the other two solutions, was clearly the buzz

generator for Civolution at NAB 2012. The SyncNow smart TV demo was a clear indication of

the direction that Civolution intends to take with its stable of audio and video Automated

Content Recognition (ACR) technologies. The key take away here is that content recognition

technology is venturing outside its traditional bounds to explore value generating ideas beyond

the anti‐piracy applications that nurtured it during its infancy.

The SyncNow‐Smart Services is a server side content identification and triggering service that

provides real time recognition of broadcast content. Companion app providers can build

2012 NAB Report


synchronized multi‐screen ad campaigns, enabling direct product purchases from companion

devices. Equally compelling was their demonstration of the SyncNow‐2nd Screen solution in

which a companion device (an iPad in the demo) recognized the content onscreen using audio

recognition and was able to present synchronized interactive user experiences. As a natural

progression to this ACR technology Civolution offers SyncNow‐Smart TV enabling value‐adding

opportunities of SyncNow on the larger main screen of the TV set itself. Civolution has

positioned itself well to integrate its technologies into the next wave of smart connected

devices. If Civolution can leverage and extend its hardware and application partner

relationships in a meaningful way, SyncNow has the potential to become the next ‘standard’

feature added to newer smart devices.

Last year, Irdeto introduced its ActiveCloak for Media which has firmly established itself as the

cornerstone of Irdeto’s offering. Irdeto recently added Comcast and Rogers as customers to

protect their over‐the‐top (OTT) solutions on multiple devices. At NAB 2012 the company

demonstrated its ActiveCloak technology on the iPad showcasing Comcast’s XFinity TV

implementation. With the acquisition of Bay TSP and Rovi’s BD+ technology last year, expect

the acquired technologies to be incorporated as part of Irdeto Intelligence (dynamic security for

Blu‐ray discs) later this year.

Irdeto’s focus this year was its trademarked Piracy Continuum, a method for content owners,

Pay TV platform operators, device manufacturers and ecosystem enablers to understand and

address the market. The products within the continuum span the entire breadth of the target

audience.

Irdeto has remained true to its two key themes of Dynamic Security (which makes it harder for

hackers to crack security) and Monetization (extract value across the content lifecycle) and has

created a breadth of solutions to fit along the Piracy Continuum. The momentum of platform

operators going OTT represents an opportunity for Irdeto. In addition to traditional OTT like

Netflix, there are other industry segments going OTT such as cable operators (Comcast Xfinity),

telcos (Verizon), satellite (Globecast MyGlobeTV), and even content owners (HBO Go). With

clear segmentation, proven themes, and the continued introduction of newer products

(TraceMark), Irdeto seems well poised to take advantage to the industry shift to the OTT model.

2012 NAB Report


TECHNOLOGY CATEGORY: TRANSCODING BY TYLER KNIGHT ([email protected])

Show Observations

As compared with the hyperbolic crush of previous years, the

aisles of NAB felt positively quiet this year. The same could

not be said for many of the booths and back conference

rooms. For many of the established vendors this seemed to be

a year for getting work done and with minor exceptions, the

new features in the transcoding market reflected that. This

year also marks the entrance into the report of a handful of

new vendors. It seems that TV Everywhere and OTT have

sparked something of a transcoder gold rush.

Without a doubt, TV Everywhere was, in fact, everywhere this

year. A number of vendors touted their abilities to handle

various types of adaptive bitrate encoding (ABR), notably the

new MPEG‐DASH standard. UltraViolet deliverables made it

into the feature list at a couple of stands. Several vendors took

seriously the need to prep content for both linear and non‐

linear distribution. Much like the MAM space, transcode

vendors are surrounding their core offering with workflow

solutions, although so far none of them have embraced a BPM

or BAM‐compliant solution. Many did add support for

workflow‐centric standards such as those from AMWA (e.g. AS‐02/AS‐03), as well as faster or

better quality complex video processing, and quality control. This was also a year where recent

legislation drove the feature set with nearly ubiquitous support for audio loudness monitoring

and growing support for automatic loudness correction (re: CALM act) and closed caption

manipulation (re: FCC 12‐9).

Show highlights include:

The Kayak application platform from Digital Rapids

Lightspeed hardware accelerators from Telestream

Significantly faster than real‐time, fully gridded support for complex video processing

(e.g. standards conversion) by RadiantGrid as well as their acquisition by Wohler

VENDORS AT NAB AmberFin

Broadcast

International

Cisco

Digital Rapids

Elemental

Encoding.com

Harmonic

Media Excel

Radiant Grid

Telestream

2012 NAB Report


Broadcast codec support by Encoding.com and encrypted file support by Zencoder.

UQC from Amberfin as well as significant improvements from the pure‐play QC vendors

(See our Quality Control section below)

Ultraviolet support from Elemental and DigitalRapids

The Elemental buy‐back program

A huge buzz around MPEG‐DASH

Market Trends

TVEverywhere

There’s no doubt that the consumer appetite for video content via a variety of Internet‐

connected or mobile devices continues to grow. With huge market growth expected for multi‐

format transcoders, it’s no wonder that everyone who could create a video stream, slapped

OTT or multi‐screen distribution on the press release and waited for the cash to roll in. Adaptive

Bitrate encoding was again a huge story for many folks, especially with the ratification of MPEG‐

DASH (more on that next). The folks at Rovi even created an adaptive bitrate version of DivX.

Unfortunately, as mentioned in the pre‐report, the proliferation of consumer devices/viewing

channels and the confusion in the DRM market continue to cause headaches for content

owners and distributors that the new feature announcements largely left unfulfilled. In fact, the

patchwork of functionality between vendors makes sorting the wheat from the chaff a

challenge. We found that the most compelling companies included most, if not all, of the

following features:

A full complement of DRM support (Verimatrix, Widevine, PlayReady, etc.)

Full SCTE‐35 ad insertion capabilities optionally with the ability, to add advertising

breaks where they didn’t exist in the original

Support for MPEG‐DASH as well as all three of the major adaptive bitrate (ABR) formats

(HLS, Smooth Streaming and HDS)

Support for generating multiple profiles at once, preferably with a compact size and

power footprint

Beyond that, buyers are likely to find end‐to‐end solutions ready for head‐end deployment (e.g.

Cisco, Harmonic, Envivio, RGB Networks), as well as a variety of encoding/packaging solutions

suitable for use at any point in the content supply chain.

2012 NAB Report


MPEG‐DASH

In an effort to stave off a debilitating standards war (think VHS vs. Betamax), the standards

folks at MPEG have introduced and ratified the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP or

DASH standard. Based on taking the best parts from the existing ABR standards, the

specification, once adopted, could simplify the distribution of content to the consumer.

Seemingly everybody at NAB was part of the MPEG‐DASH Promoters Group. And that’s a good

thing. Unfortunately, the great publicity hides a number of underlying problems. The standard

is codec agnostic, but leans towards codecs with some royalty/IP encumbrance. This ties the

fate of DASH to that of the browser/HTML5 codec wars (i.e. Mozilla Firefox developers won’t

support any standard that requires the use of encumbered IP). Moreover, while the creation of

MPEG‐DASH files is ready to ship functionality, there still exists a frustrating lack of players or

support on mobile devices. Until the rest of the eco‐system evolves, MPEG‐DASH will be little

more than a bullet‐point in a press release.

Ultraviolet

With many of the decisions about the UltraViolet specification still up in the air, it wasn’t

surprising that most vendors are targeting UltraViolet support for much later in the year.

However, as the pressure builds to deliver more and more UltraViolet titles, both Elemental and

DigitalRapids stepped up to help content owners navigate the UltraViolet creation process.

With their June release, Elemental will be fully compliant with the latest DECE 1.0.3 spec

including full encryption and all of the various audio codecs (including DTS, AAC and AC3).Pre‐

release versions should be available earlier. DigitalRapids has accelerated a UltraViolet‐specific

version of Kayak that can also handle all of the transcoding, and packaging requirements. Both

companies seemed invested in working with content owners to work out the kinks and

maintain regular development of features. For those companies who are using Rovi’s Total

Code to create new DVD or Blu‐Ray masters, the company has added an export function to the

UltraViolet Common File Format. While that doesn’t necessarily help with library titles, it will

give mastering facilities an easy win during the mastering process.

Cloud

A year after we boldly declared that the age of cloud transcoding had begun, it appears that

many vendors have taken their head out of the cloud, at least for now. Most of the established

vendors we spoke with had cloud plans or were conducting trials with customers, however

nearly all of them ‐ including those that had previously announced cloud plans ‐ were still

keeping those trials very quiet and private. It’s one thing to chase the latest marketing

buzzword. It’s another thing entirely to revamp the way you offer and charge for transcoding

software.

2012 NAB Report


This has opened the doors for start‐ups like Encoding.com and Zencoder to rapidly grow and

expand their market‐share. What both of them do exceptionally well is automate and distribute

transcode workflows across a dynamically scalable farm. By starting from a standpoint of

automation, cloud‐based transcode vendors can keep costs exceptionally low and crank

through content incredibly quickly. They’ve also beefed up decode support for traditional

broadcast codecs (e.g. XDCAM, ProRes, and DNxHD) in addition to their existing mastery of

encoding for all flavors of web and mobile delivery. By using Aspera and some clever transcode

tricks, they’ve even managed to mitigate the huge downside of remote transcoding, the media

movement penalty. Both have different, but equally good, approaches for dealing with security.

Now to be fair, cloud vendors are not particularly adept outside of the sweet spot of web and

mobile delivery. They are still developing more advanced features like workflow, complex

metadata manipulation and outputs to broadcast codecs and wrappers like J2k and MXF. But,

they do prove, that transcoding in the cloud is certainly here to stay.

Quality Control

After a flurry of activity a few years ago, most of the transcode vendors have side‐lined efforts

to build their own quality control engines. On the flip side, the pure‐play QC vendors continue

to make impressive strides (See the Quality Control section of this report). As a result, vendors

like Amberfin and DigitalRapids are rethinking how to integrate external QC engines with the

potential for some nice synergies as the products develop.

Codecs

It wouldn’t be NAB without a new codec to discuss. The definition of the new H.265/HEVC

codec has reached a point where several vendors had demonstrations of 4K encoding on

display. Amusingly, none of them could actually display a 4k file.

Last year we talked encouragingly about a number of different vendors who had taken on the

task of creating or improving their own codecs. That trend has continued this year. In fact a

majority of vendors spoke about transcode quality as one of their top objectives. While we

don’t see vendors stepping away from the MainConcept SDK any time soon, we can’t help but

wonder if the company’s hyper‐focus on DivX (a new adaptive bitrate version is now available)

is working against the market leader in codecs.

On a more useful note, ProRes encoding and decoding is now widespread and with it many

vendors have upgraded to either 10bit or 16bit pipelines. From the “Don’t Adjust Your Screen”

files, we did hear a rumor that QuickTime Player for Windows has a colorspace issue on ProRes

playback. Quicktime Player for Mac seems unaffected, so double‐check any suspect files on a

Mac before adjusting your transcoder. Finally, while we can’t officially declare the browser

2012 NAB Report


codec wars over, we have been pleased to note that J2k decode is widely available and J2k

encode continues to grow.

Solution Highlights

Last year at IBC Amberfin announced their new Unified Quality Control tool (UQC). With NAB

2012, the tool is now available, along with a lower‐cost iCR Player, and new multi‐transcode

support (aka multiple transcode jobs per server). UQC (or as we thought it should be called,

uQC), creates a framework for multiple best of breed QC systems, including VidCheck

(VidChecker), Tektronix (Cerify), Digimetrics (Aurora), and Metaglue (MXFixer). All of the results

are displayed in a single timeline, which can also display results from previous versions of the

file prior to transcode. Development to support integration with Baton is in progress. For the

workflow focused company, it’s a brilliant move. Customers can easily pick any QC vendor they

choose and even compare and contrast different vendors or different stages of the transcode

to quickly uncover any problems. The new iCR Player then allows an operator to play the file

back on a broadcast monitor to confirm any issues and markup the file appropriately. The iCR

Player also starts to behave much like a file‐based tape deck with support for web services‐

based automation or edit controller connectivity and a Slave mode for dubbing. A partnership

with Softel allows near universal Closed Caption support, while a Civolution integration handles

forensic watermarking. Finally, Amberfin is almost fully compliant with the existing IMF

specification and continues support for various AMWA application specifications.

Broadcast International is a 28‐year old company that has just entered the Broadcast market.

For that entire time, the company has quietly been honing its video expertise in the digital

signage and corporate video space. All of that expertise has been rolled into a new product line

called CodecSys. In short, the product uses an advanced scene detection algorithm to

dynamically shift between carefully tuned H.264 profiles on a scene by scene basis. The

software can encode in real‐time, with just one pass. The resulting file will play in any H.264

player. The offering does not have the maturity of most of its competitors (e.g. limited codec

support, no advanced video/audio processing, and web services still in progress), but for what it

does, Broadcast International does it well.

Cisco continues to integrate the technology they acquired from Inlet Technologies into their

Videoscape eco‐system of products. Most recently the new Cisco Transcode Manager (formerly

known as Armada) has been optimized to run on the Cisco Unified Compute Platform, a

hardware platform that integrates Cisco servers, network and I/O resources. It appears that

Cisco has focused its attention on the telecommunications industry and MSO’s. It will be

interesting to see if that investment pays dividends for content owners interested in fast,

reliable transcoding upstream in the distribution chain. As a side note, the Videoscape eco‐

2012 NAB Report


system does seem to be evolving into a nice one‐stop shop for video distribution, with Cisco’s

traditional focus on carrier‐grade appliances evident throughout.

We reported on the new Kayak Application Platform from Digital Rapids last year. One year

later, we remain impressed with their vision. Instead of trying to simplify the UI and

functionality of their transcoder, Digital Rapids is boldly exposing every lever and knob in their

16bit planar pipeline. This allows someone practiced in the dark arts of transcoding to

dramatically streamline complex transcoding operations and gain both time and quality

improvements. Digital Rapids is also rethinking how QC should occur. Instead of a performing a

QC on a full file either before or after a transcode operation, you can now add a QC action, per

frame, at any point in a transcode process. More importantly, the new pipeline tracks, updates

and adds metadata, like the QC data, down to the frame, throughout the workflow. That

metadata can be exposed at any time. New logic branches in Kayak, will allow that metadata to

be used to dynamically control different workflow branches in a transcoding process. For

example, this will allow Kayak to stop a transcode mid‐flight if the quality drops too low for a

given bitrate, or if a frame early in the file fails a QC check. It wouldn’t be necessary to

complete an entire transcode only to find that you need to start over. To be fair, Kayak won’t

be for everyone. The learning curve will be steep, and the eco‐system of components is a long

way from maturity. In fact, Kayak has yet to be released, a year after it was announced. But if

Kayak delivers on all of the promises, it will be a compelling offering and worthy of a closer look

by anyone in the market for a multi‐faceted, transcode platform.

Elemental Technologies is on a winning streak. After a series of high‐profile customer wins,

they chose Las Vegas to announce a competitive buy‐back program. Elemental is offering

customers a $3,000 credit towards the purchase of an Elemental Server for each qualifying

license (e.g., Rhozet, Telestream). Customers are allowed to surrender up to three licenses per

purchase for a total credit of $9,000. Customers interested in Elemental Live 200 can receive a

$12,000 credit back or a $6,000 credit for the entry‐level Elemental Live 150.

In the last month, they have announced support for MPEG‐DASH, full support for Ultraviolet,

JPEG‐2000 and ProRes decoding, audio loudness management, expanded closed captioning

support, and sub‐clipping support. When you add that to their existing support for all three

forms of Adaptive Bitrate encoding, SCTE‐35 support, and their screaming fast GPU‐charged

transcode speeds, it is easy to see why Elemental has been so successful.

Through either their own MPAA‐audited, secure, private cloud or the public cloud (Amazon,

Rackspace or Azure), Encoding.com can transcode any content library faster and more cost‐

effectively than any facility or in‐house department in the industry. They have aggressively gone

after content owners by adding decode support for broadcast codecs as diverse as J2k, ProRes,

2012 NAB Report


RED, and XDCAM. For NAB, they added support of Dolby Audio (HE AAC, HE AAC+, and Dolby

Digital Plus EAC3) and the Dolby audio normalization (think CALM act). There’s a

comprehensive API and a support team to help if needed. The platform is missing closed

caption support at the moment, although it should be included in one of their upcoming

monthly release cycles.

The Harmonic theme this year was integration. Product lines from recent acquisitions got new

names and a focus on interoperability. Technology expertise cross‐pollinated between

traditional appliances and file‐based offerings. By way of example, Harmonic took great pains to

display an entire end to end eco‐system for multiple different broadcast workflows. Of

particular interest to transcoding buyers, the Multiscreen solution highlighted everything from

ingest (ProMedia Capture), to real‐time transcoding (Electra, ProStream or ProMedia

appliances) or file‐based transcoding (ProMedia Carbon) to the packaging and distribution of

content (ProMedia Package and ProMedia Origin, respectively).

Harmonic appliances have always been known as robust, high‐quality devices. The ProStream

1000 with ACE is capable of up to 20 HD stream and 80 adaptive bitrate profiles, including

MPEG‐DASH support in a single 1RU box. The Electra 9000 can deliver broadcast, web and

mobile content in a single RU.

On the file‐based side, ProMedia Carbon (formerly Rhozet Carbon Coder) leveraged the deeper

pool of Harmonic codec expertise to enhance the product’s transcoding speed and quality.

Unfortunately, ProMedia Carbon still lacks a complete 16bit pipeline, which has hurt them over

the last few years, but they did announce 16‐bit support for J2k or DNxHD conversions to

ProRes. ProMedia Carbon responded to the CALM act with support for Minnetonka and Junger

audio leveling plugins. Finally, it looks like Harmonic has put their quality control tool (QCS) on

the back burner. It still provides basic video checks as part of their workflow tool (WFS), but

Harmonic has no current plans to expand it to compete directly with Cerify or Baton.

In the dedicated transcoding appliance market, the horsepower is either provided by a

traditional CPU (e.g. Envivio), a GPU (e.g. Elemental), or a dedicated DSP (e.g. MediaExcel).

Unlike their cousins in the market, MediaExcel uses the same appliance for both Live and file‐

based encoding across every flavor of ABR, the aptly named Hero. The Hero is a low‐power,

1RU appliance, which crams a lot of processing power into a small space. Moreover, the only

difference between the low‐end Hero 5400 and a high‐end Hero 5404 is a second DSP card to

provide more compute horsepower. This year, MediaExcel left their product line simplicity

behind and introduced a low‐cost, software‐only product that can either run on their own x86

CPU‐only appliance (Hero 5000) or as a virtual machine on the platform of your choice,

including in the cloud. While it might make marketing sense to add a low‐cost, flexible entry

2012 NAB Report


point, the real strength of the MediaExcel offering is the density, speed, and reliability they get

from the DSP‐based systems. At best, we see this as the first step towards an unannounced

hybrid play that allows a content owner to spike onto dynamically provisioned, software‐only

units, while retaining a nucleus of dedicated appliances and a single management platform.

On the management side, the Hero Management System (HMS) handles all of the task

assignment and failover activities for a farm of Hero appliances or VM’s, although it’s not ready

for cloud provisioning yet. For buyers who need both Live and file‐based encoding, the HMS can

dynamically adjust how the Hero appliances are utilized. The HMS also handles robust QoS

including dedicated memory and processers per channel as well as per‐channel not per

appliance failover. In a market that’s chasing the success of Elemental, we find the quiet, get‐it‐

done approach of MediaExcel appealing. It remains to be seen if they can effectively leverage

the cloud.

This year, the acquisition of RadiantGrid by Wohler distracted from what otherwise would have

been an impressive improvement in the speed of the Cinnafilm video processing. By leveraging

gridding across both CPU’s and GPU’s the RadiantGrid team was able to deliver a high‐quality

standards conversion in 40% of real‐time. It’s a shot across the bows of Amberfin. It should

come as no surprise that RadiantGrid is adding support for Metaglue’s MXFixer, various AMWA

application specifications, and the MOGSpeedRail capture appliance to a workflow platform

that already has several high quality, best of breed integrations for video, audio and captions

processing (e.g. Cinnafilm, Linear Acoustics, and Softel). We’re always supportive of solid

market competition and with the new financial backing of Wohler, we expect the RadiantGrid

feature list to grow quickly in the coming months. We also think the purchase is a smart move

for Wohler. RadiantGrid will help them maintain a foothold in the content prep/manipulation

market where they have long been the leader in in‐rack audio/video monitoring. There may

also be some interesting opportunities for hybrid products that help to bridge the traditional

video and IT/file‐based worlds.

First and foremost, we’re big fans of Telestream Vantage and the new 4.0 release continues to

add solid features like a faster 16bit YUV pipeline, new VANC support, caption creation and

insertion, proper telecine detection, and others. Moreover, even though Telestream will stop

selling Agility licenses in June, just before version 4.0 of Vantage hits the market, the Vantage

LCS product that bridges Agility nodes into the Vantage workflow system will give existing

Agility customers the best of both worlds. It goes without saying that we fully support a

consolidation of the Telestream product line.

We also appreciate solid market competition. This year Telestream took aim at Elemental with

their new Vantage Transcode HE Server. The Vantage Transcode HE Server is an appliance

that’s carefully configured to accelerate OTT and multi‐screen delivery using Telestream’s new

2012 NAB Report


Lightspeed technology (more on that in a minute). It comes pre‐installed with a full‐version of

Vantage for a fast, all‐in‐one ABR transcoding. You can create a farm of these appliances, or you

can add one or more to an existing Vantage farm where they take on the role of specialized

render node.

The Lightspeed technology is a new “secret sauce” that uses OpenCL, parallel processing and

GPU acceleration to speed up the difficult processing steps in a transcode. For folks who want

the extra “Lightspeed”, but aren’t interested in multi‐screen delivery, Telestream also offers the

Vantage Lightspeed Accelerator. This, my friends, is where we start to scratch our heads.

According to Telestream, Lightspeed supports CPU’s from AMD or Intel and GPU’s from AMD or

NVidia. In other words, the secret sauce uses an open standard and seems to support almost

any hardware you can throw at it. So why must the secret sauce be locked into a pricey,

proprietary appliance? We don’t mind a multi‐functional appliance that gives the other

transcoder vendors a bit of competition (e.g. the HE Server or highly successful Pipeline). But

we can’t find a good reason for a simple accelerator. With that said, for buyers in the market

for a relatively painless boost to an existing Vantage farm, this might be the band‐aid you’re

looking for.

As NAB started, Zencoder announced a number of new features aimed at the pro video market.

In addition to licensing the Dolby Plus Pro codec (one of the Ultraviolet audio formats), they

added closed caption support in HLS streams, and PlayReady DRM through BuyDRM. They also

announced a partnership with Aspera to offer clients accelerated transfers and AES‐256

encrytion of their content. Significantly, Zencoder plans to store the content in its encrypted

state and decode as needed for transcode. This is not an easy trick to pull off and should allay

some of the security fears of major content owners. Buyers interested in using cloud

transcoders will need to commit resources on their side. Zencoder operates almost completely

by REST API. They do provide an API builder via their web site, but beyond basic testing, most

companies will want to integrate Zencoder into a workflow engine, or rules engine that can

control the transcoding process.

2012 NAB Report


TECHNOLOGY CATEGORY: QC BY JASON ARNOLD ([email protected])

Show Observations

Marked by increased competition, the landscape for

automated file‐based QC continues to rapidly shift and expand

with new developments. QC exhibitors at the 2012 NAB Show

demonstrated impressive new releases that illustrate wide

variance not only in approach to quality control, but the

overall role and integration of QC within file‐based workflows

and systems. While Tektronix Cerify, which pioneered the

technology and Interra Systems Baton continue to maintain

top market share positions, solutions from Miravid, Venera

Technologies and VidCheck offer viable alternatives.

This competition is driving the following trends:

Support for analysis of audio loudness to conform with governmental regulations and

industry standards

Automatic correction for detected audio, video, and container metadata defects

Support for an ever increasing number of formats

Improved performance speed

Dedicated features for pre‐transcode QC and routing

Integration with ingest, transcode, digital asset management and transport solutions

and functionality

Solution Highlights

Interra Systems continues to improve its industry leading solution, Baton, on a number of

fronts. In the last year they have added support for additional formats including LXF,

MJPEG2000, and Dolby E, and have added several new checks such as film grain analysis,

telecine analysis, and improved analysis of black frames. In addition to audio loudness

detection and correction, Baton also now offers closed caption checks and overlay debugging,

VENDORS AT NAB Interra Systems

Miravid

Tektronix

Venera Technologies

VidCheck

2012 NAB Report


AC3 dialogue normalization, and automated correction of container metadata. In terms of

workflow, Interra has added functionality for Baton to perform spot‐checks at pre‐defined

intervals and time lengths through a file. In other words, Baton can handle “head/middle/tail”

or “30/30/30” spot checks. To provide smoother implementation, Baton can now be installed

once through a centralized Installation Manager, and while in use Baton can leverage VM

clustering, load balancing, and redundant systems for greater efficiency, stability, and

availability. At NAB, Interra highlighted its experience integrating Baton with leading DAM and

workflow solutions; as a market leading solution with a strong showing at NAB, we expect that

many clients and technology partners will be looking to further leverage Baton to fulfill QC

needs in coming months and years.

By comparison, Miravid might not yet be on the radar of many buyers. Started in 2005, the

company has gained initial traction with TeleSight and MSight analyzers and has entered the

file‐based automated QC market with AutoCheck to provide analysis for most major formats

(including Mpeg‐2, Mpeg‐4, H.264, and VC‐1). Miravid claims deep thoroughness of testing and

fast speed – up to 10 times faster than real‐time if offline – and is developing the solution to

include audio loudness analysis. Miravid believes its core competency lies in its video

compression expertise and is priming AutoCheck for integration with technology partners such

as Harmonic, Inc. As a result, minimal effort has been placed in developing AutoCheck’s user

interface. Miravid may enable transcoders to stand alone with proficient built‐in QC

functionality while QC industry leaders such as Baton and Cerify will likely continue as client‐

facing solutions available for integration with transcoders,.

Tektronix, which pioneered QC technology, has shown little progress with Certify in past years

but is making significant strides to put its solution back on track. Tektronix exhibited Cerify 7.4

at NAB and plans to release two new versions (7.5 and 7.6) by the end of the year. Among the

features of Cerify 7.4, the solution provides additional analysis for loss of chroma,

letterbox/pillarbox, impression artifacts, video flashing, audio channels and loudness; it can also

run checks on newly added formats including AVI and raw video. 7.4 also touts speed

improvements by optimizing its decoder without syntax checks. 7.5, due for release this

summer, was demonstrated at NAB to correct audio loudness with functionality developed in

partnership with Dolby.

Another company rapidly developing its solution, Venera Technologies has produced an

intriguing package with its Pulsar product. In addition to Encompass Digital Media, AT&T Labs

and MLB have chosen Pulsar for automating content QC operations. Venera displayed several

features of Pulsar at NAB: conformance and correction of files at the container level, QC for HLS

and smooth streaming formats, and web services/APIs for integration with other technology

systems. Pulsar also claims functionality to analyze and correct files specifically for iTunes

2012 NAB Report


specifications. In addition, Pulsar’s new Rapid feature offers automated QC and routing pre‐

transcode based on user‐defined business rules and should be made available live after NAB.

Cloud‐based support for Pulsar is under preliminary discussion and may prove to fuel additional

interest in Venera Technology in future NAB Shows.

VidChecker had a strong showing at NAB with high “buzz factor” on the conference floor.

Started by members of the original Cerify team in 2009, VidChecker has built and billed its

VidCheck solution as a “2nd generation of automated products for file‐based Quality Control”

and has a list of credible clients including CBS, Sony Music, BBC, and Technicolor. In addition to

supporting an impressive list of formats and quality checks, VidCheck 4.0 offers the most

extensive functionality for automated file correction, including video levels (Luma, Chroma, and

RGB), dropout, artifacts, audio loudness, and Dolby AC‐3 dialnorm values. In terms of

throughput, VidCheck creates efficiency by checking up to four files simultaneously. In addition

to releasing two versions of VidCheck per year, VidChecker is also planning to release VidFixer

and VidApps later this year as low‐cost supplemental plug‐ins to support in‐depth automated

QC and correction. In an innovative move that reverses an industry trend of transcoding

systems providing QC analysis, VidFixer is an add‐on to VidChecker that offers automated

correction and transcode functionality to various formats, containers, bit‐rates, frame sizes,

aspect ratios, and other key technical specifications. It also fixes video flashing for photo‐

sensitivity epilepsy. Meanwhile, VidApps is a plug‐in specifically for video and audio analysis

and correction within non‐linear editing tools Final Cut Pro, Avid Media

Composer/Symphony/News Cutter and Adobe After Effects/Premiere. Scheduled for release in

May and July, respectively, VidFixer and VidApps have potential to further shift the QC

landscape and widen the scope of competition for a remarkably dynamic part of the industry.

On a last note, in a reverse from previous years, transcode vendors in general have backed

away from large investment to develop in‐depth QC analysis or correction technology within

transcoding solutions. Telestream and Harmonic have largely remained complacent with their

own stand‐alone QC development, and Amberfin has instead developed a plug‐in framework to

support multiple QC solutions. As such, the dominant market strategy is for each vendor to

provide either transcode or QC functionality with a high level of compatibility with multiple

counterparts. That said, if Miravid or VidCheck prove successful in deploying their solutions,

increased enablement or disintermediation of transcoders could disrupt the market and stir a

competitive response from transcoders in the future. So while competition is mostly driven

from within the QC market today, competition from without may remain on the horizon. We

will look forward to watching the market develop over the next several quarters to see how

incumbent, challenger, and periphery QC technology vendors develop meaningful competitive

advantages and positions within the digital distribution ecosystem.

2012 NAB Report


TECHNOLOGY CATEGORY: CONTENT DISTRIBUTION BY MITCHEL SEAMAN ([email protected]) AND TIM DAY ([email protected])

Show Observations

Along with production and storage vendors, Content

distribution systems are following the major tech trends at NAB

– cloud infrastructure, new devices, and SOA. We saw vendors

integrating with cloud vendors such as Amazon S3, tools that

improve web‐based transfer maintenance, and improved

integration options with asset management and storage

systems. As to be expected in a highly competitive and

evolving market segment, each vendor has taken a slightly

different approach to supporting these trends.

Solution Highlights

Signiant announced Media Shuttle, a new product designed to place file delivery management

into the hands of production staffers and free up IT resources from the day‐to‐day maintenance

of transfer channels. Media Shuttle enables staff to set up customized (and optionally Amazon

S3‐hosted) web front‐ends that allow end users to view and manage transfer activity, clients,

files, and access.

File transfer is managed by Media Exchange, the company’s core wed based file transfer

product. Signiant hopes that Media Shuttle will give business users an easy and simple

experience that Dropbox and other consumer products are currently providing, without

compromising on security. The goal is to fill the hole that security teams have with products

such as Drop Box and yousendit.com.

Within the core manager product, workflow capabilities continue to improve. Signiant users can

now string together several transfer processes relatively easily. Free user‐generated plugins

are available in online forums and integrate the company’s systems with a growing number of

others. It must be noted that Signiant has no immediate plans to update its Perl interface to

something more robust.

Aspera showcased a few new products (some more finished than others) to support its

customers’ demand for access to files anywhere.

VENDORS AT NAB Akamai

Aspera

FileCatalyst

Signiant

SmartJog

2012 NAB Report


Aspera espouses the idea of a series of connected transfer nodes, whose content can be sent

intra‐network to other nodes, or outside the network to desktops and mobile devices via faspex

transfer. This product is still relatively new, but might eventually allow users to view proxies for

assets that exist on storage‐connected to nodes around the world or in the cloud, then package

those assets through one interface and provide a link to download them all at once from

several remote locations. Connect Server, Cargo Downloader, Console, and mobile apps are all

new or revised and improve administrative control over transfers.

Aspera is making an interesting foray into frame file transfer with faspframes, a software‐based

2K/4K frame transfer tool. We heard that the tool is not quite ready for prime‐time, however

potential 10Gbps transfer speeds make this a product to watch.

Sync is a multidirectional synchronization tool designed to take on conventional tools like rsync

with support for one‐to‐one or one‐to‐many configuration, baked‐in scalability and, of course,

blazing‐fast file transfer.

FileCatalyst is a Canadian company that has a simple differentiator – 10Gbps file transfer

(7Gbps with encryption), which it touts is faster than both Signiant and Aspera. FileCatalyst

provides similar point‐to‐point functionality to its competitors with central management,

prioritization and basic workflow, and it move files faster and is cheaper to license. While its

main focus has been enterprise, FileCatalyst continues to try to penetrate the film and

broadcast market and recently added BET to its growing broadcast resume.

SmartJog announced Bolt, a rights management augmentation to its current delivery platform

that will allow right holders to distribute content to licensees. A new augmentation to Mobius

(SmartJog’s member access site) is designed to give content owners easier access to their

content on a SmartJog network, facilitating tracking, prioritization, and management of files.

Cloud DAM and mobile/web access products are receiving more attention from customers this

year.

CDNs made a push for the cloud at NAB. Akamai was no exception. They exhibited a support

infrastructure for sending content to UltraViolet. The solution is an integration point between

the content provider and UltraViolet ecosystem. Akamai touted its new relationship with the

NFL as well – the project allowed NFL.com to stream video to a scalable number of users with

varying bandwidth and on various devices. In the spirit of multiplatform support, Akamai’s goal

is to make all the content available on its network available to an increasingly diverse and

connected consumer and retailer base.

2012 NAB Report


XDT released Catapult version 4, which introduces new syncing options, transfer filters, and

notifications along with an attractive $1,995 entry level price tag for 1Gb transfers and Catapult

management. XDT is hoping the entry‐level pricing will allow smaller customers to access

proprietary protocols and speed. Slingshot remains a powerful client for enabling high‐speed

transfers between Catapult servers.

2012 NAB Report


TECHNOLOGY CATEGORY: STORAGE AND ARCHIVE BY JITIN AGARWAL ([email protected])

Show Observations

NAB 2012 demonstrated the continuing innovation and

development in the storage/archive sector. Specifically,

enterprise storage vendors are evolving their products to meet

the end‐to‐end digital storage needs of their customers

through adoption of cutting edge technology on both the

hardware and software fronts. Vendors are increasingly

focused on satisfying their customer’s needs through

“converged stacks” comprised of storage media, connectivity

and an intelligent software layer for file management,

virtualization, and fault tolerance. In addition, scalable,

virtualized, and cloud storage products were present in all of

the top tier provider’s product lines. Furthermore, with the

rapidly evolving data storage needs of Media and

Entertainment clients, products that catered to “big data”

needs were evident in all of vendor’s product lines. Several

vendors sought to distinguish themselves by integrating their storage products with real‐time

production systems for the Media and Entertainment industry, attempting to leap beyond their

traditional niche of backup and storage. Trends for 2012 in Storage and Archive evident at NAB

included:

Flash/SSDs: Solid‐state drives (SSDs) were represented in all of the vendor’s product lines. Cost

parity between Flash/SSD and hard‐drive arrays should result in broader adoption in the

marketplace.

Virtualized/Cloud Storage: Every vendor touted product optimizations for Virtual and Cloud

environments. Whether Virtual machine backup, Virtual/Cloud desktop infrastructure or

Virtual/Cloud server storage provisioning, all of these trends were evident at NAB 2012.

Converged Stacks: Each vendor demonstrated their “Stack” solution with DDN, EMC Isilon and

Active Storage demonstrating full blown implementations that require no outside components.

VENDORS AT NAB Active Storage

ASG Atempo

Data Direct

Networks (DDN)

EMC Isilon

Front Porch Digital

Network Appliance

(NetApp)

Quantam

2012 NAB Report


Backup/Tape Storage: Backup/Tape storage became a part of the overall story at NAB 2012. All

of the major providers had solutions that leveraged the cost benefits of backup/tape storage,

while providing the performance of spinning disk.

LTFS: Historically, content stored on LTO tape needed the same software that wrote it to

retrieve it. SMPTE made limited efforts to standardize tape archiving using the TAR

compression format, but adoption was limited. The LTFS format announced two years ago has

already seen widespread acceptance and creates a standardized way to store content. Several

vendors have already created tools specifically for the media industry that leverage LTFS,

including Quantum and Crossroads Systems.

Solution Highlights

Data Direct Networks (DDN), offers impressive performance numbers through its Storage

Fusion Architecture (SFA), citing read and write performance of up to 10 gigabytes per second.

The SFA 10K‐X product line can read and write data at the same speed, overcoming the

traditional 50% write performance penalty seen with other storage products. DDN also

leverages a high density storage approach to reduce power utilization by 50% in this solution.

DDN’s “Scaler” File Storage system – in four varieties: NAS Scaler, Grid Scaler, Exa ScalerWeb

and xSTREAM Scaler ‐ offers different levels of file storage systems performance and

capabilities for organizations. Finally, DDN’s Object Scaler (WOS) product allows for a

geographically‐distributed, cloud‐based filesystem with a single, global namespace.

EMC Isilon continues to push the envelope in the NAS world through novel innovations in the

6th version of its operating system, OneFS, coupled with SATA, SAS and SSD storage hardware

utilized in its X, S, and NL Series product lines. Specifically, OneFS coupled with Isilon’s “Smart”

series of add‐ons, continues to deliver on Isilon’s promise to easily facilitate the end‐to‐end

management of storage by the enterprise. The X, S and NL Series of products continue to offer

a good mix of performance versus cost for enterprise customers. Isilon maintains its

independent nature, despite the acquisition by EMC, as evidenced by the lack of impact at

Isilon from potential CEO changes at EMC. As with aforementioned enterprise storage

providers, EMC Isilon increases its value add by including fulfillment abilities across the digital

supply chain.

Active Storage offers its mMEDIA Platform comprised of the mRAID, mVault and mSAN

components. In particular the mRAID element is a 48TB SATA III system that can scale up to

228TB. The mVault provides for up to 6Gb/s SAS connectivity and SATA hard drives. Finally

mSAN stitches the entire solution together through the ActiveSAN controller appliance, which

2012 NAB Report


integrates access to multiple SANs. Active Storage has a more focused approach to the Media

and Entertainment sector versus providers who have migrated to this industry from others like

EMC. Active Storage exemplifies the drive to integrate storage into media broadcast and real‐

time production environments to expand beyond the “storage” category. Active Storage also

offers free support for its products mitigating the cost impact from ongoing support.

Network Appliance (NetApp) continues to build upon its flagship enterprise storage product

based on the FAS6200 line, now capable of 4 petabytes of storage under a single, global name

space and compatible with a variety of storage protocols including fiber channel (FC), NFS, iSCSI

and CIFS for maximum versatility. With the release of NetApp’s Data ONTAP 8 operating

system, the product is now capable of FC over Ethernet as well. NetApp’s OnCommand

Management Software offers Enterprises the ability to control, automate and analyze their data

storage infrastructure.

ASG Atempo’s largest buzz creator this year came from an announcement by one of their

partners. At the NAB conference this year, Sony announced its next generation optical disc

archive storage system called the ODS‐D55U that will handle Sony’s upcoming Optical Disc

Cartridges with capacities from 300GB to 1.5TB. ASG Atempo is one vendor that will support

this technology when it is launched in fall 2012. ASG Atempo showcased its ASG‐Digital Archive

(ADA) product. ADA provides a simple drag‐and‐drop interface so that users can archive and

retrieve projects without assistance from an archivist. The product migrates content from

primary to near‐line and deep archives, whether digital tape, disk, or cloud storage. ADA allows

integration with a host of different industry standard systems such as Apple Final Cut Server,

Avid Interplay and Archive Server, Building4Media Fork Production Suite, and CatDV. When

working with DAM systems, ADA offers the ability to ingest metadata into the archive along

with the asset. Archived assets can be retrieved through either the DAM or ASG interfaces.

Storage to tape uses the non‐proprietary TAR format, which encourages public clients such as

the National Film Board of Canada to choose and reliably maintain their extensive archives on

ADA.

Front Porch offers the Media and Entertainment industry a solution focused on the

DIVASolutions product line designed to enable media companies to migrate, manage and

market their digital assets. The SAMMA line of products within the DIVASolutions enables

migration of assets from multiple formats and form factors into one asset repository. The

DIVAArchive, Director, Replicate, Net and Publish components take the asset repository and

deliver the management and go‐to‐market functionality offered by Front Porch. On top of this

capability is the Lynx cloud‐based storage model which offers scalability and performance for

customers interested in these types of services. This service from Front Porch, was developed in

2012 NAB Report


conjunction with Nirvanix Systems, which was covered in last year’s report as offering a SaaS

based approach to storage for the Media and Entertainment sector.

Quantum has a product line that centers on its StorNext line of products. In particular this

solution is comprised of the StorNext File System, SAN, Gateway and Storage Manager

products. These products combine to enable Quantum to offer an end‐to‐end technology

storage stack for its customers. When it comes to “Big Data” Quantum leads the pack from a

storage technology and infrastructure point‐of‐view. Quantum is currently exclusively sold

through resellers like some of the vendors listed in this report, but is increasingly making its

own in‐roads into customers and organizations.

2012 NAB Report


TECHNOLOGY CATEGORY: MOBILITY BY CHRISTOPHE PONSART ([email protected]) AND MITCHEL SEAMAN

([email protected])

Show Observations

As stated in our pre‐report, mobility is an overarching tech

trend that nearly all NAB vendors are considering.

Rightfully so; smartphone sales have already eclipsed those

of feature phones in the tech‐forward entertainment

industry, and the New iPad (Gen 3) had a stronger opening

weekend than The Hunger Games and Avatar combined.

The second screen is augmenting and sometimes replacing

the first as viewers discover, discuss and view content on

their mobile devices. Adoption and use among industry

professionals is up as well – the form factor, features and

availability of smartphones and tablets make them the

perfect vehicle for handy production tools or on‐the‐go

video review.

Solution Highlights

Second screen solutions, security, and multi‐device distribution were some of the best‐received

and most innovative new offerings by vendors.

CDNs like Irdeto and SyncBak are growing their repertoire of supported devices, often offering

white‐label or branded distribution networks. Irdeto Broadband is a comprehensive content

management suite that allows for branded content delivery anywhere, from TV to PS3 to

iPhone. Security and media asset management are baked in. Irdeto announced at NAB a new

approach to piracy, stressing that providing access to legal content is as important as blocking

access to pirated content, and backing that statement with its comprehensive delivery solution.

SyncBak’s distribution offering is very similar – the NAB‐funded startup is working to make legal

TV available anywhere. Expect this trend to continue and improve as the wild west of

broadband distribution settles into a few major networks that reach a broad consumer base.

VENDORS AT NAB Arxan Technologies

CinePostProduction

Civolution

ENCO Systems

Irdeto Broadband

Never.no

ProPrompter

SyncBak

2012 NAB Report


The Civolution booth remained surrounded over the course of the conference. Its digital

fingerprinting product SyncNow synchronizes the second screen with the first in real‐time,

which allows broadcasters and advertisers to deliver extra content to users on their

smartphones or tablets. Civolution has fingerprinted 300,000 or so assets, which can be

identified by partner‐developed apps built for customers. The company is hoping to improve

the metadata attached to the audio and video assets in its database, to make for more relevant

advertising and content pushes to the second screen.

Never.no may have been the most innovative mobile vendor at the conference. Its platform

draws together mobile, social and traditional broadcast channels into one framework that

allows for unified communication between broadcasters or advertisers and their consumers.

Never.no showed off synchronization tools, an app development kit, workflow tools for multi‐

platform communication, and integration with mission‐critical broadcast infrastructure from

vizrt and Harris. The Norwegian company is making a push from its largely‐European market

base into the US broadcast market and hoping to tie together all of the ways in which users

interact with their content.

Production tools are going mobile as well. Startup Doddle showcased a mobile resource

manager that tracks vendors, talent, and scheduling for production staff, and

CinePostProduction’s COPRA app allows producers to review sound‐synced and color graded

dailies on the iPad, and teleprompter and equipment manufacturers have adopted the iPad as a

light, connected, powerful upgrade to existing industry‐standard LCD displays. ProPrompter,

whose teleprompting product is iPad‐based, sells mounts, displays and camera attachments.

Smart TP and Mirror Image TelePrompters also showcased iPad offerings.

ENCO Systems has added iPad and iPhone integration to its Digital Audio Delivery (DAD)

software system, enabling reporters and correspondents to record, label, and transmit audio

files across a secure network to a DAD server. Other iPad and iPhone tools allow for partial

control of the DAD system from a remote device. The remote‐control interface is complete ‐

apps are still in the works, but ENCO promises that more mobile features are forthcoming.

We expect significant development and innovation in mobile this year including second

screen, security, and distribution enhancements. Fueled by a more mature and rapidly

growing mobile development community, apps will only become more comprehensive,

feature‐rich, and widely adopted in 2012.

2012 NAB Report


TECHNOLOGY CATEGORY: SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

AND ANALYTICS BY BRET ALEXANDER ([email protected])

Show Observations

Social Media’s impact on the 2012 NAB show is hard to deny.

Topics of conversation expand beyond the methods and

technology used to bring Social Media to the broadcast (Social

TV/Second Screen). Significant traction has been gained on the

idea of utilizing the vast amount of data generated by social

media networks and leveraging that data to enhance and

develop insights into programs, broadcasts, and other forms of

content. Below we will highlight a few of these vendors who

were present at NAB and leading the pack in terms of how this data can impact the

broadcasting realm.

Solution Highlights

Still in their infancy, the Social Media Analytics companies are fine tuning their products and

developing new functionality to address the increased interest in using this information to

make enhanced and more insightful business decisions. Companies like Fizziology and

SocialGuide are expanding their global footprint by enabling capabilities in additional languages

and dialects. Trendrr and SocialGuide are both developing solutions that enable organizations

to engage with consumers via their platforms. Additionally, there is a desire to expand the use

of the social media data outside of the studios and broadcasters and creating more tailored

solutions for advertisers and brand managers.

At NAB, Fizziology partnered with Cognizant to demonstrate case studies of where social media

analytics are used today and where they could be used to better understand the effectiveness

of marketing campaigns being used for Movies and TV shows. Through their proprietary human

sentiment analysis, a combination of technology and process, and their deep knowledge of the

Media and Entertainment space, they were able to effectively communicate the valuable

insight Social Media data can provide when marketing a film or broadcast. Additionally,

Fizziology is focused on expanding beyond analyzing the domestic US social media chatter and

is about to enable analytical capabilities in the UK and Australia.

VENDORS AT NAB Attensity

Fizziology

SocialGuide

Trendrr

2012 NAB Report


Attensity also partnered with Cognizant to develop a unified mobile dashboard that is capable

of combining social media analytics data from multiple data sources. This application was

utilized as part of the Cognizant Social Media Analytics demo and represented an ability to

create dashboards for executives to view actionable data on Social Media and integrate this

information into their day to day decisions.

SocialGuide is focusing on developing a comprehensive Social Media Analytics tool that will

serve the Social Media departments of Studios and Broadcasters of the future. Their tight

integration with Tribune Media Services enables them to optimally use the EPG data by

dynamically and automatically updating the trackers used to mine data on networks, TV shows,

and episodes. Their Social Guide Insights and engagement platforms are growing as well, with

the recent announcement of the inclusion of the ability to track Spanish television channels

with Univision.

Trendrr is looking to expand their model and data beyond the studios and broadcasters and

develop functionality and platforms specifically aimed at Brands and Ad agencies. Additionally

they are getting a better understanding of facilitating the enrichment of on‐air content with

Social Media as well as creating a channel to engage directly with those conversing about a

particular TV show.

2012 NAB Report


TECHNOLOGY CATEGORY: AD SALES SYSTEMS BY THOMAS MICHALES ([email protected])

Show Observations

At NAB 2012 there was an expansion of interest from

broadcasters in support of diverse content delivery platforms,

cloud services, and fully file‐based workflows. Several vendors

introduced pre‐packaged solutions to provide a well‐defined

starting point for an otherwise highly customizable solution that

clients and end users may or may not know how to define

requirements for. Many vendors reported that the quality of

customers was higher in 2012 than in previous years, with many

ad‐sales projects on the near‐term horizon.

Solution Highlights

Ad sales software vendors tout a series of core features which

appear nearly identical at first glance. These vendors often

position those features as differentiators in their market. Single

database, drag and drop editing of ad break playlists, modular

architecture, ability to monetize secondary events and creating unified invoices are shared

among nearly all suppliers. This is despite each sometimes stating these as a unique advantage.

The true differentiators are user interface, breadth of their application modules, interfaces with

third party systems, the range of support services and price.

Many of the solutions are now delivering on the promises made last year regarding support of

non‐linear content delivery technologies which appears to be the primary trend in this sector.

Harris has an impressive array of mature products with class leading business intelligence (BI)

analytic tools. Broadcast Master (BM) and Landmark tend to focus on international markets,

each using a single database (SQL for BM, Ingress for Landmark) and combined sales and

scheduling features. BM focuses mostly on scheduling content with a sales module, and

Landmark focuses solely on sales. OSI‐Traffic has significant penetration in the North American

call letter station market and uses a single MS SQL Server database at its core. It uses a novel

graphical view of differentiating between spots, promos and breaks which helps a user to

quickly identify various items on a playlist.

VENDORS AT NAB Arvato/S4M

Broadview

Harris

Myers

Pilat

ProConsultant

RSG

Sintec

Wide Orbit

2012 NAB Report


New for 2012 in Broadcast Master are improved tools to exchange data with agencies for what

spots they wish to run. NetGain sports impressive analytic tools that can access data points

from multiple, even non‐Harris sources and generates reports and dashboards for end users.

OSI‐Traffic has new master title features which enable improved data sharing across multiple

broadcast stations, increasing its utility for station groups. Harris has implemented Live Log

capability to allow for traffic changes to be made day‐of‐air and automatically update the on‐air

playlist via OSI‐Traffic and Harris ADC bi‐directional integration. Upcoming features in OSI will

integrate with external metadata sources for each program or spot.

Harris has the advantage of size in their market to provide unparalleled support and can

integrate updates with other Harris software products.

Pilat has an extensive array of well integrated features in their IBMS solution. They run both

major modules, Content and Sales on a common Oracle database with a thin client application

for local users and remote users via Citrix. They offer extensive security configurations for each

user in a role‐based user model. Restrictions are based on stations, domains, and additional

data sets. These features enable Pilat to be SOX compliant even though there may be multiple

financial entities sharing the common database. Pilat offers modules covering inventory and

rights management, content acquisition, and finance. The financial tools are deep enough that

a multi‐site broadcaster could base their entire organization on Pilat tools instead of SAP or

Oracle as an example. The process is work order driven, using a workflow management tool.

The work order tool is significantly improved since last year’s offering and can now interface

with third party applications for materials ordering and QC. Its media management tools can

track assets that are sent out for work and require reminders for returns. The dashboard tools

can also incorporate data from third party systems for a consolidated, enterprise‐wide view

through the Pilat user portal.

Other new features for 2012 include enhanced tools for media prep work orders, catch‐up

automation for spot placement, extended metadata reporting with web services interfaces, an

improved automated workflow engine, and an iPad application. The system supports the entire

sales process from proposal to delivery and offers multiple sales models for use in North

America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. It can also interface with third party sales management

systems such as Salesforce.com.

Nearly all software vendors use a single database, mostly a variant of SQL such as MS SQL

Server or MySQL, Oracle, Sybase, or Informix. arvato/S4M is unique in that their solution is

database platform independent, though is commonly deployed on an SQL, Oracle or Sybase

server. S4M currently runs independent databases for each of their applications, but are

planning to consolidate their services onto a single database. arvato’s main release this year is

2012 NAB Report


their AllAdOnce product that is designed for digital delivery of ad content and can be used by

television or non‐television media companies. Their legacy product, S4AdSales is intended for

commercial television stations in a linear playout model. Also new is their AdStore, which

supports the S4AdSales and AllAdOnce products to enable cross‐platform sales.

All applications run in a browser and are built with HTML5 tools for computing platform

independence from desktop computers to mobile devices. They anticipate releasing a version

supporting a touch interface by IBC 2012. A unique user interface feature is the ability to

previsualize where a spot will appear on a platform, such as in a vertical or horizontal banner ad

on a web page or a VOD pre‐roll. Arvato offers proposal generation tools for sales. Its

optimization engine incorporates these parameters to auto fill spots across all platforms and

can be manually updated with drag and drop features. The application modules all use web

service interfaces and works well in a larger SOA context. The AllAdOnce and spot optimizer can

run on cloud‐based computing resources.

Most of the vendors support interfaces with third party systems to enable users to access best

of breed solutions for analytics and business intelligence. Most offer interfaces to Excel at

minimum and others use specific APIs or support Web Services.

Wide Orbit is an industry leader and is expanding their product portfolio to include master

control automation applications above and beyond their traffic and ad sales products. Their

CRM module integrates with Outlook and SaaS offerings such as Salesforce.com. The proposal

system enables a user to monetize spots in almost any possible way and is usable across a

variety of delivery systems, be it television, radio, Internet, billboards, or digital signage.

New for 2012 is an iPad interface for dashboards and business analytic displays. Wide Orbit’s

promo optimization tool integrates with ratings services that help define sales campaigns. The

mobile/SMS solution can support Groupon‐like solutions, such as scanning a coupon for an

offering, and can tie a mobile campaign to a broadcast campaign for maximum visibility and

consolidated invoicing.

Myers presents a tremendous value proposition with its ProTrack traffic and ad sales product.

They primarily focus on the over the air television market, especially with PBS stations (96%

share), NPR radio outlets, and religious broadcasters. Its products provide a solid core set of

features in a very straight forward interface with modest reporting capabilities. They currently

rely on an Informix SQL core database and have modules to provide users with the ability to sell

spots on linear and non‐linear content delivery systems. Their VOD module was announced last

year and it has several enhancements this year, including the ability to create multiple packages

of sales for a wider variety of concurrent advertising avenues. Radio ad sales now support

2012 NAB Report


working with podcasts and direct content downloads. Myers uses a client/agency model for ad

sales, though it relies on interfaces with third parties for comprehensive CRM solutions. The

configuration tool is modest and relies on their staff to do configuration and customizations at

the client location at the time of system deployment. They do not support a graphic workflow

model in the configuration of their application.

ProTrack has several built in reports and users must rely on Myers to develop any new ones

internal to the system. However, their database is ODBC compliant and is open to integration

with third party reporting systems such as Crystal. ProTrack also features an improved spot

placement engine this year with faster reporting and improved break handling which makes it

operate more like a commercial model as opposed to a PBS model. Myers also supports

managing ad spot and program content metadata and supports BXF and custom APIs to

interface with master control automation systems. New in 2012 is the ability to back up the

ProTrack database with cloud services which is core to their push into providing solutions for

disaster recovery.

RSG Media offers another unique value proposition in offering their AdVant modules as a

service which can also lower the cost of entry to a broadcaster. Many of RSG’s tools are

intended for better forecasting, planning, and analytics, and offer an advanced spot

optimization engine.

All vendors are under increased pressure to supply features that monetize spots with finer

granularity, supporting secondary events, bugs, snipes, squeezes, web banners, mobile ads,

VOD pre‐rolls, and more. Broadview offers their ad sales product which supports these features

as well as incorporating modules such as a content library management system that can be

used as a system of record for both physical and file‐based assets. Based on an open source SQL

database (Firebird), Broadview also supports web services interfaces with external applications.

New features this year include support of cloud services, extensive new ad‐hoc reporting tools,

and an interface to third party BI and dashboard tools. Expect to see these features brought

into the fold in upcoming releases. Users can run the application on an iPad using terminal

services. Unique in their software is the ability to link to the actual media files so that a user can

right click on an ad spot in a playlist and start playing that content at their desktop. Metadata

fields are user customizable without contracting Broadview to modify the application code.

They do not have an internal CRM or proposal generation tool as they feel that users are best

served with interfaces with best of breed third party solutions.

Sintec OnAir has won several impressive clients in the last few years and also takes a modular

approach using a single Oracle database with features ranging from library and rights

management through full traffic and ad sales modules. They can provide a unified playlist view

2012 NAB Report


incorporating spots in play across multiple delivery platforms. Sintec offers their products in a

variety of ways, either with a pre‐packaged solution or individual components delivered with

professional services. They support web services interfaces with third party solutions and can

monetize many aspects of spot delivery through primary and secondary events. OnAir uses a

thin client application and can be accessed remotely via Citrix.

There is an integrated CRM module that associates advertiser data with account information

and invoices. The application uses a parent/child relationship for each of these elements and

supports a notes field for ongoing client relations commentary. Like Broadview, Sintec’s OnAir

also includes a library management system and can track physical and file‐based media

ProConsultant’s product, called Cindy, focuses on non‐linear sales management and has

extensive features to monetize all aspects of spots across multiple platforms. Currently based

on a 4D database, the next version will run on Oracle. Cindy offers an interface with their MAM

solution called Louise or with third party library management systems via a web services

interface. Cindy is a cross‐platform application running on Windows or Mac OS computers

though it requires a VPN or Citrix server for remote access. ProConsultant’s new product called

Mogodor also provides remote user access via the web. There are not many new features to

report with Cindy this year, though there are improved aspects to their ad sales submission

process that augments the rate card, conflicts, and constraints parameters. Their next version

promises an improved UI on an already excellent interface.

2012 NAB Report


TECHNOLOGY CATEGORY: RIGHTS MANAGEMENT BY KISHLAY BARANWAL ([email protected])

Show Observations

Rights Management is a segment which is increasingly gaining

focus among broadcasters. Organizations are trying to exploit

and manage their content more fruitfully in times of

unprecedented audience fragmentation.

Along expected lines, the players in this space at NAB 2012

were keen to demonstrate the comprehensive nature of their

products and also the elegant integration with other

components of a typical overall ecosystem.

Additionally, one of the underlying themes we observed

amongst the offerings was flexibility ‐ some chose to showcase

this in contract definitions while others through a customized foundation like the rights data

model itself.

Solution Highlights

Counterpoint, RSG Media and Rights Tracker (through their partnership for North America with

StorerTV) presented their thoroughbred rights management offerings while Pilat Media and

SintecMedia had similar product modules in conjunction with broadcast management systems

on display. Oracle had their Oracle Media Intellectual Property Management (build upon the

Sophoi acquisition) for visitors to take a look at.

Counterpoint Systems with its Media Maestro product has brought in a unique concept of

building a customized rights model per purchase (as a professional service add‐on). With this

facility, a rights system can be designed with the specific needs of the broadcaster in mind. This

would, therefore, provide a service flavor to the system being built around the Media Maestro

product eliminating the disadvantages of an off‐the‐shelf product purchase. A system built with

a customized foundation like this can be more efficient to use (and maintain) and could save

costs through enhanced productivity adding to the benefits provided by the comprehensive and

strikingly usable features of Media Maestro. The product is also backed by the related suite of

Maestro products which, with their strong roots in distribution make for a compelling story

VENDORS AT NAB Counterpoint

Oracle

Pilat

RSG Media

SintecMedia

StorerTV

2012 NAB Report


from a content monetization perspective. Counterpoint continues to be a solution one must

consider when selecting a rights management system.

During demonstrations, RSG impressed with the functional coverage of their RightsLogic suite.

From acquisitions to original productions, licensing to program planning and finance, their

product seemed comprehensive and intuitive, including smart considerations for flexibility in

contract definition. The system includes the ability to define content assets meaningfully and

also allows one to amortize assets, manage expenses, and plan cash flow. Anecdotal

observations of RSG deployments leave an impression of a higher level of development per

implementation. The demonstration at NAB provided some hope that this may not be the case

in the future.

Rights Tracker highlighted their presence in The United Kingdom with a clientele including

several medium‐sized broadcasters in the region. They seem to be continuously making

improvements to their offering with innovative features like a visual Rules Builder to manage

royalties and residuals and out‐of‐the‐box video integration. Accounting is not managed within

the system although invoicing and revenue recognition is provided (integration with Microsoft

Dynamics is available). Basic and customizable reporting is also offered ‐ they also let us in to a

sneak‐peek of the next version of their product which features an upgraded reporting module.

Vendors like SintecMedia and Pilat demonstrated their rights offerings which integrate (more

tightly than not) with their broadcast management system solutions. While Sintec’s OnRights

offering seems like a good option for those already committed to the Sintec OnAir platform,

Pilat impressed with their eye for functional detail. The support for secondary content including

raw footage and embedded music was particularly notable (matched only by a similar feature in

Counterpoint’s Media Maestro) which enables clip monetization (for instance, songs from a film

or caller ring back tunes from a song itself).

Oracle was also present at the show with their Oracle Media Intellectual Property Management

(OMIPM) offering which aims to automate content rights and royalties while managing complex

fee structures and contracts. They provide features to analyze rights in real‐time and also

enable automated royalty payments.

About Cognizant’s Information, Media & Entertainment Practice Cognizant’s Information, Media, and Entertainment (IME) practice provides innovative consulting, business

process, and technology services for advertising and marketing, broadcasting, entertainment, information services,

and print and publishing firms. With more than 3,000 IME consultants and technologists and three centers of

excellence, including a dedicated Digital Media Lab and Mobile Center of Excellence, we lead the industry in

developing inventive, technology‐powered business solutions that deliver proven results for clients. We leverage

our industry‐leading global delivery model to implement solutions quickly and cost‐effectively. Known for our

passionate focus on client needs, we dedicate our industry intelligence, technology leadership, and unmatched

global resources to working closely with our clients – some of the largest information, media, and entertainment

companies in the world.

For more information, please visit www.cognizant.com/information‐media‐entertainment.

About Cognizant Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process

outsourcing services, dedicated to helping the world's leading companies build stronger businesses.

Headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey (U.S.), Cognizant combines a passion for client satisfaction, technology

innovation, deep industry and business process expertise, and a global, collaborative workforce that embodies the

future of work. With over 50 delivery centers worldwide and approximately 137,700 employees as of December

31, 2011, Cognizant is a member of the NASDAQ‐100, the S&P 500, the Forbes Global 2000, and the Fortune 500

and is ranked among the top performing and fastest growing companies in the world. Visit us online at

www.cognizant.com or follow us on Twitter: Cognizant.

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