Changes ultimately bring more challenges. Today’s challenge is to come up with a content strategy and a solid sports content management system that grows an audience (local, national and internationally, across distributed platforms…), continues to add value to your brand and affiliates and tracks, measures and converts content engagement to a purchasing customer. All while navigating around complex rights.

The good thing is that change paves way to a flurry of new opportunities: to get closer to your fans, to build a direct audience, to gather data to make smarter decisions. With change you can introduce personalized experiences, additional rights, stronger brand identity and dynamic sponsor packages – all geared towards growing revenues and all through one sports content management tool.

This sounds like a dream – how can this be achieved with limited resources?

The best defense is a good offense

Content enables these opportunities: it provides the primary communication, promotion and interaction with an audience. Having an audience provides a platform for you to maximize monetization opportunities.

Dalet Flex is the perfect sports content management tool to help deliver your multimedia content strategy and scale your operations with your existing team. The might of broadcast level operations at the click of a button.

Let’s talk about the key functions of the platform: Import, Manage, Create, Review, Deliver and Engage

Import: Capture that key moment

• Simple web-based upload portal to centrally capture all content produced by everyone.
• Automatically receive content from partners.
• Capture live streams, ready to use without delay.
• Having access-controlled, rich metadata can greatly enhance your content value, making it more discoverable while driving rule-based automation. Many sources of metadata can enrich your content including AI analysis, professional data feeds, commentary, shared databases and manually-added data.

Manage: Metadata and search

• Dalet Flex offers the most comprehensive metadata capabilities on the market for sports content management and comes with controlled access to enable easy content discoverability, so the content is available exactly when you need it.
• Drag and drop content organization in collections which can be shared to speed up the edit.
• Manage hierarchical metadata structure, content and imagery that feeds your front-end D2C experience.
• All the hard work is automatically happening in the background.

Create: Clips and stitch

• Create clips and publish to all your digital properties (and partners) in just a few clicks, even when live.
• Easily stitch content together to tell a new story and produce highlights.
• Auto-brand content by sponsor, platform, contributor, team or any other rule for customization on delivery.
• Integrated with your favorite tools such as Adobe Premiere Pro to add that additional editorial flare. Search, preview import, edit and export back to Flex distribute to your digital properties. All while working in Adobe Premiere.

Review and Approval

• There is no I in team – get more out of working together with collaborative functions and target feedback to accurate timecoded commentary.
• Provide secured access to partners, sponsors and affiliates to content for feedback.

Deliver

• Keep your social channels active with instant or scheduled delivery.
• Integrated with best-of-breed partners to instantly publish items from your sports content management library to your audience on all devices.

Engage

• Feed your audience and see where they can take you.
• Opportunities are endless; you need to be in the game to win it, take risks, learn from your mistakes. “Champions keep playing until they get it right” (Billie Jean King).

Don’t take your eye off the ball, more changes will come, more platforms will appear, your audience consumption habits will change. Will you be ready?

GAME, SET, MATCH – give us a whistle

For more details on how Dalet Flex can help you win, check out this video. To discuss your sports distribution and sports content management needs, contact us or book a demo.

The post 6 Solutions to Supercharge Sports Television Content appeared first on Dalet.

These challenges underscore the critical importance of adopting robust media supply chain management strategies and tools. Let’s explore the key challenges faced by organizations in managing a media supply chain and the transformative impact of adopting robust solutions.

Can a media supply chain platform improve ROI? Can it truly boost revenue generation? Go from chaos to intelligence with your media supply chain. Sign up for a free consultation with a Dalet expert.

Challenges of Managing the Media Supply Chain

1. Inefficient Workflows 

Manual and disjointed workflows can lead to inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and missed opportunities. Content creation, editing, and distribution can be time-consuming and error-prone without automation and streamlined processes. 

2. Disorganized Content 

With the sheer volume of multimedia assets being generated, disorganization can quickly become a stumbling block. Media files scattered across different storage systems, folders, and devices can hinder efficient retrieval, leading to delays, duplicated efforts, and frustration among content creators and distribution teams. 

3. Version Control 

Maintaining accurate and up-to-date versions of media assets is a challenge. Teams working on content often create multiple iterations, and without a robust version control system, it becomes difficult to track changes, leading to confusion and potentially using outdated assets. 

4. Lack of Visibility 

Without real-time visibility into the media supply chain, decision-making becomes less informed. Inefficient tracking of content usage, performance, and engagement can hinder the ability to make data-driven adjustments to content strategies. 

5. Multi-Platform Distribution 

The explosion of digital platforms and devices requires content to be tailored and optimized for various channels. Adapting content to different formats, resolutions, and requirements for broadcasting, streaming, social media, and websites can be resource-intensive. 

6. Content Security and Rights Management 

Media content often comes with complex usage rights and licensing agreements. Ensuring that content is used in compliance with legal and contractual obligations while safeguarding against unauthorized distribution is a significant challenge. 

7. Rapid Content Turnaround 

In industries like news, where content needs to be delivered in real time, managing the rapid production and distribution of media assets can be challenging. Quick turnarounds require efficient workflows and collaboration tools. 

8. Audience Engagement 

Engaging audiences across different platforms and demographics requires creating diverse and compelling content. Ensuring that content resonates with various segments of the audience and fosters engagement is a continuous challenge. 

9. Monetization and Revenue Generation 

Identifying and capitalizing on revenue opportunities, such as pay-per-view events, subscription models, and advertising, requires effective monetization strategies and accurate tracking of content performance. 

10. Technology Integration 

Integrating various platforms, tools, and systems, such as content management systems, editing software, analytics platforms, and distribution networks, can be complex. Ensuring seamless communication and data exchange between these systems is essential. 

11. Evolving Technologies 

The media landscape is constantly evolving, with new technologies and platforms emerging. Staying up to date with the latest trends and adapting to technological changes while maintaining operational efficiency is a continuous challenge. 

12. Quality Control 

Ensuring consistent quality across different content formats and platforms is essential for maintaining the reputation of the organization. However, without proper quality control processes, variations in content quality can arise. 

Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive approach to media supply chain management, including the adoption of an advanced, modern media supply chain platform. By leveraging technology to streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, and gain insights into content performance, organizations can overcome these challenges and thrive in the dynamic and ever-evolving world of media content creation and distribution. 

The ROI of a Media Supply Chain Platform

Effectively managing your media supply chain is not only crucial for significant returns on investment (ROI) but also for achieving time savings. Media supply chain management improves ROI by optimizing workflows, reducing operational costs, enhancing content quality, and enabling data-driven decision-making. By delivering engaging content efficiently, organizations can attract larger audiences, leading to increased monetization opportunities. 

Implementing a media supply chain platform can result in cost savings by reducing manual labor, minimizing errors, optimizing resource allocation, and streamlining content distribution. These efficiencies lead to decreased production and operational costs. 

Moreover, the timeline for ROI depends on factors such as the size of your organization, the volume of content produced, and your monetization strategies. Many organizations start seeing improvements in efficiency and engagement shortly after implementing the platform. 

A media supply chain platform saves time for content creators by automating manual tasks, such as asset tagging, version control, and content distribution. This automation frees up content creators’ time, allowing them to focus on more creative and value-added tasks. 

Furthermore, it can reduce content production timelines by streamlining workflows, automating repetitive tasks, and enabling collaborative editing. This accelerates the content creation process from ideation to distribution. It centralizes content management and distribution, making it easier to publish to multiple platforms simultaneously. This efficiency ensures that content reaches the intended audience promptly, enhancing engagement. It also facilitates faster content localization by providing tools to manage and track translations, adaptations, and regional variations. This ensures that localized content can be produced and distributed efficiently. 

In conclusion, organizations seeking time-saving insights can rely on a media supply chain platform, featuring robust analytics to track content performance, audience engagement, and workflow efficiency. These tools not only identify bottlenecks but also present opportunities for impactful optimizations. Streamlined collaboration features in a media supply chain platform enable team members to work together seamlessly, reducing communication delays and eliminating the need for manual coordination. This leads to faster content creation and distribution.  

Selecting the best media supply chain management platform is a critical decision that can redefine your organization’s content creation and distribution strategies. Explore our comprehensive guide on how to choose the best Media Supply Chain platform to make the right choice.

Empowering Success Through Media Supply Chain Mastery

When every pixel weaves narratives and every frame tells a story, the role of the media supply chain emerges as the unsung hero behind the scenes. As our thirst for multimedia experiences surges, the intricate dance of content creation, distribution, and engagement unfolds seamlessly, thanks to the orchestration of media supply chain platforms like Dalet Flex. 

Recognizing the juncture at which your organization stands, poised to embrace these tools is both a strategic imperative and a transformative opportunity. When content overload threatens to drown your resources, when workflows meander through bottlenecks, or when collaboration is hindered by geographical divides, the stage is set for media supply chain management tools to take the spotlight. 

Imagine a future where asset retrieval becomes an instantaneous affair, where tailored content gracefully conquers platforms, where real-time insights guide your narrative, and where compliance complexities are tamed. This isn’t an illusion, but a reality sculpted by the dexterity of media supply chain management and automation tools. As audience expectations soar, revenue horizons expand, and the canvas of content grows, these tools remain your steadfast allies, scaling alongside your ambitions and ensuring that operational efficiency remains unwavering. 

Amid the plethora of options, Dalet Flex stands as the vanguard of media supply chain management solutions. Its magic isn’t merely in transforming challenges into triumphs; it’s in reshaping the way you approach content orchestration. With Dalet Flex, you’re not just managing a supply chain; you’re navigating a symphony of streamlined efficiency, enriched collaboration, enhanced content quality, and empowered engagement. 

Embrace a modern, efficient media supply chain and embark on a transformative journey. Request a demo of Dalet Flex today and witness the convergence of content mastery and audience resonance. 

The post How to Increase Your ROI with a Media Supply Chain Platform appeared first on Dalet.

Let me tell you a bit more about the four SaaS solutions, underpinned by the proven Dalet Flex Media Logistics Platform and Dalet Pyramid News modules.

Faster News Production and Delivery

Despite constant changes, one aspect of broadcasting news has never changed: the need to keep your audience watching, wherever they are. And in today’s competitive landscape you need to effectively track viewer engagement for the best possible advertising and/or subscription metrics.

News production and distribution used to be primarily focused on TV broadcasts. Today, with a new social media platform emerging and trending every other week, there’s no single premier medium for audiences to consume news content. Global connectivity and mobile access enable news to spread at breakneck speed, so you need to produce and distribute platform- and device-agnostic news content every minute!

This is not only a technology challenge, but news delivery needs to also take into account the context around who’s consuming your news, where and how. Above all, news organizations need to understand that they don’t control newscasting anymore – the audience does. Anyone holding a smartphone is now a potential newscaster, so it is time to rethink how news is made, with journalists being able to produce content that works across all platforms – sometimes through, or together with, their audience.

With Dalet’s cloud-native and Storytelling 360 ethos, delivered through our newsroom solution, Dalet Pyramid, all that programming, integration and metrics design has been done for you. News professionals can work anytime, anywhere, with an intuitive web-based user interface that manages all aspects of your story from a single screen, including mobile devices: ingest, news gathering, archive mining, story assignments, rough cuts and voice over – all while collaborating with other team members. Dalet Pyramid empowers you to break down the newsroom’s walls and deliver to audiences everywhere quickly and efficiently, leveraging cloud-native, scalable and elastic infrastructure.

Streamlined Production Asset Management

The days where production teams, and their Production Asset Management (PAM) tools, were totally separate from the enterprise Media asset Management (MAM) solution, should be long gone. Running separate technology and work streams for production and other content teams is highly inefficient and time consuming. And yet, this model is still deeply rooted across media companies and teams.

Issues around file compatibility, transfer bottlenecks, metadata errors and more, slow down your ability to deliver content quickly and efficiently to multiple platforms. It’s time to implement a smarter way to arrange your production and sharing environment.

Dalet Flex provides a robust solution that integrates and orchestrates production and media asset management, from content acquisition to post-production and distribution, including archive. Creative teams can access content from anywhere through the web, their preferred NLE or mobile application. Storage is greatly optimized – eliminating the need to duplicate assets – and costs can be monitored across multiple projects​. All this with a wide range of 3rd party integrations that remove the barriers between production and the rest of your operation.

Powerful media supply chain packaging and distribution

The Media & Entertainment industry today is all about revenue and cost of operations – only the most profitable will survive. Clearly understanding your media supply chain, including cost-per-asset, has become essential. For example, packaging a show or movie has a fixed cost, but if you have to create 300 versions for global distribution, your profit can very quickly vaporize. What was once a very intangible value needs to now be clearly quantified for individual line items.

These are just some of the elements that are required to run a superior media supply chain operation, which Dalet Flex can enable. From its inception, the platform was designed to easily break down and track each step within a production and distribution workflow, down to the asset level. It is easy to report on production, post-production and distribution costs and, thanks to its cloud-native architecture, internal stakeholders and external partners can access specific functions, given the correct access rights. You can now increase the agility of your operations and meet growing demands while reducing costs with Dalet’s Media Supply Chain solution.

Modern Archive Management and Monetization

If your organization has been in the media business for some time, it’s likely that a number of workflows and systems are still shackled to the legacies of the analog TV era. Assets stored on hard drives and removable discs made for operating systems that don’t exist anymore, in many cases still on magnetic videotape and 35mm film!

Repurposing and monetizing content by letting partners easily access and use it can sometimes cost more money than it’s worth.This is often due to siloed operations and disparate standards, both internally and between partner companies. Even after implementing cloud computing, migrating archived content to the cloud has been a hit-and-miss proposition. What’s more, simply sending huge media files to sit on a cloud computing service can potentially cost as much or more than just leaving them on a server in the corner of your production office.

And with the need to reduce business costs, scaling down operations, including storage, makes financial sense. How do you cost-effectively store media assets in the cloud? How do you identify the specific assets you need to share? How do you repurpose old content for a new language or the hearing-impaired?

At Dalet we believe we have the answers: make your production, storage and distribution hubs one and the same. Let the flexibility and smart management of the cloud store only what you need as business fluctuates. Dalet Flex for Archives and Monetization delivers all that and more.

With Dalet’s Archiving solutions, you’ll be able to migrate all your disparate archives into a single, intelligent, centralized media library​. Find, reuse and monetize years of existing library material and reduce costs through operational efficiencies.

Missed NAB? Would you like to review key trends and innovations from the show? Join us on a virtual post-NAB event to learn more about how Dalet’s solutions and expertise can help your business thrive in today’s competitive M&E landscape.

The post Need Efficient Workflows? We Have a Solution for That appeared first on Dalet.

An Industry in Constant Evolution

As ever, walking the enormous halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center gives you plenty of food for thought. Just by looking around, observing exhibitor’s booths and demos, and attending conferences, you soak in the state of our very lively industry – one that has a true passion for change.

The trends that stood out for me, both from dozens of conversations and listening to conference speakers, were:

• Technical and business transformation is a continuum: unlike the past, where internal changes were typically from point a to b (e.g. from analog to digital, from tape to server…), today content owners & distributors need the ability to constantly adapt, rather than going for a “big bang” approach. To respond, suppliers must build solutions that enable such continued evolution.
• The consumer is in the driver’s seat: no matter how innovative your technology implementation might be, it needs to deliver to the needs of your audience. Plus you need to have a good solution to track and understand your consumers’ preferences if you want to remain competitive.
• Similarly, any technology solution needs to be easy-to-use. With today’s digital-native workforce, if the tools are not intuitive, they simply won’t use them.
• As a major global broadcaster stated, reducing time-to-market is the quickest and easiest path to cost savings, and technology should help by providing the backbone to streamline workflows, reduce manual work and human error.
• And finally, as we’ve been predicting for several years, every media company is gradually moving their workflows to the cloud, initially through hybrid implementations. This also brings opportunities for AI-powered workflows that signal the beginning of a new era. According to the latest research by the IABM more than 30% of media businesses have started to adopt AI in their day-to-day operations.

I feel privileged to work in such a forward-thinking, innovative industry and look forward to seeing its continuous transformation.

My Takeaways from the Dalet Executive Breakfast

One of the highlights in our calendar is the Dalet Executive Breakfast at the NAB Show and this year’s edition marked the return of the event after a 3-year hiatus due to the Pandemic. In a large Vegas ballroom packed with industry leaders, top media executives and innovators, the Dalet team, together with speakers from Bloomberg Media and Fox Sports Australia, had the opportunity to exchange ideas on emerging trends and future challenges for industry.

These are the key thoughts I took away from the session:

Cloud Everywhere

• In today’s media business landscape, content is consumed from the cloud, which makes it available everywhere. 
• There’s no question that embracing the cloud paradigm is essential to benefit from its operational efficiencies and cost benefits.
• This demands a platform with a cloud-native architecture with modular services that can be scaled up and down as your business requires.
• As the media industry adopts cloud-native solutions, how content is produced and managed needs to evolve too.

Get the Right Solution for Your Business

• It’s important to take a gradual approach to cloud migration – a “big bang” approach can be too disruptive and detrimental to your operations.
• Look for a single platform that can centralize your media workflows in the cloud leveraging scalable services and applications.
• Choose the right technology partner to help your organization transform the way it works.
• Choose a media management solution that will support your company’s evolution with a cloud-native architecture, integrated tools, AI and data-driven automation for increased efficiency.

Eliminate News Production Chaos

• News production and distribution has become chaotic with hundreds of content sources and consumer destinations.
• News storytellers need to produce the story wherever they are – time and versatility are of the essence.
• Implementing a story-centric workflow based on centralized planning will enable news organizations to bring order to this chaos through orchestration, visibility, remote production and rich data models across the full story lifecycle.

You can watch here the Dalet keynote that I presented at the Executive Breakfast, together with COO Stephane Schlayen.

Dalet – Your trusted Partner

After more than 30 years of innovation, Dalet continues to lead the way in delivering solutions that respond to the needs of media-rich organizations. Ahead of 2023’s momentous NAB Show, we unveiled our latest product strategy shift, which is based on our deep-seated industry knowledge and leverages the latest available technologies.

You can count on Dalet as your trusted partner to enable your business transformation today… and tomorrow. We have the know-how and 33 years of experience to bring you to the next chapter

Keep an eye out for our next NAB-themed blog post, where we will discuss the four new Dalet solutions that will transform the way you manage and share assets across key workflows: News Production & Delivery, Production Asset Management, Media Supply Chain & Distribution, and Archives & Monetization.

Missed NAB? Would you like to review key trends and innovations from the show?

Join us on a virtual post-NAB event to hear more about how your business can thrive in today’s competitive M&E landscape.

The post Impressions from NAB’s Centennial Show  appeared first on Dalet.

Looking at the trends

What we saw at NAB was aligned with the trends identified by Caretta Research ahead of the show and what we have seen since the beginning of the year. The first trend we saw is that investment in media technology is now driven by problem solving. While new technology, prototypes, and product reveals still make the headlines, the NAB Show has now clearly taken the trajectory of a business show. Business, editorial, and creative decision makers are looking for solutions to the problems they encounter along the media value chain, especially around remote production and collaboration, scale and automation, as well as digital-native content operations.

A second trend noticeable at the event is the desire for flexible deployments and the demand for modular technologies. Media-rich organizations want to “future-proof” their operations and to enhance the management of components’ lifespan. Open platforms and “operating systems”, seamlessly integrated into the wider ecosystem, are becoming the focal point of media production, management, and distribution workflows, often with marketplace models.

The third major trend is about cloud-native architectures and how they enable products that are faster, more reliable, and more affordable. SaaS offerings with a lower cost of entry are being brought to market, thanks to multi-tenanted architectures that enable economies of scale. With the elasticity of the cloud at their fingertips, media organizations can quickly scale resources as required with control over budgets.

We at Dalet are embracing these trends to always bring more value to our customers with transformative products. The launch of Dalet Flex for teams, a SaaS solution that provides professional-grade media logistics tools to smaller crews and organizations, is the perfect reflection of that.

Making time to talk

Communication is important with our customers. We truly believe we work better as a team. Open communication is at our core, and co-innovation is a mantra. We’ve discussed countless number of times with our customers and partners how agility has become so important. The ability to deploy solutions easily and to be extremely fast in launching new initiatives has become paramount. SaaS is a key ally in this endeavor.

Achieving scale through automation and workflow orchestration is still very high on the list for our customers, and our products have been making a difference in that area for many years. In addition, and together with smart, AI-powered tools, media-rich organizations are now putting much more focus on UI and UX, a big shift in our industry. These discussions with customers are becoming more common, as well as more advanced in terms of the strategies they deploy to distribute the right content to the right audiences on the right platforms. Helping customers scale and streamline their operations is a major focus.

Conversations around onboarding, training, user experience, and customer success are also much more common. These are very much valued by all stakeholders. Dalet is a customer-centric company; and we are building the teams and the structure around customer success. We help media-rich organizations maximize ROI and outcomes on their investment and overall satisfaction with a simple philosophy: their success is our success.

So, book a meeting with us sometime. It’s great to talk!

An interview with IABM TV on industry trends, the latest releases from Dalet, and what is coming in the future (Click here to watch the interview)

Showcasing Dalet latest innovations

In the same mindset of remaining customer-centric, Dalet’s leadership team and media workflow specialists were at the event, showcasing our latest innovations in content workflow solutions, cloud-native technology, and user experience.

Attendees stopping by the Dalet booth were able to discover two offerings for the first time, Dalet Flex for teams offered as-a-service for all teams with digital media management and multiplatform delivery requirements, and Dalet Pyramid solutions to enable modern storytelling and news production practices with centralized planning, remote editing, and digital-native production capabilities.

The industry recognition we received for these new offerings was a proud moment for the #DaletTeam. While Dalet Pyramid won NewscastStudio’s Broadcast Production Award for “Best New Product or Service – Production”, Dalet Flex for teams was awarded “Best in Show” from TVTech.

As a key technology partner and their chosen Media Asset Management partner, Dalet was also present at the AWS booth. Both Dalet Flex as-a-service and Dalet Pyramid running on AWS infrastructure were on display and received a warm welcome. Dalet and AWS power some of the most advanced cloud-native and hybrid media workflows.

Dalet Flex for teams was a featured demo at the AWS booth on the 2022 NAB show floor

What comes next? Focus.

The question we find ourselves often asking is “What comes next?”

For us at Dalet, we keep our attention on the value we provide through state-of-the-art media workflows – the life’s blood of any newsroom, sports coverage, content owner, or media production facility. This is what we do, and we focus on it. Today, our customers not only evaluate products but also roadmaps, development priorities, and company culture. They buy from companies they want to work with. We are more than software.

With that in mind, I’ll conclude this article with a quote from Dalet’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Stephane Guez:

“We’re thrilled to reconnect in person with our partners and customers to share our latest innovations for digital media workflows. We’ve been hard at work investing in and developing modern technologies to meet the demands of today’s media rich organizations. To support this, we have expanded the Dalet Team with media, cloud, and security experts whose focus is to enable wider market adoption of Dalet solutions beyond the traditional borders of broadcast. These investments coupled with our intense R&D and project management efforts have enabled us to deliver an NAB showcase that we’re incredibly proud of: budget-friendly pre-configured, convenient, yet secure workflow cloud-based offerings with state-of-the-art UX and UI experiences customers expect.”

We are part of an industry and a world in a state of permanent change. Mature and stable like a large corporation, yet agile and growing like a start-up, we continue to shape the future of media production, management and distribution workflows. Join us!

The post What Happened in Vegas – NAB 2022 in Review appeared first on Dalet.

In the last several years, esports has evolved from a niche interest, popular largely among teenagers, into a market spanning the entire globe with big audiences and even bigger productions. 26.6 million monthly viewers tuned into esports events in 2021, up 11.4% from 2020, according Insider Intelligence. And as esports continues to grow, global investors, brands, and media outlets are all paying attention. Feeding this interest in esports are the numerous stories generated not only by the games themselves and the quests and rich mythos that come with them, but also in the individual players themselves. Metadata plays more than just a supporting role in esports and broadcasting at large. Today, modern broadcasting and content streaming illustrate that metadata is both powerful and invaluable. Metadata is like gold! Nowhere is this power better exemplified than in esports where live broadcasts utilize metadata-driven workflows along with hardware and software integrations to create unforgettable productions. And with the right tools, terabytes’ worth of quality content can be automatically tagged, distributed, archived, and indexed for use by global teams editing and creating content in platforms like Adobe Premiere Pro®.

Better Production Tools Equals More Content

Digital production tools have been evolving in spectacular ways and, because esports already exists in the digital realm, there are no obstacles to entry. For example, no additional algorithms are required to convert on-screen/on-camera player actions into data. AI-powered scene capture and instant analysis of every action an athlete performs in esports is collected as metadata. This allows for dynamic visualizations of player stats, instantly generated and tagged highlight clips, and efficient remote production workflows. As production tools become more adept at utilizing metadata and workflows increase in sophistication, more assets will be generated. Cloud-based platforms like Dalet Flex use AI technology (such as Dalet Media Cortex) to truly harness metadata to create fully-indexed content libraries. These asset libraries can then be utilized by editing and production teams working remotely, from anywhere in the world.

Esports is All About Big Moments

The production value in a big esports event rivals that of American Football’s Superbowl, the FIFA World Cup, or even the ceremonies of the Olympics. These events often span multiple days and are a goldmine of assets and metadata.

The 2017 DOTA 2 tournament attracted a staggering 25 million viewers and 20,000 fans on site across four days. Electronic Sports League deployed their proprietary Echo platform—developed to leverage metadata in an effort to increase audience interaction and engagement—for this event. Evidence shows that metadata generated in real time when broadcasting the 2017 DOTA2 tournament had a profound impact on audience engagement and interaction. Graphics detailing player-performance stats effectively created a narrative around the competition experience and individual players, eliciting audience responses of surprise and anticipation through the four-day competition.

Two years later, the 2019 League of Legends World Championship, produced by Riot Games, showed just how far and hard the production envelope can be pushed and how innovation can pulverize the status quo. Riot pulled off a two-location remote production with the world feed being produced in LA, the English Language show produced at Riot’s European HQ in Berlin. Commentators across the globe had instant access to live stats and memorable gameplay moments thanks again to that humble metadata. Using the at the time new JPEG XS compression format, Riot games executed the first trans-Atlantic remote production in esports history. Astoundingly, the finals were produced and sent to 40 distribution partners around the world with just one OB truck onsite in Paris. It’s staggering to consider the volume of content and metadata that was generated just from this single event.

Literally thousands of hours of compelling video come out of these events with a mountain of metadata to match. And like with professional sports, the stories in esports don’t end when the confetti settles and viewers logoff. In fact, to be able to retell these stories in inventive ways is critical in maintaining interest in a digital world where attention spans can be fleeting and memories just as short.

Assets Worth Managing

With the array of software and user roles required to pull off a successful esports event, content may end up being stored on different servers and in different locations. Assets may have multiple permissions and there could be any number of file formats floating around as well. According to an article on FeedMagazine.TV, ad hoc in-house solutions can become fragmented. If editors, for example, are to execute tasks efficiently and across teams, assets need to be unified and available from a single source. This is where Dalet Flex can reduce these fragmentations, centralizing all this fresh esports content into a single, unified view. Integration with AI indexing tools, including Dalet’s own Media Cortex, help in the categorizing, indexing, and archiving of media. This not only creates meaningful interpretations of the pre-existing metadata, but also builds a layer of metadata that makes indexing and subsequent searches more intuitive and efficient.

Metadata excels in the way it enables us to consolidate assets, categorize information, and create robust content libraries. The Council on Library and Information Resources states “without metadata, a thousand-hour digital video archive is reduced to a terabyte or greater jumble of bits; with metadata, those thousand hours can become a valuable information resource.” Imagine that now, not only can a live clip of a player slaying a dragon for the big esports tournament win be displayed as an instant highlight, but video from multiple angles provided by in-game observer cameras can be tagged, saved, and indexed in an asset library to be later edited and sent out on social media or other distribution channels. What’s so important here is that the manpower requirements are greatly reduced, and more time can be using these memorable moments for post-event fan-engagement, branding, and promotion.

The scope of work required by esports can on be accomplished in the cloud. Cloud-based infrastructures and services are becoming not just more practical, but necessary for content access, storage and asset management as more and more employees across the globe are working remotely. The flexibility of multi-cloud platforms allows for optimal levels of security, performance and reliability, as well as business continuity and system redundancy. Given volume of content and metadata generated from an esports event, a platform with these characteristics is needed to not only sustain but to also scale operations as esports popularity continues to surge and productions get bigger and more complex.

Esports Will Only Continue to Grow

The growing global popularity of esports has brought about some remarkable innovation, in particular, the use of metadata to create highlights, stats, and enhance storytelling as well as pump out a mountain of content. AI-powered, cloud-based content management and supply chain platforms like Dalet Flex will undoubtedly see broader adoption in esports as this already large volume of esports assets increase. Associated access requirements, along with a need for seamless project hand-offs across time zones, require metadata-driven solutions in the cloud. Esports is forecast to gain more traction in years to come, and with that the demand for tools that can manage this content in a scalable and flexible fashion will increase as a result.

Curious as to how Dalet can help you in your esports video asset management and storytelling goals for 2022. No better time to level up than now.

The post Esports and Metadata: Unlimited Storytelling Possibilities appeared first on Dalet.

Today’s world is radically different

Just twenty years ago, the first primitive video streaming technology emerged, and to early adopters, it was exciting. It was shaky and flaky, but showed potential. Neither YouTube nor Facebook existed. Video was consumed via broadcast or DVD. The rigid standards that bound broadcasters were necessary because TVs at the time couldn’t display anything else.

After years of technology evolution, it became easy to get video to where it was meant to be consumed, and the idea that one day there might be hundreds of video platforms to address, all different in some way or other, was either a distant one or not there at all.

Today, it’s a radically different world, where everyone has a video device in their pocket, where digital video is better than film in every measurable way, where 8K video resolution measured by pixel count per frame is 85 times that of standard definition from two years ago. There’s a variety of video codecs, HDR vs SDR, not to mention complex distribution rights, which might vary from region to region.

Viewing habits are vastly different

Inevitably, viewing habits have changed dramatically. There’s anecdotal evidence that in a typical class of 30 ten – year – olds, precisely none of them will have watched linear TV the night before. Between them, YouTube, Social Media and OTT/OVP sourced media are the dominant platforms for video consumption. “Traditional” linear TV is just one of a myriad of video distribution formats.

The Ooyala Flex Media Platform was developed to be the answer to this explosion of video formats and platforms. It automates content distribution, guided by orchestrated packaging workflows that users create, based on the number and nature of video destinations to be served.
 

A cloud-native platform at your service

A “cloud-native” platform means that it is modular, scalable and almost infinitely flexible. This is perfect for modern media creators, because their distribution demands will grow quickly, and sometimes unpredictably.

Applications in the cloud are not restricted by size or scale. There are no physical boundaries. If you need more, just ask for it. It’s the same if you need less. A cloud architecture means that you don’t have to make business-critical investments in hardware that risk losses through depreciation, or though an inability to grow and contract with customer demand.

The Ooyala Flex Media Platform is your Cloud Media Factory. An automated content supply chain that allows your team to meet all OTT and multi-platform distribution needs!
 

Adaptable and secure

Building a cloud-native application – especially one that is optimised for media production and distribution – requires an approach that is both adaptable and secure. For the ultimate in flexibility, the Ooyala Flex Media Platform has microservices as its basic functional blocks. These are essentially “atoms” of functionality. They’re elements of the application that have been made as lean as possible without affecting efficiency. Indeed, breaking down an application like this is a major enhancement to efficiency, because it dispenses with monolithic programs that belong in the cretaceous period.

Microservices communicate with each other and with the outside world through APIs (cCarefully designed gateways that “talk” in a very controlled way to other parts of a program – like a user interface or an external software request for some media).

This approach is intrinsically secure. Even though an application talks to external services, it has to do so in a very specific way. Unusual requests will simply be rejected. There is security at every layer in the system.
 

What’s the answer?

The answer to the extraordinary rate of change in distribution platforms is to have a flexible, modular, scalable cloud-based application to deal with the complexity. Dalet’s Ooyala Flex Media Platform is designed to deal with a wide range of media operations and scale with them to almost any size. Closely integrated with other Dalet products such as Dalet AmberFin for media processing and Dalet Media Cortex for AI-powered media enrichment, the Ooyala Flex Media Platform can take media from anywhere, to anywhere, automatically and without drama.

Sooner or later (most likely sooner) every organization will be impacted by the rate of change in multimedia content operations. Strategic thinking based on linear growth is no longer an option. The Ooyala Flex Media Platform, a first class citizen of the cloud, is the answer to this sign of the times.

The good news? It’s ready for you to use now, and it will make you fighting fit for the future.

Learn more about the Ooyala Flex Media Platform

The post Why Cloud Content Supply Chains Are The Answer to Today’s Media Consumption Demands appeared first on Dalet.

Breaking the news for today’s multiplatform audiences

With changes in the media landscape accelerating, more than ever, news organizations need to be agile enough to meet evolving expectations. But what news organizations really need to focus on, is the dramatic shift in audience behavior and the fierce competition for screen time. They need the agility to experiment with different platforms, formats and tones of voice in order to reach fickle young audiences. Here are examples of Dalet customers breaking new grounds.

 
SBS, Australia

Building a cross-platform, multi-cultural media operation with Dalet

With significant shifts in audience expectations for more content on more platforms, SBS took the strategic decision to revamp its underlying media management and distribution architecture with Dalet. Faced with a range of legacy products no longer able to cope with increasing demands for multi-platform and multi-lingual content production and distribution, SBS centralized all its media operations under a single, open and collaborative platform: Dalet Galaxy.

NextRadioTV, France

Driving Multi-Platform Expansion for Leading Media Brands with Dalet

Owned by multinational telecoms and mass media company Altice Group, NextRadioTV is one of the largest media properties in Europe with 14 TV and two radio channels, including BFMTV, reaching more than 10 million viewers each day. A Dalet customer since 2005, NextRadioTV powers its content production, playout and multi-platform distribution workflows with Dalet Galaxy for all of their leading TV, radio and digital channel brands. NextRadioTV also leveraged its Dalet Galaxy platform to launch the newest regional channel, BFMLyon. 

“More than 1,000 journalists and editors are able to work with the Dalet Galaxy system. They work collaboratively and share their content across all NextRadioTV brands. This gives us tremendous flexibility with regards to feeding channels and distribution outlets, including our new BFM Lyon channel.”

Antoine Robelin, Broadcast CTO, NextRadioTV

Mediaset, Italy

How Mediaset Uses Dalet for News and Info-tainment. A story about growth and efficiency!

Mediaset is Italy’s largest commercial broadcaster. Back in 2010, they embarked on a radical business transformation with Dalet to produce more content, faster, to more devices with a future-proofed and scalable agile system in response to new business opportunities. Connecting teams, breaking production silos and creating a centralized internal news agency with content customization at the heart, Mediaset fully leverages Dalet Galaxy.

Providing sports fans unique content experiences

Sports have always been a ‘now’ focused-type of entertainment and the digital era has brought in a whole new world when it comes to fan engagement. Providing a unique media experience and deepening fan engagement before, during and after the games is the number one goal for teams, leagues and federations.

MLSE, Canada

Expanding the Fan Experience in Arena and Around the World with Dalet

A world-class sports and entertainment organization, MLSE is the owner of iconic teams including the Toronto Maple Leafs (NHL), Toronto Raptors (NBA), and Toronto FC (MLS). MLSE relies on Dalet Galaxy to centralize, manage, produce and deliver all of its content, providing a unique media experience and deepening fan engagement before, during and after games. 

“Dalet allows us to focus on telling the timely stories that matter to fans right now – whether it’s creating snackable content from interviews, a look into the lives of players, or deconstructing a spectacular play moments after it happens. It also gives us the ability to reuse that content for a related story in the future; connecting the history of the organization to that ‘now’ moment, which deepens the passion our fans have for their favorite team.”

Shannon Hosford, Chief Marketing Officer at MLSE

Building agile content supply chains and augmenting workflows

Translations.com, USA

Translations.com introduces Media.Next

A Dalet “Business Innovation” Award winner in 2019, Translations.com, the technology division of TransPerfect, leverages fully the Dalet Galaxy five Media Asset Management (MAM) and Workflow Orchestration platform. Building on the principle of open production and component-based workflows, the new platform, dubbed “Media.Next,” prepares for the industry-wide explosion of media translation and localization needs.
 

“The Dalet Galaxy five platform played a key role in the successful launch of our Media.Next solution. The demand for localization of video content is growing rapidly, and we’re confident that our partnership with Dalet will help us scale up to meet demand.”

Phil Shawe, President and CEO at TransPerfect

2019 was quite a ride! We hope these customer stories have given you a great deal of inspiration and ambitious ideas for 2020 and beyond. And, who knows, perhaps next year it will be your turn to be featured in the Dalet blog… Bring on 2020!
 

Want to learn more and meet these organizations? Join us at a Dalet Pulse event near you!

The post How leading media organizations grow with Dalet… A year in customer stories! appeared first on Dalet.