NAB attendees can find Dalet in the West Hall at booth W1717.

Driving Industry Conversations: Executive Briefings & Thought Leadership

Beyond the technology showcase that addresses enterprise workflows for News, Media, and Sport verticals, Dalet will drive urgent discussions around reshaping business models and the critical need for Time-to-Value solutions at key events like the Devoncroft Summit and the annual Dalet Executive Breakfast.

Devoncroft NAB 2025 Summit – Dalet on CEO Panel

Dalet CEO Santiago Solanas will join industry leaders on stage at the Devoncroft “State of the Industry” Summit on Saturday, April 5, 2025, to explore the path forward for media organizations. For more information, click here.

Rebasing the Industry – Dalet Executive Briefing

The annual Dalet Executive Breakfast will take place on Monday, April 7, 2025, at the Wynn Hotel. Featuring guest speaker Josh Stinehour from Devoncroft, the session will offer fresh insights into modernizing industry practices for long-term success. Register your interest in attending here.

Customer-First Innovation: The Dalet NAB 2025 Solutions Showcase

NAB attendees are invited to book a meeting with Dalet leadership, account managers and customer success to discuss how Dalet’s fundamental shift in deployment methodologies and enhanced underlying technologies significantly enhance the customer and user experience and business outcomes from first engagement to onboarding, proactive support and beyond.

Key Innovations in the Dalet Solutions Showcase:

• Optimized Media Production and Supply Chain: Media workflow solutions today need to generate revenue or save money, and they need to do it quickly. The latest developments of packaged workflows for Dalet Flex are focused on providing a fully customizable solution designed to meet the high demand of top-tier organizations from day one. New AI integrations with DeepVA, semantic search, and a full migration to Kubernetes promise a better user experience with even more elastic, resilient performance on premise, hybrid or in the cloud.

• Next-Generation Story-Centric News Operation: Dalet story-centric news operation means content is no longer locked to a specific distribution channel. It can be easily accessed and packaged for digital and linear via a web browser or the new Dalet Pyramid Mobile App. Integrated tools for news story planning, editing, rundown management, and distribution streamline the entire operation. Dalet Pyramid Rundown, the latest release from the Pyramid family, enables news operations to access planning from the rundown and access the rundown from planning.

Enhancing Operational Efficiency: Key Updates

• Browser-based Audio Editing: One size does not fit all, especially when seeking operation efficiency. This is why the latest updates to Dalet Cut brings a new dedicated user experience for audio-only editing. Whether it’s for radio, podcast, or any other audio format, editors have the accessibility and intuitive experience of a browser-based editor, tailored for their specific needs.

• Scalable Ingest Management: Live ingest today is more variable than ever in volume, format, and workflows. Dalet Brio and Dalet InStream continue to expand functionality and support for additional formats and workflows to provide a cost-effective and innovative ingest solution for your operation. Managing this increased variability in a centralized manner is crucial to an efficient operation. Dalet will be previewing its latest web-based ingest manager, Dalet Ingest Portal, which will provide modern, intuitive scheduling for Dalet products as well as 3rd party solutions.

• Advanced Media Processing & Transcoding: With the increase of both sources and destinations for your content comes more formats, codecs and standards that you need to convert to. Transcoding today needs to not only be done at the highest quality but also efficiently. Dalet AmberFin’s latest updates bring both technology and pricing model updates with best-in-market pay-per-use pricing that can be combined with your other Dalet solutions or utilized as standalone. Recent updates bring new HDR10+ support as well new codecs such as HTJ2K, all of which is available on-premise, in the cloud, or hybrid to best match your operational needs.

Dalet NAB Networking & Engagement Opportunities

Join Us for NAB Afterworks Happy Hour

Network with industry peers at Dalet’s NAB Afterworks Happy Hour, hosted at booth W1717 on April 6th, 7th, and 8th from 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM.

Book a Meeting with Dalet

Schedule a meeting to discuss industry-leading solutions and learn more about Dalet’s commitment to media innovation and advocacy.

The post Dalet welcomes you to NAB Show 2025 appeared first on Dalet.

Before we enter the realm (the most ChatGPT of phrases!) of AI, let’s see what we’re working with:

• Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence and computer science that focuses on using data and algorithms to enable AI to imitate human learning, gradually improving its accuracy.
• Artificial intelligence can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence using machines. AI encompasses various subfields, including machine learning and deep learning, which allow systems to learn and adapt.
• Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence technology that can produce various types of content, including text, art, imagery, and audio.

While ML and AI were introduced as early as the 1950s, we now have accessible and user-friendly models like GPT-4 that are truly unlocking the future of media with AI. As Mathieu Zarouk (VP of Product Management at Dalet) says, “AI-driven solutions that have existed for many years have now reached an acceptable level of maturity and commercial viability.”

Now that AI is so widely available and accessible, what are some of the significant benefits and drawbacks of AI in news production?

Benefits of AI in News Production

1. Automation of mundane tasks

AI automates repetitive tasks such as tagging, formatting, and metadata generation. This allows journalists to focus on creativity and impactful storytelling, improving efficiency across the newsroom.

2. Captioning and categorizing

AI accelerates caption creation for live and recorded content while automatically organizing assets with metadata and tags. This allows for fast retrieval and seamless multi-platform distribution.

3. Translating and versioning

AI streamlines localization by translating content accurately and suggesting culturally relevant adaptations, helping newsrooms tailor stories for diverse audiences worldwide.

4. Summarization and suggestions

AI tools simplify complex data, summarize large volumes of information, and suggest narratives or visual elements. This ensures journalists can quickly craft cohesive, compelling stories.

4. Enhanced personalization

By analyzing user behavior, AI delivers tailored content recommendations, helping news organizations engage audiences with relevant stories that align with their interests and viewing habits.

Drawbacks of AI in News Production

1. Limited contextualisation

While we mentioned that AI can gather and analyze data above, it is limited when taking social, cultural, or economic context into account. This can sometimes lead to producing content that lacks depth and conviction.

2. Ethical concerns

While AI can analyze data and pick up on patterns, it cannot make moral or ethical choices like a journalist would. This raises the risk that AI-driven stories could produce unreliable or biased information through data they incorrectly process.

3. Lack of human touch

The human touch is crucial in news production. AI fails to capture nuanced understandings, emotions, and broader implications around events. This can lead to impersonal content production that struggles to resonate with audiences.

4. Spread of Fake News

A major concern with AI in news production is its potential to spread misinformation and fake news. Users find it challenging to differentiate between real and fabricated content, which results in a lack of audience trust.

5. Deepfake Technology

Deepfakes are engineered videos or audio recordings that look real but are entirely fabricated. These can be used to spread misinformation or manipulate public perception, presenting a significant challenge to a news producer’s credibility.

Following on from the last two points, it’s important to note how organizations like C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) are addressing the growing issue of misinformation and content authenticity on digital platforms. Formed by a coalition of major technology and media companies (the big leagues like Adobe, Microsoft, Intel, and the BBC), the main goal of C2PA is to help combat media manipulation to shape AI’s future. Dalet has been a member of C2PA since 2021 and works with France Télévisions on an innovative C2PA proof of concept to help address the onslaught of potentially misleading content. (learn more here).

How AI-Enabled Newsroom Solutions Can Change the Game

Working alongside traditional news production processes, AI tools can enhance your ability to deliver a consistent narrative across platforms to support the story-centric approach needed in the modern newsroom. Here are just a few real-world, practical applications of how an AI-enabled solution can support efficient, streamlined workflows right now:

• Speech recognition: AI-enabled production tools turn speech into usable metadata and enable automatic caption generation. This means users can not only find the exact moment in an interview or news story they are searching for, but also increase the speed and accuracy of captioning for live and recorded content.

• Language translation: This allows users to easily translate and automate generated captions, existing captions, or even graphics. Especially helpful for international networks, teams can create multiple language versions of content automatically.

• Automated metadata tagging: AI-enabled MAMs allow producers to enrich content with AI-generated descriptive metadata, saving organizations significant time and energy over manual entry and logging.

• Wire summarization: This enables teams to instantly generate concise summaries from wire services to quickly assess breaking news and integrate key points into their stories without sifting through lengthy reports. This accelerates the editorial decision-making process, ensuring that stories remain fresh and relevant.

• Social post drafting: By using AI to generate platform-specific headlines, captions, and post suggestions, you can streamline the process of adapting news content for social media. Instead of manually rewriting each piece, journalists can use AI-generated drafts as a starting point, ensuring rapid distribution while keeping messaging aligned across platforms.

• Assisted editing: Enhance video and audio production by using AI to suggest cuts, highlights, or even auto-assemble rough edits based on predefined templates or metadata. This reduces the manual workload on editors, allowing them to focus on refining storytelling rather than spending time on routine assembly.

• Multi-engine integration: This lets users leverage leading AI engines for an organization’s specific needs. It also connects multiple AI services to a centralized platform including other integrated tools and SaaS offerings.

Discover Integrated, Practical AI With Dalet

While it’s easy to get caught up in the endless possibilities of AI, it’s important to focus on where we are today. Despite the risks of misused information, fake news, and deepfakes, there’s no denying that AI (together with safeguards put in place) can be leveraged to make certain elements of news production easier, faster, and better.

Designed with this in mind, Dalet Media Cortex seamlessly integrates powerful AI capabilities into your workflows–empowering media professionals to better serve their audiences. By driving increased efficiency in content curation, production, management, and publishing, Dalet Media Cortex works behind the scenes to enhance every step of your news production process.

Experience the transformative benefits of Dalet Media Cortex through Dalet Pyramid, the cutting-edge solution designed to evolve your news production workflows. Our unified news operations platform offers web-based tools for collaborative planning, fast-paced editing, broadcast-grade and digital-native production, as well as multiplatform distribution. With Dalet Pyramid, you enable your team to create, manage, and distribute content seamlessly across all channels

It’s time to evolve your news production and harness the power of AI! To find out more or book a Dalet Pyramid demo, click here.

The post How News Production is Evolving in the Era of AI  appeared first on Dalet.

To meet these demands, most newsrooms have adapted their workflows to be more story-centric. This sees a shift from planning around broadcast rundowns to planning around the story itself to accommodate both linear and online news production—enabling digital teams to cover stories as they happen without needing to wait for a later broadcast. Newsroom technology has evolved in line with this, expanding the tool set to include News Production System (NPS), NRCS, Media Asset Management (MAM) Systems and Content Management System (CMS) to cater for the growing volume of media assets and online distribution.

But this complex web of tools contributes to fragmentation and silos between newsroom teams. So, is it time to evolve your newsroom technology once again?

Let’s explore how you can better align your newsroom technology with story-centric reporting through a new, centralized system that empowers digital and linear teams to break stories in real time, without relying on the other.

The Importance of Story-Centric Reporting to Modern Journalism

The way news is consumed and produced has fundamentally changed in the last 20 years.
With the rise of digital, audiences increasingly expect to engage with news stories as they break across streaming platforms, social media, and websites. Story-centric reporting empowers newsrooms to reach broader audiences and work smarter—repurposing content across channels to break stories as they happen, maximize reach and reduce duplication of effort for digital and linear teams.

So, how does story-centric reporting impact delivery for broadcast journalists?

1. Speed and Agility

Breaking news waits for no one. To stay relevant, journalists need to be the first to break a story. This means they need immediate and remote access to media assets, including archival footage and cloud-based editing systems like Dalet Cut to compile accurate, quality stories in real-time.

A story-centric workflow enables digital and linear teams, as well as journalists, freelancers and the many other news professionals to work on the same narrative at the same time, without needing to wait for the other. This means any updates and adjustments can be made at pace as new information becomes available, ensuring the story evolves fluidly across channels. Having access to modern solutions combining NPS, NRCS, PAM, and MAM into a single, story-centric platform provides teams with the assets they need to react quickly while maintaining accuracy.

2. Consistency Across Platforms

Inconsistent or disjointed narratives can confuse audiences and dilute the impact of a story. Journalists require tools that help them adapt stories for different formats without sacrificing the integrity of the message.

Story-centric reporting ensures that the core message is preserved across channels, enhancing the audience’s understanding and engagement. With the capabilities to ensure all relevant assets are connected to the same story, teams can maintain consistent messaging across all distribution channels and get the story out faster.

3. Collaboration Without Silos

Modern reporting demands that all newsroom teams including linear, digital and social work together regardless of their location. Traditional newsroom workflows often separate linear and digital production, leading to silos and inefficiencies.

Story-centric reporting breaks down these barriers by uniting all contributors around a single narrative giving all stakeholders access to resources, updates, and insights in real-time, so digital teams can produce stories before the broadcast is finalized and linear teams can incorporate digital insights—ensuring a seamless workflow between teams for more cohesive storytelling.

How to Align Your Newsroom Technology with Story-Centric Workflows

Although modern news production systems support a story-centric approach, digital and linear teams are often left using different tools impeding collaboration and efficiency. To capitalize on the story-centric reporting needed for future-proofing the newsroom, you need more than just upgraded hardware—you need an integrated platform that evolves with changing workflows. Dalet unifies the core newsroom technology of NRCS, NPS and MAM into a single, unified newsroom solution that integrates with your CMS to provide:

1. Centralized Planning Around Stories

To move to story-centric workflows, you need story-centric capabilities within your planning, NRCS, and production system. If you have separate platforms across your workflow you can suffer from misalignment and loss of connection to the original story.

Dalet’s unified news solution, Dalet Pyramid, combines your planning, NRCS, NPS and MAM for a story-centric news production approach. With all the tools you need in one place, your teams can manage all aspects of production from a central hub—maximizing access and collaboration. Centralizing your tools in this way simplifies planning, enabling teams to focus on the core story and not navigating disparate systems. This means digital teams don’t have to wait for a linear broadcast before covering stories as they break.

2. Multi-Platform Distribution

Today’s audiences expect news tailored to their preferred platforms. Meeting these expectations requires publishing to multiple distribution channels quickly and effectively.

Dalet Pyramid ensures that stories can be easily adapted and distributed to TV, social media, and digital platforms simultaneously. Linear teams no longer need to finalize a broadcast before repurposing content for digital teams—everything can move forward concurrently. With seamless CMS integration, stories can be published to your desired digital channel directly from the same system used for TV. This means that both teams can create platform-specific versions of a story without duplicating effort, allowing for broader reach with minimal delays.

3. Enhanced Collaboration Across Teams

At the heart of a story-centric workflow is collaboration and so breaking down silos between linear and digital teams is critical. Dalet Pyramid enhances collaboration through:

• Real-time updates: All contributors can access the latest version of a story, ensuring alignment and reducing duplication of effort.
• Remote Collaboration: Multi-user, real-time collaboration from anywhere on scripts ensures alignment, accuracy and speed to delivery.
• Shared media assets: By centralizing media storage, Dalet’s platform empowers teams to work from the same pool of resources e.g. digital teams can access archival content as a story breaks for accurate, digital-first stories, while linear teams can incorporate elements prepared by digital contributors into their broadcast like graphics or social insights.
• Cross-discipline integration: From social media managers to on-air producers, all team members can contribute to a single, cohesive story within the same platform.

By facilitating collaboration, Dalet’s unified platform ensures a more consistent and efficient story-centric workflow.

4. Simplified Media Access

Having quick access to media assets is vital for crafting impactful stories as they break, especially for digital channels where speed matters most.

Dalet’s integrated MAM functionality ensures that digital and linear teams have instant access to centralized media assets, regardless of location. For example, digital contributors working remotely can pull footage, graphics, or statistics from the archive without delay, streamlining their workflow and covering stories as they break.

Dalet: Enabling You to Focus on Storytelling

The mission of newsrooms has always been to tell impactful stories and in today’s multi-platform environment, technology can either be a barrier or an enabler.

When it comes to story-centric reporting, news systems often have fragmented tech stacks that force digital and linear teams to spend time switching between tools, managing assets and troubleshooting workflows. Dalet Pyramid simplifies newsroom operations by integrating planning, production, delivery and management, eliminating the need for separate tools and boosting collaboration between teams.

By centralizing these capabilities, Dalet helps you focus on what truly matters; delivering compelling stories as they break to audiences everywhere.

Ready to level-up your story-centric reporting? Request a demo.

The post Aligning Newsroom Technology with Story-Centric Workflows appeared first on Dalet.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on TVB Europe and has been republished here with permission. For more industry news and updates, visit our blog regularly.

The global spectacle of the 2024 Olympics in Paris will break new ground in several ways. Sure it features the debut of breakdancing as an Olympic event, but it will also be the first Games to showcase an identical number of female and male athletes. The Paris Olympic games will also have advancements off the field, with unprecedented coverage, including round-the-clock streaming, the trial of an AI-powered end-to-end 8K live-streaming system, and daytime broadcasts of swimming, gymnastics, and track and field finals.

Speaking of firsts, Peacock, NBCUniversal’s American OTT streaming service, will live-stream all 329 medal events, a noteworthy evolution in sports broadcasting. This pivotal move to streaming platforms highlights a major shift in how audiences engage with sports content. With over 5,000 hours of live coverage, complete event replays, and new multiview features, viewers can watch what they want on their chosen device.

Fan engagement is the key to winning in today’s competitive world of global sports. With an explosion of content to manage, distributed and often freelance teams to coordinate, multiple locations, and myriad distribution platforms to feed, technology will be key to helping journalists overcome the many hurdles required to produce winning coverage.

Producing Olympic Gold: A Data-focused Model

Media outlets have an opportunity to reshape their coverage and diversify the agenda, diving into stories and covering athletes often overlooked during regular sports seasons. A more explanatory, data-driven approach will help audiences understand non-mainstream disciplines. Expanded coverage will inform about what happens on the ground beyond results, with post-event interviews with athletes.

To engage Olympic audiences, media organizations must navigate an overwhelming flood of information with seamless management and collaboration strategies. The challenge is producing a constant stream of diverse, fact-checked, and compelling content for various platforms while managing the exponential increase in both input and output.

French broadcasters will cover the games and the impact on Parisian life around the clock, not just from a sports perspective, but from a news perspective, from pre-game setup to closing ceremonies. France Télévisions has exclusive free-to-air rights to show the Games, with dedicated streams covering every sport across all screens. Other channels that do not have broadcast rights, such as regional channels and 24-hour television news channels, will focus on highlights and urban impacts as well as background stories and athlete profiles. Seamless collaboration will be required when sharing packages for affiliates to localize and rebrand.

Historically, broadcasters operated around a singular data model focused on linear television with fixed schedules driving the process. However, the dynamic nature of today’s sports and news cycles—exemplified by events like the 2024 Olympics—demands a more versatile approach. Content is now distributed across multiple platforms, including apps, radio, websites, social media, and podcasts. The once-clear division of labor between editors, videographers and producers has blurred, replaced by the need for real-time updates and instant accessibility. Adapting to this fast-paced environment necessitates a fundamental shift in organizational dynamics and information flow.

Broadcasters now need to efficiently produce platform-optimized versions of content. Tasks such as ingesting, scripting, editing, localization, digital versioning, and graphics creation all revolve around the event. So most media outlets will leverage news workflow concepts for sports broadcasting. This streamlined process not only reduces costs but also enhances collaboration, visibility, and access to media assets. Consequently, producing platform-tailored versions of sporting events becomes significantly more efficient and cost-effective.

This workflow is underpinned by an AI-driven data model that aggregates content types, enriches them with metadata, and provides the structure necessary for workflow automation. Task assignments and notifications ensure smooth operations. As linear and digital media continue to converge, this robust data model bridges the gap between editorial decision-making and automated technical processes, crucially impacting media production.

Olympic Feats in the Cloud: Transforming Sports with Technology

Increasing reliance on cloud infrastructure for content sourcing, processing, and distribution has prompted a reassessment of system designs and the associated infrastructure costs and scalability requirements. The cloud provides geographical flexibility and complements physical on-premise infrastructure. More fundamentally, a media workflow in the cloud is a software-defined infrastructure, enabling unprecedented agility and operational efficiency.

This means news and sports coverage is no longer constrained by physical infrastructure, nor limited to a single geographical location. Virtual media operations can respond almost immediately to any demand or change of circumstances, as adaptable as the news itself. In the past, broadcast systems were sized based on the “worst-case scenario,” with a large number of expensive ingest ports, media processing nodes, and storage.

The challenge of ingesting and processing Olympic-level resources provides the perfect use-case for the elasticity of the cloud. Cloud-based video recorders spin off in seconds, adjusting to requirements such as streaming protocol, encoding format, and bandwidth. Capturing feeds only for an event’s duration, they provide an ideal replacement for on-premises equipment farms, especially when ingest needs vary greatly within the day. Workload elasticity applies to media processing as well. Automatically expanded resources let content creators work concurrently on growing files from many sources with enough remote rendering power to deliver content on the fly from anywhere during live story development.

Cloud-native platforms can optimize costs, by automatically adjusting and scaling infrastructure, almost in real-time, based on workload demands. Cloud-native applications can be designed so that you only pay for infrastructure as needed, thus optimizing operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness. However, many broadcasters are adopting hybrid cloud approaches, combining on-premises infrastructure with cloud services. This strategy balances the benefits of both, aiding in major events like the Olympics while gradually reducing technical debt.

AI-Powered Broadcasting: The Future of Sports Coverage

The worlds of sports and data are deeply intertwined, with AI playing a pivotal role. Since the 2018 PyeongChang Games, AI has supported judges and referees in making accurate calls. Intel’s AI-powered 3D Athlete Tracking (3DAT) revolutionized the fan experience at the Tokyo Games by providing near real-time insights and overlay visualizations. Looking ahead to Paris 2024, AI will enhance scoring accuracy and offer judges real-time performance analysis, redefining how we understand athletic achievements.

For broadcasters, AI is often more pragmatic. With hyper-localization a key consideration, AI is essential to facilitate or eliminate basic or repetitive time-demanding tasks, and to assist in gathering information and preparing content. Integrated AI at scale can handle the complexity of multiple languages, automating translations of captions, graphics, voiceovers, and more. AI can support every stage of the production chain, analyzing and indexing incoming content so it is discoverable and recommending relevant content without requiring journalists to waste time logging.

For example, if there is a gymnastics accident, instead of a journalist searching for a similar incident from the last Olympics, AI-powered recommendations can propose material, then re-package content so that it’s ready for distribution across any platform. AI can help to quickly repackage highlights with different branding for each affiliate or distribution platform, using consistent branding templates. Localizing and customizing content for different audiences and platforms.

In just four years, technology has advanced greatly from traditional workflows that often required separate teams to use different tools and repositories on the same content for each platform. Hours would be spent on technical tasks to manually exchange content, adapt and process different versions. AI-powered automation can accelerate the workflows to “do more with less.” Produce once, then use AI to automatically create multiple versions. For example, crop a 16:9 interview of an athlete to 1:1, add digital graphics and text on screen, and prep to send to Facebook.

Technological innovation and human collaboration are at the heart of the Olympics. The 2024 Olympics will not just be a display of athletic prowess but also a testament to the advancements in media technology. Media professionals who embrace story-centric workflows and AI-driven cloud infrastructure will cross yet another finish line in the race for innovation. Successfully navigating the complexities of modern Olympic coverage will ensure that audiences worldwide experience every moment of the Games like never before.

The post From Field to Screens: Overcoming Olympic Hurdles with Technology  appeared first on Dalet.

The proliferation of social media and streaming platforms has completely changed how sports fans interact with the leagues they follow and the teams they support. Discussions of last night’s game are no longer confined to the office water cooler. Fan engagement has become big business in its own right, with dedicated supporters hungry to consume on and off-field content around the clock.

Direct-to-consumer video and over-the-top (OTT) media services are helping to unlock substantial revenue streams and open up new markets around the world. At the same time, TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are making fans more accustomed to consuming bite-sized content. A recent survey by Deloitte claimed that the future of sports fandom could hinge on captivating Gen Z and Gen Alpha fans with personalized and interconnected digital experiences. These factors have made fast-paced content production integral to the success – and the bottom line – of sports organizations of all types.

For teams, and the leagues and federations they compete in, the creation of an efficient media workflow can mean the difference between a winning content strategy and the scoring of an own goal. Putting tenuous sports puns aside for one moment, teams, leagues, and federations have joined broadcasters in the need for robust, production-connected media asset management (MAM), distribution, and monetization systems that streamline and accelerate the game-to-fans content workflow.

With 2024’s sporting calendar packed to the brim, including the Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Paris (practically next door to Dalet HQ), how are sports organizations leveraging MAM solutions to accelerate their media workflows?

Ready, Set, Go: The End-to-End Sports Production Workflow

Before we start, let’s define the end-to-end sports production workflow. In essence, this covers everything from multistream ingest, transcoding, and content enrichment, all the way through to distribution, archive, and monetization.

For sports organizations that need to move fast, getting media into the production system at speed helps to accelerate all workflows.

While speed is paramount, quality is also key in delivering captivating experiences for fans. Solutions that enable the capture of rich content, that can then be transcoded, cut and distributed to multiple channels easily, are highly sought after.

The most savvy teams and organizations are focused on making processes faster and breaking down physical barriers for field teams. They are looking for remote and collaborative services to help ensure a flow of content from multiple sources and contributors without complexity. In addition, they need back-office processes that can automate useful metadata creation, packaging, and delivery to all digital outlets, at scale.

To help streamline processes, many sports organizations are looking to cloud-native MAM solutions with production capabilities, such as Dalet Flex. As we know, MAM and PAM solutions are converging to help deliver seamless media workflows. But which features specifically benefit sports firms and help to accelerate sports production workflows?

Live Elastic Ingest: Faster Content, From Kick-off

When it comes to live sports, capturing every moment from every angle is crucial. For a lot of organizations, matchday content is sourced from multiple sources and locations. This might include different camera crews, field journalists, partners, producers, and fans.

With so much live video to capture, it’s important to handle the volume and variety of sources, all while bringing in content with the rich metadata required to keep your library organized and efficient. This saves time and effort later down the line.

At Dalet, we developed Dalet InStream for this exact purpose. Dalet InStream seamlessly manages multicam, multifeed ingest to the cloud, as the action unfolds. This is a real time-saver, allowing editors to start working on live feeds while they’re still growing, producing edited clips in real time.

Dalet InStream’s flexibility and scalability is a major advantage. It can handle as many channels as required on a game day. With multiple feeds available — with or without graphics and various commentaries — every aspect of the live broadcast is captured and ready for the highlight reel. Channels can subsequently scale down to zero when there’s no action. This ensures no resources are wasted on off days.

One of London’s biggest soccer teams, Arsenal, uses Dalet Flex to offer their fans service well beyond the live match experience. Our custom solution delivers frictionless ingesting, processing, reviews and approvals, before content is seamlessly delivered to the club’s viewers via in-app highlights and social media.

“Video is critical to football. It’s all about the match, and specifically, it’s all about the highlights. They want to show their mates in the pub, see it on their mobile, watch it at home or on their desk at work.”

– John Dollin, Senior Product and Engineering Manager, Arsenal Football Club

Cloud and On-premises: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

A lot of sports organizations require hybrid MAM solutions, particularly when niche technical equipment and high-res video formats combine with legacy systems. Take the case of Monumental Sports & Entertainment in Washington. The company owns and operates the NHL’s Washington Capitals, the Washington Wizards of the NBA and WNBA’s Washington Mystics team, amongst others.

The group needed a solution for its new full SMPTE 2110 broadcast facility which was a format that the legacy system was unable to ingest. Our on-premises ingest solution, Dalet Brio, was the answer. Dalet Brio is perfect for SDI and IP high-res formats like 4K and HDR, ensuring top-tier content capture.

Dalet InStream and Brio can be used in tandem to cover both cloud and on-premises ingest needs in a way that is both connected and centralized.

Chop and Change With Advanced Editing Capabilities

Editing could be described as the star playmaker in the sports production workflow, connecting content ingest, transcoding, and tagging with distribution and monetization.

For digital and social media professionals, editing functions that sit within production-connected MAM systems, such as Dalet Cut, are making it easy to engage fans with real-time highlights and key moments. Editorial teams are rapidly creating highlights from live streams or existing content inventory. These can be quickly published to all digital platforms at the touch of a button.

Production-connected systems also provide easy access to broadcast footage and archive clips for traditional broadcast and replay purposes. Tools, such as Dalet Xtend, seamlessly connect MAM systems with creative applications like Adobe Premiere Pro, making the creation of highlights and edited packages for live coverage far easier.

Editing tools are also having an impact away from back-office functions, affecting play closer to the pitch. With lightweight, web-based editors, coaching staff are whipping up highlight reels and tactical clips for halftime reviews and post-game analysis in record time. This is giving forward-thinking teams a competitive edge.

Transcoding At Speed For Pitch Perfect Distribution

Transcoding is the process of converting a video file from one format to another, making it compatible with various devices and platforms. This is an important part of the sports content production workflow, particularly when content needs to be adapted for broadcast, streaming, and social media clips simultaneously.

Standards conversions are very important in sports as well, particularly for frame rates and HDR. If a broadcast is shot in 60fps HDR, it may need to be converted to 30fps SDR for social media, or converted to 50fps for international distribution.

Once live content has been ingested, transcoding ensures it will look great on any device, from the biggest screens to the smallest.

Dalet Flex efficiently manages distribution to transcoders and encoders, ensuring high-quality content for fans, whether they’re watching on a smartphone, tablet, or TV. However, with Dalet InStream, producers can record both broadcast quality and proxy files at the same time, removing the need for time-consuming transcoding. This is a game changer for workflow acceleration.

Speed is important but so too is quality. Another of our proprietary solutions, Dalet AmberFin, has its own transcode engine that can be deployed on premises, in the cloud (or both) to deliver consistent high quality results. The scalability of the cloud allows users to ramp up their transcoding operation on game day and scale back down when it’s not in use.

Content Enrichment Through AI-Powered Metadata

Metadata creation is the unsung hero of efficient media management. More and more MAM solutions are using AI to supercharge the process. Sports organizations are capitalizing on these advancements.

In addition to typical content tagging for efficient retrieval later down the line, teams, and leagues are further enriching their sports content metadata through external match data providers and AI sources. With Dalet Flex, sports feeds from providers like Opta and Sports Radar can be integrated to enable a real-time data layer for key metrics like goals and possession stats. Our AI integrations take this further, enhancing content with even more metadata such as face, logo, and voice recognition. This allows users to find the exact moment they are looking for, with all elements in frame.

From here, all of this advanced metadata can be used to curate your edit bin, auto-generate highlights, and generate speech-to-text transcriptions, saving valuable time and money.

The End Goal: Distribution and Monetization

Getting content out to the right platforms is crucial to maximizing its value. Digital content has become a major revenue generator for the biggest teams in sports. Back to the world of soccer, the Financial Times reports that Spanish giants Real Madrid and Barcelona collectively garnered over 2.9 billion Instagram engagements in 2023, while Manchester City was able to grow its new WhatsApp channel to over 254 million members. Video content posted to this channel is now a major driver of traffic to the club’s £5/month streaming subscription service, City+.

Advanced production-connected MAM systems streamline distribution to archive and monetization platforms, ensuring content can start generating engagement and revenue quickly and efficiently. A great example of this workflow in real life is the partnership of Dalet and Veritone and the integration of Dalet Flex and Veritone’s AI-powered Digital Media Hub.

On the leagues and federations side of things, having sophisticated control over content rights is imperative. Organizations are utilizing MAM solutions to make sure users and partners can view or edit only the information that is relevant to them. Other use cases for this functionality includes presenting a subset of metadata to referees, coaching staff, production teams, league clubs, and OTT fans.

At Dalet, we help a leading international sports broadcaster deliver live football highlights within minutes to dozens of licensees worldwide. Using workflow automation within Dalet Flex, a complex process is simplified and streamlined to ensure service-level agreements are met, expanding the broadcaster’s revenue options.

Dalet and Veritone recently tackled the subject in the comprehensive webinar and Q&A, ‘Score Big: Unlocking the Power of Sports Media for Fan Engagement & Revenue Boosts’ which is available for you to take a shot at on-demand now!

Ready to Accelerate Your Sports Production Workflow?

With video content only becoming more powerful, more and more sports organizations are exploring the benefits of production-connected MAM solutions to their media production workflows. Here at Dalet, we’re leveraging Dalet Flex to increase agility, generate efficiency, and maximize content value for major sports-affiliated companies across the globe.

At the heart of Dalet Flex’s media workflow is its automated workflow engine. This powerful tool automates the entire production process, from ingest and editing to metadata enrichment and distribution. By streamlining these workflows, we ensure that sports content moves smoothly through the production pipeline, reducing time-to-air while enhancing overall efficiency.

If you think your team, league, federation or broadcaster could benefit from our production-connected MAM solutions for sports, get in touch with a Dalet representative today.

The post Sports Production: Accelerating Media Workflows for Teams, Leagues, Federations, and Broadcasters appeared first on Dalet.

Production budgets are being squeezed, ways of working are becoming more complex, and global, remote teams face more challenges than ever when it comes to collaborating effectively. This is driving a need for better collaboration tools across media workflows, and thus an increased demand for agile MAM systems with production capabilities.

At Dalet, we’ve responded to this change with the development of Dalet Flex, the world’s first production-connected MAM.

So, what exactly is a production-connected MAM and how does it help foster collaboration for creative teams in real terms?

A MAM That Serves User Needs

At the heart of Dalet Flex is FlexMAM, the main interface that serves as the gateway to your organization’s media assets. FlexMAM makes it easy to upload, organize and review assets, search for and update metadata, begin editing, export edit decision lists (EDLs), and trigger workflows.
Unlike traditional asset management systems that categorize files by folders, FlexMAM adopts a flexible data model with customizable taxonomies. Robust filtering and search capabilities are built in, ensuring that asset search and retrieval is as intuitive as it is frictionless. This approach encourages team members to explore and use assets more efficiently.

Improved Collaboration from Import to Archive

The platform offers a suite of web-based applications designed to streamline every stage of a typical media workflow. In addition to FlexMAM our core applications encourage collaboration in the following ways:

• FlexMOVE simplifies the import process, allowing users to upload content from various sources directly into Dalet Flex, supporting every file type.
• Dalet Cut provides editing capabilities, enabling users to work on videos directly within the web interface, enhancing collaboration between editors and producers.
• FlexREVIEW facilitates the review and approval process, allowing teams to provide feedback and make decisions swiftly.
• FlexTRACK offers a real-time overview of workflows, ensuring everyone involved is up-to-date with the progress of projects.
• FlexXTEND allows access to media libraries directly from NLEs such as Adobe Premiere Pro, enabling remote production workflows.
• FlexMOBILE allows users to work from anywhere with an easy-to-use application available on Android and iOS devices.
• FlexADMIN allows users and administrators to manage users, groups and workspaces in an account.

These applications are fully web-based. This ensures accessibility from anywhere, improving collaboration across different locations and time zones.

In addition, the wider Dalet ecosystem consists of a selection of tools that streamline the wider technical video production process. High-density ingest and playout, media conversion, real-time multilayer graphics and augmentation through AI are all taken care of by our suite of complementary products.

How This Enables Collaboration Across Media Workflows in Practice

In the past, MAM systems were seen as tools to support content managers and archivists.
With a production-connected MAM, the lives of individual users across the media workflow are made easier. What’s more, team members reap the benefits of features that encourage collaboration.
This is especially important as modern studios and production teams utilize hybrid working and remote collaboration. It’s unrealistic to expect all relevant stakeholders to sit within the same building at the same time. Effective delegation, providing feedback, changing creative direction, editing on the fly and meeting tight deadlines – these are all tasks that have become more challenging in recent years as a result.

Luckily, production-connected MAMs boast cloud-native features that help to simplify and automate processes, bringing colleagues and collaborators closer together… even when they’re split across cities, countries and continents.

So, how does this is bear fruit in practice:

1- Easy access for multiple users

Video production and media management is a group effort and production projects can be fluid. Freelancers often need to be brought onto projects and given access to the right media, often without much lead time.

Within a production-connected MAM like Dalet Flex, project owners can easily grant access to multiple users and set permissions accordingly.

Users, groups and workspaces can be created quickly, at the touch of a button, and it’s easy to add or remove members to and from groups and workspaces at speed.

When personnel changes or user permissions need to be adjusted, having a MAM that is able to react in real time is crucial.

Who benefits: Producer, Director, Project Lead

2- Collaborative editing on the fly

Dalet Cut further enhances collaborative efforts by enabling teams to work together on editing processes.

As a lightning-fast multimedia editing tool with native access to the full media library, users of all video editing skill levels can quickly edit and publish content from anywhere. Anyone with a web browser can begin editing and assembling a project, which can then be seamlessly handed over to another editor.
Versions of edited files with different aspect ratios for all playout scenarios can be quickly created and distributed to multiple platforms directly from the edit suite.

For more involved edits, there’s frictionless connection between Dalet Cut and advanced NLEs such as Premiere Pro. This enables a smooth transition when projects need to cross from MAM to the editing suite. Dalet Xtend allows Premier Pro users to access the same collection of media and edit lists, making it extra easy to pick things up where they were left.

Who Benefits: Editor, Producer, VFX, Colorist, Finisher

3- Faster asset retrieval via advanced search

Locating assets by metadata allows users to find exactly what they need without the typical hassle associated with large libraries.

Moreover, Dalet Flex’s taxonomy-based structure, along with technical filters, affords the ability to refine searches by characteristics such as asset type, frame rate, language, and more. Need to find all clips shot in 4:3, in German, with owned rights, that feature… elephants? No problem.

There is also the functionality to save and share searches. If a user has a detailed search request that they frequently use, they no longer need to repetitively type it in and apply relevant filters. Instead, the process can be saved and repeated at the click of a button. This action can also be shared with other users.

Faster, more efficient retrieval helps create time for more creativity and collaboration at other stages of the workflow.

Who benefits: Archivist, Ingest Manager, QC, Legal, Producer, Editor, Sales

4- Better curated media through collections

Central to Dalet Flex is the creation and management of collections. These serve as repositories for organized production assets. Collections can include assets, clips, and sub-collections, with customizable access and metadata settings.

They help production teams to better curate the media they work with.

For instance, collections help to simplify the process of bringing together a selection of assets to be later used in editorial.

The collection can be shared with other users, either to send them the finalized content selection or help contribute to the curation process further.

Who benefits: Producer, Editor

5- Simplified workflow orchestration and automation

Dalet Flex’s Workflow Designer turns the process of building workflows into a frictionless, drag-and-drop experience. Users can visually map out a project’s flow using a variety of “ingredients” like actions, resources, and scripts. They can then select and arrange these elements to design a perfect workflow. This can either be launched into action immediately or saved as a draft for later refinement.

Workflows can run manually, or even more efficiently through automation. Project leads can select specific sets of business rules and metadata properties, enabling complex workflows to run automatically.

This type of orchestration helps to bring about greater collaboration. It enables the correct people to receive content or notifications at the right steps of the workflow, keeping everyone involved informed and in sync.

Who benefits: Everyone working across the project

6- Streamlined review and approval processes

Dalet Flex Review streamlines the feedback and approval processes.

Team members can comment directly on assets, providing clear and actionable time-coded feedback that can be exported straight into editing software. This can be done anywhere, at any time, as long as the user is connected to the internet, and comments can be searched for across the media library.

Advanced workflows can be set up to trigger certain actions based on review sessions. For example, if a copyright concern crops up, an email can be automatically triggered for Legal to review.

This helps bring the right team members into the production process efficiently – only looping them in when needed.

Who Benefits: Producer, Editor, Director, Legal, QC, VFX, Colorist, Finisher

7- Improved archiving through metadata management

Dalet Flex integrates AI technologies to enhance natural language and visual content processing. This allows for efficient and detailed metadata generation. Users can therefore search for assets based on what is contained within shot, as well as what features within various audio tracks.

This turns content discovery from a laborious chore into a task that is second nature. Teams are able to work more harmoniously when the content they require is within easy reach.

Who benefits: Archivist, Ingest Manager, QC, Producer, Editor, Sales

8- Advanced integration with other systems and platforms

Even with a MAM as comprehensive as Dalet Flex, third party apps, programs, and systems will still likely be used across the production process. Dalet Flex’s capability to integrate with external systems through APIs means that it can seamlessly fit into existing workflows, connecting with traffic systems, task management software, and more.

This integration capability, coupled with automation features, streamlines operations, reducing manual work and allowing teams to focus on creative tasks.

Who Benefits: Producer, Editor, Project Lead

Get Ready to Boost Your Own Media Workflow Collaboration

By centralizing asset management, streamlining approval processes, and enabling real-time collaboration, Dalet Flex empowers you to produce high-quality content faster and more efficiently than ever before. Whether you’re managing a small team or coordinating large-scale media production, Dalet Flex’s adaptable and intuitive platform is built to help teams work better together, at every stage of the production process.

If you’re keen to hear more information about Dalet’s production-connected MAM services or are looking to increase collaboration in your own media workflows, get in touch with a Dalet representative today.

The post How Production-connected MAM Enables Collaborative Media Workflows appeared first on Dalet.

This convergence reflects the quickly evolving needs of the industry. In recent years a huge leap forward in technological capability has coincided with rising creative demands and shifting media consumption trends. This has all had a significant effect on how media businesses operate.

As a direct result, MAM systems are evolving to provide greater production functionality to users.

So, what is the nature of this change? What brought it on? And why is it that cloud-native MAMs have started to take on PAM features?

Asset Management: As It Was

Historically, PAM and MAM served distinct functions.

PAM was all about managing the media production process within a localized, on-premise environment. It facilitated collaborative work but limited it to a single location, where all media assets were stored on a central server, accessible only to those within the four walls of the business.

Conversely, MAM offered a centralized repository for all digital media files, offering easy access to finished content for users across an organization. It connected active workspaces with archives. Historically, this too took place mostly on premises.

Typically then, the intersection point between PAM and MAM was only once a project was complete.

However, several factors have prompted these systems to adopt features from each other. This has led to a convergence of PAM and MAM.

How the Evolution of Media and Production Has Prompted Change

Three recent media industry changes have accelerated demand for MAMs with greater production capabilities. This can be summarized as how people work, how people watch, and how it all happens.

1. How People Work: Creative Needs and Remote Access

The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in an exponential increase in the need for remote access, pushing the industry towards flexible work arrangements. A massive 92% of broadcasters now operate hybrid or fully remote working practices. Editorial and production teams need to collaborate effectively despite being geographically dispersed. This shift has necessitated access to media assets from anywhere, catering to new formats that demand higher bitrates and depth, adding to the complexity and volume of data managed remotely.

2. How People Watch: Consumption Trends

The way people consume media has changed too. 99% of US households now subscribe to at least one streaming service. There’s an increased demand for content, leading to higher volumes of media consumption and production. However, this surge doesn’t correspond with increased budgets for production companies. To maximize the investment in production assets, there’s a growing need to tap into archives to repurpose content. What’s more, global streaming platforms have opened up local markets to wider distribution deals. Creating new language versions of existing productions is a more common requirement. Content is less likely to ever be considered “finished” as a result.

3. How it Happens: Technology and Cloud Connectivity

The rise of cloud connectivity has been a key driver in blurring the lines between PAM and MAM. The adoption of cloud-native solutions allows for the storage and management of vast amounts of data more efficiently. Whilst a promise of the transformative effect of the cloud has been foreshadowed for decades, the technology is actually in use now. Cloud storage is being deployed to house petabytes of archives. This is a key driver in the blurring of MAM and PAM.

It should be noted that all three trends have been accelerated and exacerbated by recent economic changes. Higher inflation, market volatility, and general uncertainty brought about by major geopolitical events have led to a tightening of budgets across the board. Media companies are being forced to do more with less. Content repurposing and the development of additional monetization opportunities have become far greater necessities.

Convergence to Production-connected MAM

Today, what is being asked of PAM and MAM systems has almost become indistinct.

User requirements for both system types are converging. In response, we’ve developed a single, comprehensive asset management solution.

At Dalet, we refer to this as production-connected MAM. At its core, a production-connected MAM is a solution that manages content across the media supply chain, from acquisition to distribution.

This unified approach provides a central repository for all media assets, integrating production tools with archive environments. This facilitates the creation of content more efficiently, with accessibility from anywhere.

What this integration looks like:

• Production-Centric Media Library: A unified view into raw and finished media, enabling the connection and tracking of all content under one roof. This overlapping of previously distinct worlds significantly enhances productivity and insights.
• Insights and Efficiency: To avoid duplication and maximize existing content utilization, it’s now easier to identify which raw clips were used and in what context for any finished clip.
• Cost and Storage Monitoring: Cloud-native solutions offer lower total cost of ownership but require monitoring to prevent unexpected expenses. Modern MAM systems should provide detailed breakdowns of individual production costs, improving efficiency and decision-making as content demand grows.
• Comprehensive Ingest and Organization: Production-connected systems are format-agnostic, supporting a wide range of media types and facilitating automated workflows through proxy file creation, live ingest capabilities, and advanced media processing.
• Workflow Automation and Flexibility: The integration of MAM with Non-Linear Editing (NLE) systems and the implementation of workflow automation are core to the production-connected MAM concept. This not only simplifies the production process but also ensures greater mobility and efficiency, enabling rapid editing and rendering for multi-platform distribution.

A Use Case for Better Connecting MAM and PAM

One vertical where seamless, efficient workflow is increasingly important is sports broadcasting, where archival content plays a huge role in live transmission.

Fox Sports Australia recently approached us because its content wasn’t findable, it had disorganized metadata and its archives were not easily accessible.

Through the implementation of Dalet Flex, our production-connected MAM, we were able to build a centralized modern media library to provide ubiquitous access to content. We transported over 13,000 hours of live broadcast video to the cloud, where it became accessible to multiple teams across multiple sites. This provided the network’s production staff with powerful search tools that eased their content production pain points.

Ready to Streamline Your End-to-End Workflows?

The convergence of PAM and MAM represents a significant evolution for media organizations. At Dalet, we are leading the charge with Dalet Flex, our cloud-native, Production Media Asset Management solution.

Allowing our customers to make informed decisions and optimize their operations in an ever-changing media landscape is central to our thinking. By connecting not only to Dalet applications, but also to third-party systems through our robust API network, Flex sits at the core of any media operation.

This holistic approach not only streamlines the production process but also ensures that content creators can meet the growing demand for high-quality media with greater efficiency. To find out how Flex can integrate with your business, get in touch.

The post How Cloud-Native MAM is Adopting PAM Features for Seamless Media Workflows  appeared first on Dalet.

You’ve made a significant investment in capturing and creating engaging content. Now you need a well-thought-out strategy to maximize its potential. Enter monetization, the game-changer.

Monetization can be divided into two main categories: direct and indirect.

Let’s delve deeper.

Indirect Monetization – The Building Blocks

Indirect monetization means leveraging your existing content to enhance or even produce new content. This converts your archives into financial assets, saving or even eliminating content acquisition costs. Although you may not directly see this manifested as immediate revenue, this equates to true monetary value as it eliminates the need to purchase stock footage or shoot new content.

Consider a sports half-time show: incorporating clips and highlights from your archives to match ongoing discussions significantly enhances the viewing experience. In news production, it enables producers to create powerful stories that leverage archive stock on specific topics, such as a city’s evolution over time.

Direct Monetization – Generate New Revenue Streams

Direct monetization is the process of licensing or selling your content. One way can be by distributing finished content to consumers in a traditional TV, OTT or VOD format. A second, highly lucrative, revenue option is by licensing finished or raw content to other businesses through a digital storefront. This is the type of monetization that we will focus on for the rest of this blog.

The rise of digital storefronts allows businesses to create branded shopping experiences, with their content available for direct purchase. Customers can easily search to locate what they need, thanks to robust metadata, narrowing their searches to the exact section they require.

An additional use case is where portals provide licensees with access to the content they have purchased the rights to. A broadcaster, for example, may have paid for the rights to all of a league’s game replays and highlights for the year. So they leverage the storefront to access all the content they’re entitled to, without the need to pay for any specific clips.

Whereas storefronts present great revenue potential, they are only as good as the quality of their published content. Enter Dalet’s partnership with Veritone, which allows you to curate your most valuable assets through Dalet Flex’s powerful media management and Veritone’s AI-powered Digital Media Hub (“DMH”), featuring its commerce and monetization capabilities.

The joint offering enables a seamless workflow from content delivery through production, curation, packaging and distribution, empowering media, sports and entertainment organizations to monetize their digital media archives, while remaining in control of their content catalog.

By harnessing Dalet Flex’s versatile workflow engine and comprehensive metadata capabilities, media-rich organizations can decide exactly what is published to their store, and when. Business-driven automation monitors your entire archive, identifies suitable content and publishes it instantly, maximizing your store’s potential. This is key to monetizing content of all types and sizes, but particularly for sports and historical video archives.

Sports Content: the Need for Speed

Content monetization forms a crucial element of sports media workflows. In a world where sports rights are paramount, speed is the name of the game, with fans expecting swift delivery from the license holder. The faster your content reaches the storefront, the greater the revenue for you and your customers.

However, efficiency needs to go hand in hand with speed to stay ahead of the competition. The combination of Dalet Flex and Veritone’s DMH enables rapid delivery of proxies and metadata to your storefront, with your high-resolution content safely housed within your Dalet asset management environment.

Your customers can search, preview, and order their content through DMH, triggering the Dalet Flex workflow engine to automatically handle the request backstage which prepares and delivers the content based on the buyer’s requirements.

Uncover Hidden Treasures in Your Archives

The benefits of a storefront transcend sports distribution. Any company interested in licensing their content can now implement an effective direct monetization strategy. Be it a news organization or broadcaster licensing archives, or a studio leasing their shows to other businesses, a robust MAM and a modern storefront can unlock fresh revenue streams.

Our joint technology solution eliminates the need to duplicate data across siloed systems and brings increased value to any content owner. Dalet and Veritone share a common vision, committed to a long-term shared roadmap and outstanding customer service.

Whether you’re an existing Dalet Flex customer eyeing new revenue opportunities, or you’re in the market for a comprehensive solution that helps you manage and monetize your archives, the Dalet Flex and Veritone DMH integration is the answer.

The post Unlocking Revenue Streams: Monetizing Your Media Assets with Dalet and Veritone  appeared first on Dalet.

Media-focused businesses large and small are already reaping serious rewards from the integration of video archive systems with the cloud. These benefits go beyond simple cost savings and increased efficiency.

However, moving to the cloud is no easy feat. Whether you’re implementing a hybrid approach or looking to shift to a fully cloud-native solution, it’s important to follow a robust methodology. Enlisting the help of a partner who knows your business inside out and can provide the services you require is integral.

In this post, we explore the benefits of migrating your MAM to the cloud and outline how we as a business successfully implement such systems. But before that, let’s define what a cloud based Media Asset Management actually is.

What is a Cloud based Media Asset Management?

At its core, a cloud based Media Asset Management solution uses cloud services to store and serve content from media libraries as part of the production and distribution process.

However, in reality, “cloud-based” can have multiple meanings. It could refer to fully hosted solutions where every aspect of MAM is managed by a cloud provider. It may also refer to hybrid models, where certain elements remain on-premises while others are moved to the cloud.

It’s important to recognize that cloud based media asset management does not mean cloud-native MAM. At Dalet, we define a true cloud Media Asset Management system as an enterprise solution built with cloud-native architecture, made up of microservices and modular capabilities.

Key features of a cloud-native MAM include:

• Unified Content Catalog: where disparate media libraries are brought together into easy-to-access cloud storage.
• Workflow Orchestration and Automation: where standard and custom workflows are leveraged alongside AI technology to transcode, approve, publish, and more.
• Application Ecosystem: where a suite of cloud-native tools is curated to address the specific technical and editorial needs of an individual media business.

Are you overwhelmed by your extensive media library ? Our customers experience unmatched scalability with our Cloud-native MAM, designed to grow with your business seamlessly. Request Your Personalised MAM Demo Today!

Can a Cloud based Media Asset Management Coexist with an On-premises Solution?

Regardless of your architecture, a cloud based Media Asset Management does not have to exclusively use cloud storage. It can integrate with multiple cloud providers and on-premise storage to operate in a hybrid model.

Traditionally, the moving of a MAM to the cloud may have been contextualized as a classic “lift and shift.” In other words, the moving of on-premises, physical server-based storage to a virtual cloud-based archive.

While lift and shift options bring the accessibility of the cloud and remove on-premise infrastructure needs, they do not take full advantage of the cloud in the same way cloud-native architecture does.

What Services and Workflows Does a Cloud-Native MAM Impact?

While many lightweight web-based solutions exist, they lack the power of a cloud-native MAM capable of improving access, collaboration, and efficiency on an industrial scale, based on user needs.

While all features might not all be used across every implementation, an enterprise cloud-native MAM system will be comprised of several key technical components:

1. Cloud Storage: This is the backbone of a cloud-native MAM, providing scalable, secure, and cost-effective storage solutions for media assets across multiple storage tiers.
2. Intelligent Ingest – Ingest any media with relevant and enhanced technical and editorial metadata at scale regardless of where the media originates from, for example, watch folders, camera cards, live feeds (SDI, SMPTE IP, compressed IP), or file uploads.
3. Metadata Management: Essential for organizing, searching, and managing video files effectively. Cloud facilitates metadata capabilities through advanced tagging and indexing.
4. Workflow Engine & Automation – In-house ability to quickly create workflows that efficiently distribute content at every stage of the media supply chain ensuring secure, reliable access to assets 
5. Transcoding and Encoding Services: Cloud services can automatically convert media files into various formats and resolutions, making them suitable for different distribution channels and devices.
6. Integration APIs – These allow for seamless integration with other tools and systems such as NLEs, file transfer systems, AQCs, playout, monetization, analytics platforms, and more.

What are the Benefits of Implementing a Cloud-Native MAM System?

Following a successful migration, the benefits of implementing a cloud-native MAM system are numerous:

• Scalability: The cloud allows you to easily dynamically scale your storage and processing needs up or down without significant upfront investment.
• Accessibility: Users can access media assets from anywhere, at any time. Previously, clunky VPNs and high-speed internet connections may have been required to access media assets. With cloud a standard wi-fi connection is all that’s needed.
• Improved Workflows: Automation makes it easy to orchestrate your media supply chain and manage your storage costs. You can control where files are and when they are accessible. Metadata can also be used to determine when files are moved to and from cold storage, based on the specific needs of your operation.
• Cost Efficiency: Cloud reduces the total cost of ownership by removing the need for physical infrastructure and the associated maintenance costs, while improving your content security.
• Security: Cloud-native MAM systems leverage cloud provider security measures, including data encryption and secure multi-factor access controls.
• Content Monetization: Return on investment extends beyond financial savings. Cloud-native systems allow you to generate new revenue streams by licensing selected inventory to clients, partners and affiliates through integrations with modern digital storefronts.
• Innovation: Cloud-native architecture allows you to quickly adopt new features and technologies as they become available in the cloud ecosystem.
• Reliability: Cloud systems can take advantage of providers’ immense scale. No matter where you are in the world, you’ll always be near to a server location for quick, reliable access to archives. Cloud also removes barriers to high availability – AWS operates a “five nines” principle of 99.999% year-round availability and uptime.
• Energy Savings: Cloud data centers are up to 5x more energy-efficient than traditional data centers, reducing energy costs for companies that migrate to the cloud.

How Long Does It Take to See Benefits from Cloud-Native MAM?

The timeline to realize these benefits can vary. Typically, organizations begin to see improvements in operational efficiency and cost savings within the first few months after implementation. However, the full scope of benefits, especially those related to strategic advantages like improved content distribution and market responsiveness, may take longer to materialize.

But an uptick in performance can come quickly. When our customer France Télévisions was faced with a nationwide lockdown in March 2020, staff had no direct access to the company’s systems. We were able to rapidly implement remote cloud workflow solutions and restore operational strength in just 4 weeks.

Preparing to Move to The Cloud

Whether you’ve decided to move all or part of your MAM system to the cloud, there are several things to consider. Moving to the cloud is a big task — one that nobody wants to have to do twice — so it’s important to make the right choices.

Before any implementation, it’s important that your MAM provider has a holistic understanding of your business. This involves understanding your business’ current MAM setup and workflows, exploring how you operate with other vendors, and determining your needs and ambitions moving forward.

Moving to the cloud isn’t about having the latest and greatest, it’s about bringing real value to your operation and enabling you to achieve sustainable growth.

While all media-focused businesses are likely to benefit from the features we’ve already listed, your organization will have specific pain points that a cloud MAM can ease. It’s important to state clear aims and objectives.

If you’re a broadcaster, the aim may be to drastically improve the speed and efficiency of content delivery to meet tight deadlines. In the film industry, the focus might be on collaboration among geographically dispersed post-production teams. Setting the precise specifications for the cloud features you want to exploit is key.

Over the past 33 years, we’ve built significant experience in managing large-scale, multi-million-dollar projects. Over this time, we’ve created a set of standardized tools and methodologies to ensure the successful delivery of our projects.

Key Milestones for Successful Cloud-Native MAM Implementation

Though this varies depending on the nature of the project, our phased implementation approach typically includes:

• Project Initialization & Scope: working with you to define the scope of the project by setting high-level goals and objectives.
• Business Analysis Requirements: performing a study to determine the functional requirements of the desired system. This study includes an in-depth analysis of workflow, infrastructure, interoperability with third-party systems, and data migration from legacy systems.
• Project Planning & Design: writing a plan with detailed descriptions of key milestones throughout the project to ensure delivery is on time and within budget.
• Risk Management: anticipating risks and developing workarounds as needed.
  Integration & Customization Engineering: providing customization for integration with third-party applications, databases, legacy systems, or equipment – in other words, connecting to the tools your business already uses.
• Implementation & Configuration: working with you and third parties to implement and configure the system in accordance with the requirements.
• Acceptance Testing: planning and conducting acceptance test scenarios to verify that the implemented solution meets the desired system requirements.
• Training and Coaching: providing custom training sessions to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Roll out: working with your organization to develop a proper support strategy, organize post-project evolution, and evaluate any future needs.

Initialization in Practice

So, what does this actually look like in practice?

Following kick-off, our Professional Services team will engage with relevant stakeholders in your business on an agile basis, working across a series of project sprints that typically last for 3 weeks at a time.

This outlines a simplified migration from on-premises to the cloud. In reality, businesses often deploy a hybrid approach or gradually move to the cloud in iterations over time.

Dalet’s distributed architecture means files can reside anywhere at any time, with the benefits of cloud felt even when some files remain in on-premises storage.

The Key to a Successful Setup Process

Whether implementing a hybrid or full cloud-native solution, some areas of the initialization are particularly important to get right.

Defining accurate technical specifications, including infrastructure, security, and storage requirements, is crucial. A consultant or cloud services operations specialist will take extra care in pulling together requirements. This person then becomes ultimately responsible for successful deployment on the appropriate cloud account.

We support integration with many providers, including AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, OVH and more. This is important to us, not only in terms of increasing consumer choice but also from a data recovery standpoint. Some customers house their entire media library with one provider. Dalet Flex mirrors this data with another provider as well, for extra security.

Security measures are integral. We provide recommendations for ports, services, anti-virus measures, and more. This may involve discussions about VPNs and secure data transfers, especially between cloud and on-premise locations, ensuring a secure environment.

When it comes to migration, specifications cover the movement of data from existing systems, possibly involving third-party solutions. The approach will vary depending on the media business in question. A move to the cloud might require the use of technologies like AWS Snowball for data transfer. It’s also common to deal with specific requests for data context preservation. This stage is one of the most complex and crucial, as it involves ensuring that existing data is accurately and efficiently migrated to the new system, considering all technical and functional requirements.

In the Long Term: How MAM Is Set to Evolve

Looking ahead, cloud-native MAM is set to become even more integral to media production and distribution workflows. Advances in AI and machine learning will further enhance metadata management and content personalization. Cloud providers will continue to improve security, compliance, and global reach, making cloud-native MAM an even more attractive option for media-focused businesses.

The evolution of cloud-native MAM is tied to the broader trends in cloud technology and media consumption habits such as a prevalence of mobile video and streaming. As the media landscape evolves, cloud-native MAM systems will become more sophisticated, enabling media companies to not only manage their assets more effectively but also to innovate and adapt to the change.

In order to make the most of these advancements, many businesses will need to update their approach towards collaboration. At Dalet, we believe that organizations should reimagine and reorganize how they work to maximize impact on operations and productivity. Our co-founder Stephane Guez provides more context in his post Media Trends of 2024: Big Events and Big Changes.

Ready to Realize the Benefits of The Cloud?

Implementing a cloud-native MAM successfully requires careful planning, a clear understanding of your organization’s needs, and a strategic approach to integration. The benefits of making the transition are clear, offering significant advantages in terms of cost, efficiency, and scalability, but it’s difficult to achieve all of this without the right partner.

If you’re keen to hear more information about Dalet’s cloud-native MAM services or are looking for help with your business own migration to the cloud, get in touch with a Dalet representative today.

The post Implementing Cloud Based Media Asset Management Successfully appeared first on Dalet.

When content-related tasks involve manual processes and repetitive file conversion, an automated media asset management system can significantly streamline workflows, saving time and effort. Furthermore, limited file access and sharing can hamper collaboration and delay content creation, while the inability to track asset performance makes assessing content impact challenging.

Investing in a robust media asset management system addresses these challenges head-on, offering solutions that enhance content organization, collaboration, version control, compliance, and overall efficiency. By implementing a media asset management software, organizations can maximize the value of their media assets, improve productivity, and unlock the full potential of their creative endeavors. In the dynamic world of digital media, embracing media asset management is the key to unleashing boundless possibilities and ensuring a successful and thriving content management journey.

Overwhelmed by your growing media library and complex content workflows? Step into the future of media asset management with Dalet Flex. Sign up for a free consultation now and experience a seamless, scalable MAM platform tailored to your needs.

How to choose the best Media Asset Management software for your business

Choosing the optimal media asset management software is a pivotal decision with far-reaching implications for an organization’s content management and workflow efficiency. The selection process demands thoughtful consideration of essential factors that align with the organization’s unique requirements and aspirations. Amidst the array of options, focusing on these key considerations ensures a well-informed choice that sets the stage for seamless content organization, collaboration, and optimized productivity.

Foremost, scalability emerges as a fundamental element that should not be overlooked. As organizations evolve and their media libraries expand, a MAM solution’s ability to accommodate growing content volumes without compromising performance becomes indispensable. A scalable MAM empowers businesses to adapt effortlessly to changing needs, fostering a content management environment that thrives in the face of growth and innovation. Moreover, user-friendliness assumes a central role in the selection process, offering an intuitive interface and streamlined functionalities that facilitate swift adoption and mastery. 

An accessible and user-friendly MAM solution empowers team members to navigate the system with ease, maximizing their creative potential and reducing the learning curve for seamless integration into content workflows. Organizations prioritizing scalability and user-friendliness lay the foundation for a transformative content management journey that embraces growth, collaboration, and content excellence.

As important as scalability and ease of use are, they are far from the only factors to consider when selecting the right MAM. Here are 10 further essential factors to consider when choosing the most suitable Media Asset Management software for your organization:

1- Define Your Requirements:

Before evaluating MAM options, clearly define your organization’s specific needs and requirements. Consider factors such as the size of your media library, the types of media assets you handle, the number of users who will access the system, integration needs with other software, and any specific workflows you want to streamline.

2- Metadata Management:

Robust metadata management capabilities are crucial for efficient content discovery and retrieval. Look for a MAM system that allows for comprehensive metadata tagging, custom metadata fields, and advanced search capabilities to improve asset organization.

3- User-Friendly Interface:

A user-friendly interface is essential for quick adoption and ease of use among team members. Conduct user trials or demos to gauge the platform’s intuitiveness and usability for both technical and non-technical users.

4- Integration Capabilities:

Ensure that the MAM solution can seamlessly integrate with your existing software ecosystem, such as video editing tools, content management systems, or cloud storage platforms. Integration reduces manual processes and enhances workflow efficiency.

5- Format Support:

Verify that the MAM solution can handle a wide range of media formats and codecs. It should support common file types as well as emerging industry standards to accommodate various media asset types.

6- Security and Access Control:

Media assets can be sensitive, so robust security features are essential. Look for encryption, user authentication, role-based access control, and audit trails to protect your valuable media content.

7- Support and Training:

Consider the level of customer support provided by the MAM vendor. Ensure that they offer responsive technical support and resources to assist with implementation and training.

8- Analytics and Reporting:

Advanced analytics and reporting features help track asset performance, content engagement, and user activity. This data-driven insight can guide content strategy and decision-making.

9- Cost and Pricing Model:

Evaluate the total cost of ownership, including licensing fees, implementation costs, maintenance, and any additional charges for storage or user licenses. Consider if the pricing model aligns with your organization’s budget and requirements.

10- Vendor Reputation:

Research the reputation and track record of the MAM vendor. Look for customer reviews, case studies, and testimonials to gauge the scale of customers they deal with and satisfaction levels of existing users. 

Selecting the best media asset management solution requires careful consideration of your organization’s specific requirements, scalability, user-friendliness, integration capabilities, security, and support. By choosing the right media asset management software, you can optimize content management, enhance collaboration, and leverage the full potential of your media assets, ultimately driving success, delivering a high return on investment and reducing the total cost of ownership of your media content.

For a comprehensive understanding of each factor to consider when selecting a Media Asset Management system, delve into our detailed Step-by-Step Guide to Media Asset Management.

12 steps to Media Asset Management success

Once you have a media asset management software, or even if you’ve had one for some time but are looking for even more ROI, implementing some simple best practices for media asset management is essential. These 12 tips will help to ensure a streamlined and efficient workflow, maximize the value of digital media assets, and improve collaboration across the organization. 

1. Metadata Enrichment: Metadata plays a crucial role in media asset management. Ensure that all media assets are tagged with relevant and descriptive metadata, including titles, descriptions, keywords, categories, creation date, copyright information, and any other pertinent details. Consistent and comprehensive metadata facilitates quick and accurate asset search and retrieval.

2. Standardize Naming Conventions: Establish and enforce standardized naming conventions for media assets to maintain consistency and avoid confusion. A consistent naming structure makes it easier to identify and organize files logically.

3. Categorization and Tagging: Organize media assets into meaningful categories and use descriptive tags to classify them. Categorization and tagging help in creating intuitive asset structures and improve searchability.

4. Backup and Disaster Recovery: Regularly backup media assets to protect against data loss due to hardware failures, system crashes, or other unforeseen incidents. Implement a robust disaster recovery plan to ensure business continuity in case of data loss.

5. Version Control: Implement version control to keep track of changes made to media assets. This ensures that users always access and work with the latest versions of files, preventing data discrepancies.

6. User Permissions and Access Control: Implement role-based access control to restrict access to media assets based on user roles and responsibilities. This helps protect sensitive content and ensures that only authorized users can modify or distribute assets.

7. Automation: Utilize automation features to streamline repetitive tasks, such as file transcoding, format conversion, and content delivery. Automation saves time, reduces errors, and enhances overall workflow efficiency.

8. Integration with Existing Systems: Integrate the media asset management system with other tools and software used in the organization, such as video editing software, content management systems, and project management platforms. Seamless integration enhances workflow efficiency and data flow.

9. Asset Lifecycle Management: Manage the entire lifecycle of media assets, from ingestion to archival. Implement practices to review and update asset metadata regularly, retire assets when no longer needed, and ensure proper archiving for historical or regulatory purposes.

10. Regular Audits and Maintenance: Conduct regular audits to ensure the accuracy, consistency, and relevance of metadata. Periodic maintenance of the media asset management system helps optimize performance and ensures it meets evolving organizational needs.

11. Training and User Adoption: Provide comprehensive training to users on how to effectively use the media asset management system. Encourage user adoption through education, support, and showcasing the benefits of the MAM system.

12. Security Measures: Implement robust security measures to protect media assets from unauthorized access, data breaches, and cyber threats. This includes encryption, user authentication, and monitoring access logs.

By implementing these best practices, organizations can optimize their media asset management workflows, improve collaboration among team members, enhance content discovery and reuse, ensure compliance with copyright and licensing requirements, and ultimately maximize the value of their video content. A well-organized and efficiently managed media asset management system is a valuable asset for any organization dealing with digital media content.

Media Asset Management with Dalet Flex

Key amongst an industry-leading list of core features and benefits, Dalet Flex’s user-friendly workflow engine makes it a standout choice in the media asset management landscape. The unparalleled flexibility of the workflow engine allows it to cater to the unique needs and preferences of any organization, ensuring a seamless alignment with existing processes. This adaptability optimizes content creation and distribution like never before, empowering video teams to work more efficiently and effectively with their media assets.

Whether it’s customizing workflows, integrating with other tools, or tailoring the system to specific requirements, Dalet Flex provides the freedom for organizations to tailor their media asset management experience to suit their individual workflows and content strategies. This level of flexibility sets Dalet Flex apart as a truly versatile and adaptive solution in the ever-evolving world of media asset management.

With a proven track record and comprehensive solutions covering the entire content lifecycle, Dalet offers robust features like metadata management, version control, and advanced search capabilities. Its seamless integration with third-party tools, scalability, and customization options ensure a tailored fit for organizations. Dalet’s analytics, customer support, and industry expertise further cement its position as a trusted choice for optimizing media workflows and maximizing the value of digital media assets.

It’s not all about the software though. Dalet stands out in the industry as a top choice for media asset management because of our global, expert team of dedicated video workflow specialists and their wealth of knowledge that elevates our customers’ experience beyond the platform, there’s also;

1- A Proven Track Record:

Dalet has a strong reputation in the media industry, with numerous successful implementations worldwide. Its solutions have been adopted by major broadcasters, production companies, and content distributors, attesting to the effectiveness and reliability of Dalet’s MAM offerings.

2- Customer Support and Training:

Dalet offers excellent customer support and training resources to assist organizations during implementation and throughout their usage of the MAM system. Their responsive support team ensures a smooth onboarding experience and provides ongoing assistance when needed.

3- Industry Expertise:

With over 35 years of experience in the media technology industry, Dalet understands the unique challenges and requirements of media asset management. Our solutions are designed to address these specific needs, making them a trusted choice for media organizations.

Managing media assets with Dalet Flex provides organizations with a feature-rich, scalable, and user-friendly MAM solution. Our comprehensive suite of solutions, seamless integration capabilities, customization options, and excellent customer support make it the top choice for optimizing media workflows, enhancing collaboration, and maximizing the value of digital media assets. Get in touch with a Dalet specialist today.

The post Media Asset Management: 12 Proven Practices for success appeared first on Dalet.

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.

People frantically looking up ‘How to…’ video guides was one of the defining features of Covid lockdowns. Without easy access to plumbers or builders, it was up to the video tutorial to help guide our shaky hands through fitting a new shower head or fixing the fence.

For Robin Kirchhoffer, CMO at media solutions and service provider Dalet, the rush online was no surprise and it’s a trend that’s set to continue. That’s because, firstly, he says viewers on average retain a whopping 95% of a video message – much higher than written communication and vital if you’re taking a hammer to your house – and secondly because business marketing teams have been steadily growing the quantity and quality of corporate video content.

“People love watching video to help them understand, buy and enjoy things, and the pandemic just led to more proliferation,” Kirchhoffer explains. “Corporates have responded by creating more video content, both internally as well as externally on channels from YouTube to TikTok. Most industries were already doing this, but the need to have it properly wired as part of your marketing strategy has increased. It can help build a brand message, customer trust and contribute to a firm’s top and bottom line.”

Tutorials and product demonstrations are a great example. They are valuable because they help customers get the most out of their new products and services. One of Dalet’s clients, Audi UK, produces and distributes such video tutorials to its car dealers as well as training content and commercials to its sites and applications. Another client, American Family Insurance, manages all kinds of assets, including training and marketing content.

“As marketers, you need to make sure that video is there for customers and clients because this is how they want to access information,” Kirchhoffer explains. “The C-suite also sees the shift in usage and is asking for new initiatives to be launched more quickly. Marketers need to be fast on their feet with new and more video content.”

However, this growth has created several pain points for marketing teams in their media supply chains. This encompasses all parts of the video journey including content creation, commissioning, production, distribution to multiple platforms and storage.

“Most businesses using video content are not native media organizations,” Kirchhoffer explains. “They don’t have the toolsets and processes in place to manage and plan their video content and campaigns, document and categorize everything and understand how and why it is performing. There isn’t a single point of truth where everyone can work together.”

Instead, he adds, the content is very siloed, with some stored in cloud services, some offline on hard drives and some on a shared server. As a result, it is hard to leverage value and have true transparency and visibility. Many organizations also manage these tasks manually with filing, indexing and planning taking up valuable employee time.

“The question is: how do you control these video assets? A marketing team managing and creating different videos needs a level of automation and centralization to help manage the flows,” he says. “It helps drive the consistency of messaging, format, graphics and quality control throughout an organization, either with local or multi-national campaigns. It also frees up marketing minds to come up with new creative ideas and designs.”

The Dalet Flex software product, used by Audi UK, American Family Insurance and leading media organizations, provides these centralized toolsets and processes as a service. “Marketing groups and corporations want to unify their teams so that internal staff and outside agencies, remote video producers and freelancers can see content processes on one system,” says Kirchhoffer.

“With Dalet Flex, they can ensure that their assets are visible, properly indexed, centralized and documented much more efficiently. You can also use analytics to see how each video is performing, how it is helping the bottom line or whether it needs to be amended or repurposed and used on a different channel.”

Kirchhoffer expects demand for video content to continue growing both long and short duration films and more cinematic high-resolution campaigns for specific events or product launches. “Already there is a need for specific branding, logos and color schemes for different countries or channels,” he explains. “You need to manage it well to help grow your brand.”

For those of us soaked to the skin after a failed plumbing attempt – that can only be good news.

The post Shooting for the Stars: How to Boost Your Video Strategy appeared first on Dalet.

With a powerful combination of web-based, user-friendly tools and powerful automation capabilities, Dalet Flex helps media-rich organizations:

• Centralize – Gather their content in a consolidated repository, build a valuable and living archive

• Manage – Organize their repository, enrich, curate, and share content

• Collaborate – Support a hybrid or remote workforce, review and approve media assets with purpose-built tools

• Orchestrate – Drive their media supply chain with a workflow engine

• Connect – Integrate their content repository with 3rd party tools and automatically leverage additional tools, such as Artificial Intelligence services

• Monitor – Control on-going processes in a single, web-based, monitoring center

• Distribute – Automate content packaging and distribution across traditional, digital, and social platforms

• Save – Reduce storage costs with better and automated management of assets’ lifecycle

Bringing Professional Media Tools To Creative Teams Everywhere

Dalet Flex has been an enterprise-grade solution for the last eight years, serving the needs of large media organizations including the likes of Public Broadcasting System affiliates, Arsenal Football Club, Audi, and HBO, just to name a few. Indeed, the adoption of Media Asset Management and Supply Chain orchestration solutions usually comes with advanced deployment and integration projects.

But what about smaller, independent creators and content owners who would find this commitment outside of budget and outside of practical application? Still, these teams need the power and the applications of Dalet Flex, offering customizable work environments, automation (with easily edited workflows), and purpose-built media tools.

Well, we have good news for them: Dalet Flex is now available as a service.

Your Media Workflow Solution As-A-Service

While Dalet already had several products available as SaaS in its portfolio, such as Dalet AmberFin and Dalet Media Cortex, it became evident to us that Dalet Flex should also be available as a service.

Success with SaaS, both for Dalet and the customer, relies on faster deployments of upgrades, ready-to-execute workflows, and the ability to offer Dalet Flex at an affordable price point to get started. But this is only the tip of the iceberg: it is the revamped customer experience that really makes the difference, with better on-boarding experience but also improved Customer Success services and Knowledge resources.

Another huge advantage of SaaS is being able to offer Dalet Flex for teams in a variety of plans and packages for what your business needs. Ten people on your team? We have a Dalet Flex for teams plan designed for you. What if your media management crew is fifty? Again, we have you covered.

Focus On Your Craft, We Take Care Of The Rest

Cloud-native from its inception, Dalet Flex for teams is completely hosted, monitored, and maintained by Dalet, in our partner environment: Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This means that while you work on your various creative projects and produce the best media for your needs, Dalet delivers upgrades for new and innovative features, and ensures the maintenance and security of the products’ underlying infrastructure. This represents significant savings especially for smaller organizations without advanced IT and DevOps capabilities, avoiding the constant purchasing of upgrades or waiting for the one major upgrade that completely changes your operations. Upgrades happen gradually, avoiding disruption of your productivity.

Perhaps that is the biggest appeal of the development for Dalet Flex for teams: the encouragement of creativity by letting you focus solely on your craft and your business. This was the inspiration in developing and releasing Dalet Flex for teams.

Dalet Is With You On This Journey

Whether you are enterprise-level or a smaller production team, Dalet remains committed to making the integration of our solutions into your workflows and media productions seamless. We have only built upon our already available (and highly praised) training resources with additional classes from Dalet Academy. Those who invest in Dalet Flex for teams will have access to the same educational resources and coaching services, along with our growing library of self-service learning materials.

Then there is the Customer Success Management team, a dedicated team of Customer Success Managers that accompanies our customers through each step of their journey to help them succeed with Dalet solutions and services.

Finally, those who subscribe to Dalet Flex for teams will be supported by our Cloud Operations team, making sure the overall performance and security of our cloud services remains state-of-the-art.

Welcome to Dalet Flex for teams

Dalet Flex for teams, an award winner at the 2022 NAB in Las Vegas for Best of Show from TV Tech, is ready to take your productivity to the next level, bringing to your media crew all the capabilities and power of Dalet Flex, in a scalable solution. Pricing is offered in three subscription tiers — Essentials, Growth, Advanced — based on the range of users accepted for a given Tier, support levels, specialized features (Single-Sign-On, number of integrations, …), and included cloud usage.

Contact us and let’s begin this new adventure today.

The post Dalet Flex for teams: Professional Tools for Smaller Media Organizations appeared first on Dalet.

Don’t Touch That Dial: Fitness on Television

In-home coached fitness can trace its origins back in 1952 with Jack LaLanne. He brought exercise into the living rooms of the world with his self-titled TV program. It was wildly popular and ran for a remarkable thirty-four years. His high energy and robust approach to life got the viewing public hooked on the privacy and convenience of working out and getting fit in their own homes.

Photo credit: Cliff Riddle, Hollywood, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The only sticking point was that the viewers had to be around at the precise time of the show. It would be several decades later with the arrival of home video that put everyday people in charge of when they worked out. Viewers could now see how they should be preforming the movements and connect with the energy of the instructor whenever they hit “play” on their VCR. Leading this movement was an unlikely and unexpected individual: Oscar-winning actress Jane Fonda. Her videotape exercise program, Workout, set the stage for another step forward in home fitness. Fonda went on to produce many bestselling tapes, as well as made it acceptable (and yes, appealing) to be a woman with muscles.

For a period in the 80s and 90s, every level of celebrity had a video that promised to tone and firm various muscle groups. In 2001, as people yearned for fun in their workout, Zumba with Beto Perez appeared. His incredibly popular DVD meant users no longer had to fast forward or rewind a tape, breaking the flow of their exercise routine. Instead, they could pick sections of the workout from a menu and skip right to them.

Up until this point, asset management in fitness video content (including DVDs) was somewhat basic:

• Close-up shots on the Talent
• Music
• Camera angles and shots (Zumba, for example, had four or more cameras.)
• Credits
• Exclusive to DVDs, static menu items

I Feel Seen: Interactive Fitness on Mobile

Present day, production has shifted to a mobile world, and our fitness is following. Everyone is turning to their phones and tablets for workouts that will challenge and motivate them. Companies like Apple, Nike and ifit.com have developed interactive fitness video content that enhances their brand. Even national gym chains adapted to this demand. Lifetime Fitness now offers digital membership with live, and on-demand exercise programs.

From its beginnings, Peloton aimed to be game-changer in the world of fitness. The company provides a complete user experience from hardware, music, and the instructors themselves. In essence making themselves a true media company. The experience they’ve constructed dips in the world of Augmented Reality (AR) through their bikes and treadmills using their app and subscription service with thousands of classes. Their trainers also interact with people exercising, making Peloton’s routines more than just a static experience, by putting you in a class with other runners and bikers. Together, you cheer one another on while competing for top spots in leaderboards and shout-outs from your instructors.

Bro, Do You Even Quest?: The Rise (and Demands) of VR Fitness

Fitness video content is now flexing hard in the virtual environment. With sales in the Quest app store surging 150% year-over-year growth in the 2021 Christmas weekend. Virtual Reality is where I found myself seeking a way to keep moving and discover better health. Supernatural is my go-to app, placing you in breathtaking environments where you can smash balloons with a Flow or Boxing routine. The app also has meditations and stretches to take care of the mind, too. Judging from the user comments, Supernatural has improved both the physical and mental health of its community. Noting the popularity of VR fitness, Les Mills, a worldwide provider of fitness known for their impressive gyms and services, recently brought their popular BodyCombat program into the virtual realm.

These advances, though, have increased the complexity of fitness video content. It’s no longer a matter of getting a bunch of fit individuals in front of a camera and recording a routine. For example, Supernatural offered a behind-the-scenes look at production. It is a three-month process, spread across multi-functional teams, including coaches, music rights managers, VR filmmakers, developers, and choreographers. As a subscription-based app, they provide new content daily to keep their user base engaged, energized, and coming back.

While you still have the earlier-mentioned assets to contend with, AR and VR exercise programs now includes:

• Targets. These communicate to the user that they have successfully landed a hit and how hard.
• Bats or gloves. These show where the user’s hands are.
• Environment. Where the user works out no long has limits. You can be on mountain tops, beaches, or in an endless and sparkling-clean digital gym.
• Scores and leaderboards. Achieving a personal best, or challenging their friends, encourages users.
• The Menu. Users mark favorite workouts, add others to their leaderboard, and filter content.

With increasing complexities, managing these individual workouts demands reliable production, asset management and packaging, as well as distribution media workflows such as those supported by Dalet Flex.

Appreciating a Good Flex: How Dalet Flex Manages Home Fitness Assets

With home fitness now crossing into an interactive medium, imagine managing all these daily produced assets, knowing where to find the precise song, trying to catalog the thousands of hours of production material, and keeping an efficient archive. As a content business, it is vital to understand what’s been delivered when and what can be re-monetized. For example, producing specialized playlists for your users, such as collections of particular music or highlights, adds value to the content already produced. Keeping these fitness video content elements, which span a wide variety of media, in order is the kind of challenge that Dalet Flex can meet.

As this industry continues to expand, it will need robust solutions for rich media asset production, distribution and management.

User-friendly and highly customizable Dalet Flex grants editors and producers with adaptable tools for diverse teams in remote locations. Users can collaborate on managing the production workflow that these fitness packages demand through business-driven rules and customizable metadata definitions. The platform is well-positioned to help the in-home fitness industry manage its complex media workflows.

Many who have had their eyes opened to the joy of home fitness will stay online, or combine traditional gym workouts with what they have learned from apps. The business of fitness video content has certainly caught its second wind, but it needs agile and reliable tools to manage its growing volume of content and metadata moving into its future.

The post Fitness Video Content – More Assets than Meet the Eye appeared first on Dalet.

Working in the Field: Where the Adobe-Dalet Relationship Begins

In getting Adobe Premiere Pro and Dalet Flex to work together, our product team focused on two pain points:

• Making remote work actually work
• Facilitating project management

Dalet Flex offers editors a better way to manage projects by making the platform their central repository, not only for media files but also for the projects themselves. When integrated with Adobe Premiere Pro, the result is an efficient, cloud-based workflow optimized for collaboration and remote production.

Let’s take an example: your studio is working on a retrospective sports documentary. The workflow starts within Dalet Flex. Whether you have large libraries comprised of assets numbering into the millions, or simply a collection of content amassed over a year of production, Dalet Flex lets you build advanced data models and leverages controlled vocabularies, such as thesaurus or taxonomies, to make content easy to find. Free-text search strings can also be refined by going to the search results’ column headers, requesting specific parameters such as “Show me media shorter than five minutes.” or “Display content rated 3-stars by users.” By refining your content search, resulting media clips are reduced to only what you and your project will need.

Now having the specific media they want, users can gather them into a bin with a simple drag-and-drop as another layer of organization for your project. Dalet FlexMAM also allows you to clip and add to your bin only the exact portion required for your editing project.

With new clips borne from one asset or the assets you have collected in your various bins, a rough cut can be assembled using Dalet FlexMAM’s Sequence Editor. These sequences can serve as a starting point for a wide array of projects, easily imported into Adobe Premiere Pro. Additionally, users can open the Dalet FlexXTEND panel as an extension within Adobe Premiere Pro. This extension allows editors to browse the Dalet Flex library from within their creative environment, making all advanced search functions offered in FlexMAM also available in FlexXTEND.

Creating Content from Anywhere: Working in the Cloud

But what about when you are editing from a remote location or transitioning to a cloud-based operation? Let’s say that, for this sports retrospective production we are editing, I am working from home using Adobe Premiere Pro on my own workstation. Here, I will enable Proxy editing in FlexXTEND. When importing content from Dalet Flex, a proxy version is downloaded directly to my workstation. Now, I can edit remotely with proxy versions of the media assets. When the sequence is ready for rendering, FlexXTEND triggers the sequence rendering to a remote machine running Adobe Media Encoder.

High resolution media files can now remain close to the Media Encoder. Whether running on a cloud server or on-premises, Dalet Flex delivers maximum flexibility — no pun intended! — when it comes to where assets are stored and your Media Encoder machine is located.

In addition, Dalet Flex will soon add a custom MPEG-DASH reader to Adobe Premiere Pro so that editors can work inside Premiere Pro on growing files and enable workflows optimized for live content.

Project Management Matters More Than Ever!

We understand the importance of project management for creative teams. Dalet Flex now offers advanced features for rich asset and project management, which makes the life of Adobe editors easier in terms of collaboration and work efficiency. Dalet Flex effectively becomes the central repository not just for media files, but for Adobe Premiere Pro project files too. With this approach, projects are treated by Dalex Flex the same way as assets currently are. This offers a whole new world of possibilities to manage and collaborate on projects with the assignment of metadata, the ability to perform simple and complex search queries, and the access to all FlexMAM capabilities, be it directly in Dalet Flex or in Adobe Premiere Pro thanks to FlexXTEND.

How does this benefit video editors? Returning to the example of the retrospective sports documentary you are working on — let’s say you want to pull from another retrospective you put together in 2019. The FlexXTEND panel provides all of Dalet Flex’s search capabilities to find that project — assets and all — and import it back into Adobe Premiere Pro. The extra time and work required to return to a previous project and having to re-establish links to media files are no longer an issue with Dalet Flex integration. The solution now allows you to trigger workflows on Adobe Premiere Pro projects, for instance to restore media files from an archive when required. That is something of a real time saver.

Going further: What Is Coming Soon

What makes the integration of Dalet Flex and Adobe Premiere a must-have for content creators is that we are never satisfied with the status quo: always looking to improve, to innovate, and to ask, “What’s next?”

To keep improving collaboration and remote work, not only for editors but for all FlexMAM users, we will release brand new mobile applications for iOS and Android in upcoming months. We have much more planned, with increased Adobe Premiere Pro integration – this is merely the beginning. While this post has been focused on our integration with Adobe products, Dalet Flex also offers integrations with Avid environments. Stay tuned on this blog for more details in future posts.

If you want to know more about what we do at Dalet, or how Dalet Flex can take your Adobe Premiere Pro creative workflows to a new level of productivity, watch the VOD of our latest webinar and schedule a call with us. We look forward to providing you with solutions for your media production needs.

The post Unleash Creativity with the New Power Couple: Dalet Flex and Adobe® Premiere® Pro appeared first on Dalet.

In a way, Burning Man’s virtual reality counterpart represents the promise of the metaverse—a unique opportunity for redefining content production and distribution.

Has VR’s Moment Arrived at Last?

Virtual Reality (VR) is far more accessible than it has ever been, thanks largely to Meta’s innovative, standalone Oculus Quest line of headsets. A recent Statista report shows that users spent 71% more time using VR in 2020 alone due to the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. These numbers have only increased throughout 2021 as more and more curious and eager-to-get-away people enter the metaverse, even though the metaverse concept is nothing new. In fact, it turns thirty this year. Neal Stephenson coined the term in his 1992 novel Snowcrash, but the concept goes back even further to William Gibson’s critically acclaimed 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. The title also gave life to the terms “cyberspace” and “the Matrix.”

Get a Second Life: From Early Steps to Christmas Craze

Just 5 years ago if you wanted to get into VR, you needed an expensive gaming PC, a high-end graphics card, and an equally costly headset. The pre-VR attempts of virtual environments such as the popular escapist haven, Second Life, promised a multiverse in which users could own virtual property , attend concerts, go to art shows, and more, provided your hardware had the power and punch to deliver. Many times, it didn’t.

The demands needed for a positive VR experience were upheaved in 2018 when Meta (then Facebook) released the Oculus Quest, catalyzing a paradigm shift. For the first time, all you had to do to enter the metaverse was power up a headset, secure it on your head, and boom, you were jacked into the ‘verse like one of Neuromancer’s console cowboys. The following year, Meta released the Quest 2 with a lower price tag and superior onboard tech. According to the Verge, Meta is reported to have sold 10 million Oculus Quest headsets in 2021 alone, and there’s plenty for people to see and do in the metaverse.

You Want Content? Oh, I Got Your Content…

Virtual Reality content and experiences are becoming increasingly more available and range from animation, to films, and to even the channels themselves that are used for distribution. Felix and Paul Studios, EMMY-award winning immersive content creators are at the cutting edge. The small studio has collaborated with the likes of NASA, SpaceX, President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama to create all original 360-degree video series that include “The Space Explorers” and “Traveling While Black.”

Streaming giant Netflix released their original VR app in 2015, and is still available for all modern headsets. Netflix stands apart from YouTube by placing you in a wilderness lodge with a big screen TV where you can dim the virtual lights and enjoy all of your favorite Netflix series and movies while simultaneously feeling like you are getting away from your everyday reality. Similar to Netflix, Amazon Prime VR provides access to award-winning Amazon Originals, popular movies, hit TV shows, channel subscriptions, and a modest and growing library of immersive virtual reality content, all optimized for the virtual home theater.

The YouTube VR app launched in 2016 and has continued to capitalize on its ever-expanding library of 180 and 360 degree videos, perfectly suited for headset viewing. Recently, the company has turned their eyes toward the content creators, providing a variety of resources as a means of encouraging creators to explore the VR space. Users can find workshops, labs, and downloadable templates on YouTube VR.

New Opportunities for Non-Media Companies to Shine

Entertainment isn’t the only industry experimenting with content distribution in metaverse channels. Take for example, Hyundai, who launched a virtual showroom in VR featuring popular and new car models on display where you can even change the colors of the cars in the showroom and watch slick, promotional videos; and Audi who, with the help of Dalet Flex, created a Le Mans VR Experience, putting its viewers in the Pit Lane as part of the crew. It’s not inconceivable that automotive manufacturers may someday evolve these experiences to suit prospective car buyers, providing hands-on previews of vehicles without the buyers having to leave their sofa. Then comes along the fast paced fitness app, Supernatural, mentioned previously, places your trainer (via green-screen recorded 3D video) right into your workout environment.

With so much new content being created and distributed—3D video trainers, docuseries, and virtual show rooms—creators will need ways to efficiently deliver to their consumers to stay relevant. Managing and monetizing archives of valuable content will become essential to not be left behind the curve. Dalet provides in Dalet Flex a scalable platform offering the tools for producing, packaging, and distributing content with both relevant metadata and reliable asset management. Think of it as an open and extensible “Media Factory.” The workflows created before and after the launching of these digital worlds provide the means for even non-media companies to become pro-level content creators!

The Future’s So Bright, I’ve Gotta Wear (VR/XR) Shades

The future of the metaverse is bright, indeed. It’s not just a buzz word and the fact that the term itself nearly defies description speaks of its potential for distributing content in incredible ways. The metaverse can, should, and likely will forever change the way content is distributed and with it the very creative process itself. Whole worlds have already been forged from the pixel up. Worlds await where you can experience films, fitness, live music, art, history, and technology with friends and strangers alike. These are worlds where the lines between reality and the simulation blur.

“The Medium is the Message” is a quote from Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhany that became the unofficial slogan of the Internet in its formative years. And much the same can be said for the metaverse — the channel is the content. We at Dalet are firm believers in the power of innovation and intend to support content creators, owners, and distributors in this New Frontier.

The post The Metaverse Era: A New Reality for Content Production and Distribution 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.

For more than 40 years, Spectra Logic has built a reputation for reliable data storage technology, including LTO (Linear Tape Open) tape libraries, for content archive. Today, many customers — particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic — are now also actively looking into cloud solutions such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform for secure and easy archiving, as well as a method to easily share assets in a global environment. These customers are data-intensive businesses such as high-performance computing companies, genomics, research sites, and media and entertainment studios.

Potential issues with traditional HSM (hierarchical storage management) are around scalability and searchability of assets. As there is now a demand for remote production, the advantages for object-based storage, something that Dalet Flex does and does extremely well, is in how it can scale and easily make assets searchable as well as shareable across the cloud as object-based storage running on a web-based system.

Dalet Flex and Spectra BlackPearl work together to bring a fully integrated solution tested and certified to meet a media-rich organization’s remote production needs. With the capabilities of both platforms across production and asset management, Dalet Flex and Spectra BlackPearl support integrated workflows, promoting greater efficiencies, where each platform’s benefits are passed on to end users. Both companies aim to better connect users to content no matter where they are located.

Our integrations are tested, certified, and designed to make the most of monetizing and securely archiving assets. This collaboration instills confidence in our clients to trust both Dalet and Spectra Logic as a joint solution provider.

Dalet FlexMAM tools enable users to manually archive and restore content from the Spectra BlackPearl archive

One success story for Dalet Flex and BlackPearl is with media production powerhouse Fox Sports Australia, using the Dalet ecosystem to manage their original content, assets, and archived footage, some of these assets over a decade old. The workflows Dalet Flex and Spectra BlackPearl deployed easily incorporate rich metadata in order to make ten years of assets both accessible and securely stored in a hybrid cloud environment. Success cases like this one are part of a larger developmental roadmap between Dalet and Spectra Logic for future workflows and integrations.

For more details on the technology ecosystem created by Dalet Flex and Spectra BlackPearl, watch our recent episode of Dalet Media Talks below, featuring myself, Jonathan Coutts-Zawadzki and Spectra Senior Vice President of Business Development & Strategic Alliances, Hossein ZiaShakeri.

Dalet MediaTalks – Spectra Logic: From Content Creation to Asset Preservation

The latest integration between Dalet and Spectra Logic leverages the new BlackPearl RioBroker® data mover that speeds file transfers and streamlines production and archive workflows. Its accessible API makes integrations with platforms like Dalet Flex simple and economic. The two platforms bring many enterprise-level capabilities to clients, providing a complete solution for archive and asset management in a cloud-based environment.

At Dalet we are always open to working with leading technology partners and strengthening the Dalet ecosystem with efficient solutions for clients everywhere. Partnerships like this do more than build on our already reliable platforms but offer you more efficient, more secure opportunities to manage your media and take your content strategy to the next level. To learn more about the integration between Dalet Flex and Spectra BlackPearl, take a look at our joint solution brief or contact us directly to discuss your requirements.

The post In Perfect Harmony: Dalet Flex and Spectra BlackPearl appeared first on Dalet.

Offering Solutions in Bite-Sized Segments

At Dalet, we know that getting started in something new or breaking away from what you know as tried-and-true can be a challenge. It’s those odd butterflies you get in your stomach before learning something new. Yes, we totally get that. We’ve all been there. This is why Dalet’s Pre-Sales Manager and Solution Architect Sharif Khan and Customer Advocate & Trainer Jonathan Coutts-Zawadzki are launching Quick Cuts on YouTube, where in less than five minutes you learn something new with our media asset management, content supply chain and production platform, Dalet Flex.

Tips and Tricks

In our current age of TikTok and YouTube’s #Shorts, we bring you these two-to-three minute videos as an approach for users to quickly familiarize themselves with the Dalet Flex platform. The idea is not to overwhelm users with a 30-to-90-minute video that offers a comprehensive look at our platform while taking away a massive chunk of your workday in the process. Instead, we offer you a less-than-five-minute solution that leads to another solution, and then another.

Our first season of Quick Cuts on YouTube will follow the basic workflow of a video project, and each episode will acclimatize users to the Dalet Flex approach. Our series starts with a brief introduction of what Dalet Flex is and what it offers on the basic level as a multimedia asset management platform. From here, Sharif and Jonathan then look at one aspect of Dalet Flex — creating and assigning metadata, importing and storing assets, DIY troubleshooting — in each video.

It’s the same comprehensive approach to what Dalet Flex offers you in asset management, just broken down into a digestible delivery. After a couple of minutes with Sharif and Jonathan, you can either return to Dalet Flex and accomplish whatever you need to get done, or you can look at what else we have in the log of episodes and find another solution. And if you don’t find the solution you are looking for in the Quick Cuts library, you can put in a request in the Comments section for a solution you need or a feature you want to know more about. What we strive for at Dalet is to help you unlock all the potential in our platforms, and with Dalet Flex, your options may be farther reaching than you realize.

Quick Cuts #1: Dalet Solution Architect Sharif Khan introduces Dalet Flex as his chosen solution for asset management.

Welcome to Quick Cuts

Dalet’s Quick Cuts series on YouTube brings additional support to you, the users of our award-winning platform. We hope you find the answer to your questions in this series of quick deep dives into Dalet Flex; but if you don’t, that’s okay. We’re listening and look forward to your feedback following each episode. Sure, when learning something new, there’s always a learning curve you’re facing; but we at Dalet are here to help you achieve your goals and deliver great content.

One bite at a time.

The post One Bite at a Time: Dalet Presents Quick Cuts, a Short Video Series appeared first on Dalet.

Video communications are playing an increasingly important role in delivering key messages, both internally and externally, as well as building brand equity. During the ongoing global pandemic, video has become even more crucial as a replacement to in-person meetings and events to effectively reach dispersed audiences.

Many organizations are looking for a singular platform that can operate as the “brains of their operation” to manage digital media assets and create unified workflows. Dalet Flex is a unique offering that not only serves as a digital media asset management (MAM) system but also as an orchestration platform. This allows teams to manage and create actions within the MAM as well as numerous adjacent and supporting applications.

So how would this be used in the real world?

For example, a corporate marketing team might use Kaltura for centralizing videos, BrightCove to stream videos from the CEO for townhalls and send content to website, then YouTube and social media applications for marketing branded content. Dalet Flex allows them to tie into each of those applications, through a single interface and not only distribute but to also track the meta data for delivery and analytics performance.

On the other hand, a broadcast company would have ingest from several different avenues, master control, run down, scheduling and distribution. The Dalet Flex orchestration platform allows teams to connect those various applications creating a single, cohesive media supply chain. This also means that editorial and post-production teams could be tied into on-air production for real-time post-production engagement.

Either way, the Flex Media Platform helps you manage digital media assets and to take your video strategy beyond the next level by overcoming these common obstacles.

Unify Your Team

Sometimes the larger the organization, the more disconnected the teams and processes. However, a strategic media asset management tool will bring increased efficiency and brand consistency. The Flex Media Platform helps connect dispersed teams and aggregates localized content for global visibility. Plus, it integrates with your entire technology ecosystem and standardizes UI/UX, workflows and processes.

Unlock Efficiency

Duplicated efforts not only waste time but money and resources as well. Flex helps automate actions and focus manual tasks to save time and improve consistency. Bottom line, you can complete four times as many projects with the same personnel.

Hide Complexity with Elegance

Simple and intuitive UX makes being an expert easy. Flex offers an intuitive, web-based user interface that enables users to publish, unpublish and republish content to a wide range of distribution points, platforms and social media—even orchestrating workflows to deliver content to OTT platforms at given intervals or following other metadata criteria.

Overall, Dalet’s Flex users have reported:

Download the Dalet Flex Solution Brief to learn how to:

• Improve engagement with your customers and stakeholders
• Complete 4x as many projects with the same personnel
• Unify your team and unlock content efficiency

Want to discuss leveraging this solution in your operation? We are here to help.

We stand by the motto “Media asset management is 70% psychology and 30% technology,” and we understand that the key to a successful MAM is gaining mindshare and creating adoption.

This is achieved when the MAM system feels organic and does not create additional processes for the post-production teams. Additionally, it’s important that a MAM is cohesive in an environment, as opposed to one that doesn’t tie into existing applications thereby creating silo’d workflows.

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