Acknowledging the deep market shifts, this year’s show revolved around audiences’ insatiable craving for fresh content and more personalised, immersive experiences on the devices and channels of their choice.

For broadcasters and media organizations, it highlighted one thing: the need for greater agility, faster adaptation and collaborative innovation. Not only do media professionals need to think “out of the box” about linear broadcast and traditional consumption formats and devices, but they need to think tactically on how to build meaningful, complementary content experiences.

The Efficient Media Factory

Multiplatform Production, Versioning and Automated Distribution

This is a good segue to talk about how our agile Dalet Galaxy five platform is enabling broadcasters and media organizations to meet their audiences’ expectations and build strong, open foundation for future requirements.

A key concern today is how to address the many outlets, program categories and flavors of a particular program simultaneously. Our Director of Product Strategy Kevin Savina explains in a Rapid TV News interview at IBC the complexities of delivering hyper-curated content to multiple platforms and how broadcasters and media organizations need to embrace the new way of thinking and working when it comes to building and distributing their content.

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Agile platforms like Dalet Galaxy five drive workflows with a component-based approach, enabling industrialization of key industry standards like IMF and creating real business benefits and opportunities for international content distribution. More than a technical uplift, component-based workflows really allow an operation to change the value model and ultimately change the way the media business engages its viewers and customers who want to purchase their programs with hyper-targeted content delivered to any platform, any country en mass.

Let’s take a real-life example with the leading European media brand Euronews. A finalist of the prestigious IBC Innovation Awards alongside Dalet, Euronews piloted a strategic transformation to put content customization at the heart of its operations. Tapping fully into the agility of the Dalet Galaxy platform and component-based workflows, Euronews, in essence, reinvented its broadcast journalism, taking its “one-size-fits-all” approach to news, which was one video with 11 voice-overs, into 12 distinct localized channels. They increased digital content output by 20% and television content by 100% with the same staff and headcount.

Johann Zemmour, Dalet General Manager, EMEA & APAC; Francois Schmitt, Euronews COO; Yannick Agaësse, Dalet Sales & Business Development Manager

Euronews achieved its vision and became the world’s first truly ‘Glocal’ news channel, providing audiences important global headlines with perspectives and viewpoints relevant to their regions, cultures and communities. This transformation also allowed Euronews to become the perfect media partner for advertisers looking to run impactful international advertising campaigns with the ability to adapt their message to the characteristics of local markets.

Another great example of customer success is Sportcast, a subsidiary of DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga. Sportcast operates the largest digital football archive in the world. Producing the 617 yearly matches of the German Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 for DFL, Sportcast manages the entire content value chain from the stadium to the world with the Dalet Galaxy platform. You can hear from them directly the importance of an agile platform in managing, enriching and delivering content:
 

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Live Show Production & Complementary Content Experiences

With the launch of Dalet OnePlay at IBC, we had the chance to talk with many attendees about the importance of complementary content experience around live shows. I am happy to report here that our new solution received a very warm welcome from both the Dalet stand visitors and the press, nabbing the TVBEurope Best of Show Award for its innovation and outstanding product development.

In the conversations we had, most media operations need a way to better control content and engage their audiences during live playout. Not everyone can afford to run every production device manually to get that granular control. It’s simply too costly and too cumbersome. Dalet OnePlay controls all core production device types, including video switchers and servers, cameras, audio mixing consoles, graphics, lighting, routers and more. In addition, it orchestrates multimedia content distribution, including social media delivery, thanks to the native connection with the Dalet Galaxy five orchestration layer. You can read more about Dalet OnePlay capabilities in the interview with Dalet OnePlay product line manager Raul Alba.

Raul Alba, Dalet Product Line Manager for Studio Production, Broadcast Graphics, and I/O Solutions

Making Media Businesses Smarter. The AI Revolution!

The notions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) may sometimes remain a bit difficult to grasp. Well, we have a suggestion: get the benefits of AI, not the complexity!

At IBC2018, we revealed the first version of Dalet Media Cortex, a cloud service that enables media organizations to connect and orchestrate various types of AI technologies everywhere they add value to operations & business. A plug-and-play service, the first release of Dalet Media Cortex enables media organizations to consume cognitive services such as celebrity identification, label, brand and scene detection, sentiment analysis, and visual content moderation, on demand in a pay-as-you-go model.

The AI-generated data is then displayed at various levels of the Dalet Galaxy five application, in a set of new intuitive UIs, to provide contextual, actionable insights and recommendations to the users.

The full launch of Dalet Media Cortex will be in Q1 2019 and you can learn more about our AI as well as social media plans in the What Caught My Eye’s Business Transformation session – see video below, starting at 41:20 and until 46:20 – featuring Dalet VP of Marketing Arnaud Elnecave:
 

Connecting a Globally Distributed Workforce

Also making its debut at IBC2018, the new Dalet OneCut remote editing workflow was demonstrated on the stand by product line manager Golan Tsarfaty. The new remote editing capabilities give journalists out in the field a way to upload materials easily as well as develop stories remotely using content from the central newsroom and archives. They can submit drafts or finalize their piece from anywhere.

You can learn more about this remarkable workflow in this in-depth interview with Golan.

This feature is the perfect illustration of decades of R&D and innovation in collaborative media workflows. Collaboration is a core concept of the Dalet Galaxy platform and spans across the entire workflow: from planning through scripting, production all the way through broadcast and distribution. All of these activities are served by a single, unified content catalogue and accessible from multiple devices. Shared media bins make the life of teams easier than ever, chat rooms allow users to open up projects quickly, using ad-hoc groups to exchange media, scripts and ideas. Last but not least, collaborative script editing in editorial workflows is a game-changing feature!

Thank You, Dalet Community!

I could not conclude this blog article without praising the amazing Dalet community!

Dalet Pulse was once again a unique demonstration of how powerful, diverse and vibrant our community is today. On behalf of the entire Dalet Team, thank you to everyone for attending and engaging in so many discussions around the latest technology and business trends, as well as sharing best practices and use cases. Also a big thank you to our event sponsors and key partners Adobe, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Quantum and Dell EMC. See you soon…
 

Any questions? Did you miss us at the show? Let’s talk or meet at our next event!

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In today’s increasingly file-based media workflows, file transcode operations have assumed critical importance. Gone is the old router that joins processes together and in comes the smart, scalable, reliable, hidden transcoder. I apologize in advance if some of this blog piece sounds a bit pro-AmberFin, but when we designed our new Transcode Farm Controller, we talked to many different customer types to find out what was needed and they made some interesting observations that I will share with you. Most importantly, they said that a Transcode Farm Controller must be scalable, must provide an appropriate level of redundancy to suit their application and must enable a combination of high throughput and advanced system functionality.

Well, that sounds easy enough. They also wanted it to be operationally easy because the operational staff won’t have the training to understand the low level technology of every file format and the supervisors will be too busy to spend much time on the farm. (Note how I avoided trying to tell a joke there).

What’s the big deal about transcode farm control? 

The big deal is the reliability aspect. To make the problem simple. Imagine that your MAM is sending jobs to iCR via web services and suddenly someone unplugs it from the rack. How do we build the system so that the MAM doesn’t know or care that something went wrong? We ended up with 4 major components to the system:

1. The interface – this is the web service “listener” and watch folder controller that responds to commands from the MAM, from the GUI(s), from the review stations or any other component of a facility using iCR

2. The transcode node – this is the engine that does the processing of the file(s) 

3. The Farm Controller – this is the brain that decides which job goes to which iCR node at what time and with what overrides 

4. Network License Manager – this is the control layer that allows an iCR node to be a transcoder and allocates the various options to the farm

Put those functions together on a server and call it “The new iCR Transcode Farm Controller” and you get a single, reliable, redundant interface to the iCR Transcode capabilities. Jobs are sent to the iCR Controller and behind the scenes the system architecture is sized to achieve the required levels of redundancy and throughput required by that particular application. 

By combining the Farm Controller with AmberFin’s Network Licensing Server you satisfy another requirement we were asked for – to dynamically float cost-options across the underlying server hardware and no longer have a fixed node-to-server relationships. In fact one thing we have been able to achieve is to allow an international customer to move their transcode farm around the globe on a daily basis and “follow the moon”. In other words, by utilizing the power of their international VPN, they can move jobs around the planet and process jobs when the people are sleeping. Neat! 

Strangely, we were also asked by customers if we could make the transcode farm cheaper. The combination of the Transcode Farm Controller and Network License Server adds this third dimension in terms of enhanced network functionality. It provides floating software licenses for occasional functions, such as standards conversion, captioning, Dolby, audio processing and watermarking. 

Network License Server makes European debut at IBC 

We know how complicated some of these systems can get, so we were asked if we could make a single desktop system look and behave like a big system, so we’ve managed to use the same technology in both a single standalone Desktop PC running as the proof of concept as well as in a network of 100 or more servers / blades / VMs. Furthermore, each iCR node contains all the software required to implement the four main functions of media ingest, file transcode, playback and quality control. The license defines the functionality of a specific node at a specific time. 

It goes without saying that we were asked to be sure that a user’s full capacity is always on-line. For example, if one transcoder node encounters problems, the Farm Controller will seamlessly swap the required iCR operations to a back-up node and the Network License Server will ensure it is able to carry on. It is easy to tie together job queues and the Network License Server so that the network administrator is able to gauge how many jobs were delayed based on the licensing options available within the group. This feedback gives key capacity information to administrators, allowing them to manage both costs and capacity. I’m pretty pleased that we’ve listened to our amazing customers and made something shiny and new that will help the monetization of media and give a great ROI. 

The post What to Look Out For in Amsterdam – Apart From the Canals and Fast-Moving Trams? appeared first on Dalet.

And that’s a really good thing because when it comes to achieving a high quality, clean encode of video – and in particular high frame rate, high-resolution video – then interlacing is a huge distraction. Inevitably it adds noise and reduces quality, because the compromises inherent in it do not work well with the underlying algorithms. Moreover, all display devices and most capture devices inherently use progressive scanning. This is a good thing because it encourages everyone to start using more and more progressive techniques in their distribution operations.

While I wholeheartedly believe that HEVC will mark the end of interlacing, we still have some ways to go before we truly rid the world of the evil that is interlace. In fact, the professional content creation industry is still generating more 1080i material every year than progressive material. While this continues to be the case, good quality de-interlacing in the value chain will be vital for the success of HEVC in professional deployments.

So if your content was created in an interlaced format or restored from an archive in an interlaced format, don’t give up! Passing it through a professional de-interlacer will at least ensure a clean progressive signal, free from artifacts, going in to the HEVC encoder. And if you integrate high quality de-interlacing within a generic transcode platform, and tightly couple transcode to a variety of media QC tools to check quality before delivery, you’re got a winner! If you come and see us at IBC, we’ll be able to show you a really good de-interlacer can help HEVC look great for all content.

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One of the most interesting topics of conversation was 4K and ultra HD. A young producer, Tim Pool, remarked how it was easy to make UltraHD with mobile technology. The latest Nokia phone has a 4k video camera in it which enables you to shoot and upload to the internet in amazing resolutions with clean progressive pictures and get them displayed on 4k TV sets. So if it’s easy for the amateur, why is it hard for the professional?

Ever wondered why we have progressive cameras that are forced to do interlace that feed compression codecs which are less efficient with interlaced material going into an interlaced transmission system that illuminates a progressive display that is forced to do interlace? Seems a bit weird when you say it out loud.

And that’s what I did. Everyone I talked to at IBC thought it weird that we all just accept interlace and we’re not actively designing it out of our workflows. Instead the buzz at IBC (if there was one) was focussed on 4K and HEVC. Strangely, both of these technologies work best with progressive pictures (and there is no 4K interlaced standard that I know of yet). AmberFin’s HEVC demo showed a lot of people about the effects of interlace on compression and all the 4K imagery at the show was in progressive.

Spookily, one of the most interesting demos was in the new technology area where frame rate changes were shown. Images at 60fps looked so much better than 30fps. 120fps looked even better and 240fps had a lifelike quality that was awesome.

For my money, super-high frame rate HD that is up-converted to 4K will make my man-cave the perfect place to hang out and watch sports. Native 4k resolution movies in my man-cave will be awesome if I can have a Dolby Atmos object based sound system. Unfortunately, my man-cave is still a dream and until that day, AmberFin’s new transcoder farm will have to continue removing interlace from 1080i pictures. Maybe I was a little premature in predicting the death of interlace. I think for now, it is just wounded.

The post IBC 2014 – Did Interlace Die or Was it Just Wounded? appeared first on Dalet.

In fact, it’s far more like a fine whiskey and, like whiskey, is aged and most blended to ensure the most enjoyable experience.

Blending is key to whiskey, be it a single malt (from one distillery) or “blend” (from many), the vast majority of whiskeys are made from blending different casks to ensure that what goes in the bottle is pleasing to the palate. Jenever is produced in much the same way and similarly, technology can be “blended” to achieve something greater than the some of its parts.

At IBC, the Dalet stand will feature a number of both “Single Malts,” blends of Dalet technology, and exclusive “blends” – mixing the best from Dalet and other leading technology vendors.

Starting with the “singles” – IBC will be the first showing of Dalet Galaxy enhancement by Dalet AmberFin transcoding – providing users with more video quality and less complexity in a fully-integrated solution.

This September will also see the launch of Dalet Brio3 – the combination of the Dalet Brio video server and Dalet Cube graphics engine to offer a fully-integrated playout engine for primary and secondary events.

On the Dalet AmberFin demo pod, we’ll be showing the latest addition to the (AT)3 temporal transform toolbox – integrating GPU-accelerated, motion-compensated frame-rate conversion technology Tachyon, from Cinnafilm. Adding to the existing tools in (AT)3, this ensures that you always have the best conversion tool for the job.

Meanwhile, the Dalet Tech Zone features a number of exciting integrations including Opta for rich metadata incorporation into sports content, and Filemobile for User-Generated Content (UGC) integration into News workflows, to support the most advanced workflows.

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