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NAB 2022: Digital Nirvana, Veritone, EZDRM, Gracenote, Adobe All Impress

LAS VEGAS — MESA members dominated the news and floor during the entire week at the 2022 NAB Show, the first live one since the start of the pandemic.

Here’s a brief look at what some of the companies brought to the event:

Digital Nirvana

When looking for services in the media and entertainment space, trust is massively important. That’s why companies keep turning to Digital Nirvana and its media monitoring and metadata generation offerings.

“There’s a competency and capability we’re known for, and we’re just getting started,” said Russell Wise, SVP of sales and marketing for Digital Nirvana. “Our MetadataIQ [which automates the generation of speech-to-text and video intelligence metadata] is being promoted to the broadest market, and the reason it’s got so much traction is because there’s demand for it.”

Just the latest in a string of new partnerships saw Digital Nirvana link up with eMAM for automated metadata generation and enhancement, with eMAM’s media asset management and workflow management platform for broadcasters and media companies seeing Digital Nirvana’s MediaServicesIQ (automated, AI-driven speech-to-text transcription, subtitle, and video intelligence metadata generation capabilities) integrated directly with the eMAM suite of solutions, via API. The integration enables eMAM users to generate metadata automatically and link it to the assets in the platform.

“Rich media is the key for all modern organisations. Media tagging is essential for turning historical content into a living archive and for rapidly using live content,” said David Miller, eMAM president.

“It’s gratifying that eMAM has chosen Digital Nirvana as a trusted partner to help expand the utility and value of its platform to the broader media asset management marketplace,” Hiren Hindocha, Digital Nirvana CEO, said in a statement. “The integration with MediaServicesIQ complements the already powerful eMAM platform and relieves a pain point for its users. In real-world terms, this partnership elevates the visibility, accessibility, speed, and productivity of the media creation process for eMAM clients.”

Veritone

Veritone came to the NAB Show to show how its proprietary enterprise AI platform, aiWARE, can help broadcasters, production companies, brands, along with content owners and creators, extend their brand strategy to the metaverse using AI. And Veritone co-founder and president Ryan Steelberg liked what he saw.

“It feels like a B2B show, with all the power players in the room,” he said. “The continued advances of the metaverse represent a massive opportunity.”

Veritone came armed at the convention with Veriverse, a portfolio of newly available, integrated AI solutions for content IP owners and others aiming to leverage the metaverse, blockchain and NFTs.

The suite of solutions includes Veritone Voice, Avatar, NFT, Verify and Veritone Metaverse Migration Services, and Steelberg sees the offerings as an opportunity for companies to take advantage of the emergence of Web3, and make the transition to metaverse platforms without “sacrificing their brand security, personality and attributes.”

“When content companies think of what’s coming, we pride ourselves on being the wilderness guide for this amorphous chaos that the metaverse will be,” Steelberg said. “We had clear ideas of use cases and the customers that would respond to this. More than anything, you need to have a clear strategy about who you’re serving and how to serve them. Otherwise, you’re way behind the curve.”

The entire point of Veriverse is to offer a path forward, in both traditional media channels and immersive environments, to securely create and activate synthetic media, as well as protect and manage identity and assets, while maintaining brand continuity across channels (and, of course, safely create and sell NFTs).

From the AI-enabled custom synthetic voice cloning solution, Veritone Voice, to the avatar creation (across industries and use cases) solution Veritone Avatar, to the Veritone Verify digital security system, giving content owners a way to manage and protect their identity and IP, Veritone believes it has the right set of solutions for what’s coming next.

EZDRM

Olga Kornienko, co-founder, COO and DRM integration specialist for EZDRM, said her company was in Las Vegas to do what all companies should have been itching to do since the start of the pandemic.

“We’re here to promote humanity and human interaction,” she said. “We’re here to remind ourselves we’re in business with people, not companies, and our relationships are based on working with people to make their lives easier.”

Kornienko echoed a theme that had emerged earlier in the week at MESA’ Anti-Piracy and Content Protection Summit, that confronting piracy today requires a holistic approach, and that it’s wise to have every angle of content protection technology covered. “It has to be DRM, watermarking and other solutions working together,” she said. “It has to be a holistic approach, or you’re leaving opportunities for things to go wrong.”

EZDRM used the NAB Show as an opportunity to tout its involvement with the High-Efficiency Streaming Protocol (HESP) Alliance, with EZDRM bringing security to high efficiency streaming services and the scalable sub-second latency live streaming the protocol is known for. “It’s an important sign of where the industry is, and it’s about making sure streaming can compete with broadcast,” Kornienko said.

HESP Alliance’s goal is to accelerate standardisation and large-scale adoption of HESP, and EZRDM’s DRM as a service (DRMaaS) solution has already been extensively tested in combination with HESP.

Gracenote

Gracenote’s Kamran Lotfi, VP of video product and Halleh Kianfar, director of product management, were on hand at NAB to offer up the latest on Gracenote’s Personalised Imagery and Gracenote Audience Predict, respectively.

Audience Predict, launched in December 2021, is a content analytics tool that forecasts potential future entertainment programming performance, using content metadata from Gracenote, and syndicated Nielsen audience measurement data with machine learning tech. The service’s interactive dashboard lets content owners and distributors use predictive insights for both linear and streaming services to make strategic decisions on their programming investments and strategies.

Initial feedback on usage of the service has seen content companies better understand when to debut content, and whether it makes more sense to debut a season all at once, or go the weekly episode drop route. The confidence score the service offers after looking at anticipated potential programme performance — on potential audience size, composition and reach — is helping companies optimise their release patterns.

On the Personalised Imagery side, a service that just celebrated its first full year, Gracenote shared that customers who’ve used it reported a 7 percent jump in titles watched, and an 11 percent jump in the number of hours watched.

The personalised imagery solution is aimed directly at services looking to improve their content discovery, by selecting the right preview image for a title based on the viewer’s interests and preferences. A demo at NAB showed how Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood can be marketed in roughly a dozen ways using images from the movie that are geared toward the viewer’s interests. The service leverages Gracenote Video Descriptors (mood, theme and scenario) in conjunction with cast information to find just the right image to get that content started.

Adobe

With one of the biggest stages on the show floor, and non-stop programming during the event, Adobe was among the most active companies to come to Vegas. And it had its biggest news already announced before NAB kicked off, with the introduction of Frame.io for Creative Cloud and updates to both its After Effects and Premiere Pro offerings.

Frame.io’s video collaboration platform is now available to Adobe’s millions of Creative Cloud customers, allowing video editors and project stakeholders, including producers, agencies and clients, to collaborate seamlessly in the cloud, marking the industry’s first integrated review and approval workflow for post-production.

As part of a Creative Cloud subscription, video creators can now share work in progress with an unlimited number of reviewers, get frame-accurate comments and annotations inside Premiere Pro and After Effects, use Frame.io file transfer technology for fast uploading and downloading, work on up to five different projects concurrently with another remote user, and more.

New After Effects upgrades include Native M1, scene edit detection, and an Extended Viewer solution that enables users to view 2D and 3D layers located outside a frame’s edge when using the Draft 3D engine. For Premiere Pro, there’s a reimagined import, header bar and export experience, along with performance and workflow improvements.