Exclusives

NAB 2023 MESA Round-Up: RSG Media, Edgio, ZOO Digital, Language Metadata Table, Zixi

LAS VEGAS — More than 50 MESA members exhibited during NAB. Here’s what a few of them had to share at the show.

RSG Media

Global rights management firm RSG Media wasn’t just celebrating the launch of a new software platform at NAB. Ted Garcia, EVP for RSG, got to detail the successful use of the new RSG Media Rights Essentials offering by two clients.

Multimedia and rights management firm Distribution 360 (D360) and content producer and distributor Big Media were the first to deploy Rights Essentials, which is designed for small- and medium-sized companies, and is built on a cloud-native, SaaS, multi-tenancy platform, offering a wide range of tools, including asset maintenance, rights in and rights out, finance, participations, sales avails reporting, list maintenance, security, and more, all geared toward helping companies more efficiently manage extensive asset libraries, ensure future scalability, and gain critical sales avails reporting functions.

“it’s highly configurable and takes just a few weeks to implement,” Garcia said. Following the completion of contract loading and deployment, RSG Media will work with D3the companies through RSG’s Customer Success and Satisfaction Program (CSSP) to help improve the system and “provide a single source of the truth for rights.”

For Garcia, NAB was also reason for him to personally celebrate: NAB selected him to service on its Exhibitor Advisory Committee, which is comprised of experienced exhibitors dedicated to assisting attending companies optimize their NAB Show experiences. With attendance up roughly 20 percent in 2023, Garcia said he looks forward to offering input on what undoubtedly will be an even bigger show in 2024.

“There’s a significant benefit to meeting face to face and it’s wonderful to be committed to NAB for next year,” he said.

Edgio

For software solutions provider Edgio, NAB 2023 marked a first for the company’s brand, its first appearance following the successful completion of Limelight’s acquisition of Edgecast, with the combined company adopting the Edgio moniker.

And from bot management to streaming to applications, Edgio had no shortage of news to share.

There was the announcement that Edgio was providing an integrated platform for the delivery of live and on-demand games broadcasts across Canada for the Canadian Hockey League (CHL), with Edgio’s Uplynk solution for video streaming helping the CHL manage and organize events for 60 teams playing in three member leagues via a cloud-based solution. Edgio and its live events team helped the CHL prepare and deliver high-quality video to any end-user device while ensuring the organization can support SRT, Live DVR and flexible storage solutions.

There was announced availability of Edgio’s new Advanced Bot Management solution, which proactively mitigates malicious bots while still providing observability of good bots, by leveraging massive amounts of data drawn from the Edgio platform’s global deployment.

The offering runs natively on every server across Edgio’s global network to inspect all traffic for bots in real time and applies machine learning to detect bots based on both signature and behavioral fingerprinting.

Advanced Bot Management is infrastructure and network agnostic and promises customers freedom to easily integrate with their cloud, hybrid cloud or on-premises infrastructure.

And there was deployment of Edgio Applications Platform v7, with new integrated performance and security features designed to increase revenues thanks to better website performance and multi-layer security. The new offering enables organizations to deploy faster, better-protected applications with 90 percent faster page loads, and the promise of billions of malicious requests each month blocked.

“Everyone says they’re end to end, but with our robust capabilities we mean it,” said Scott Goldman, head of product management for streaming at Edgio. “We focus on being high quality, have spent a tremendous amount of time improving our video pipeline, and allow content owners to focus on what they do best, while we do the heavy lifting.

“We pride ourselves on having a set of capabilities that lowers the cost of ownership.”

ZOO Digital

It’s not like AWS and localization specialist ZOO Digital are strangers. Not at all.

“Everything that ZOO has created in the media and entertainment space has been hosted by Amazon Web Services,” said Mazin Al-Jumaili, VP of talent management and business development for EMEA at ZOO.

At NAB, AWS and ZOO just took their partnership up another level, with ZOO joining the AWS Partner Network after completing the AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR) of its AWS-hosted ZOOdubs dubbing services platform. ZOOdubs, alucnhed in 2017, was the first cloud dubbing platform that supported in-studio and remote recording via a centralized, secure production platform.

“Our cloud-based subtitling and dubbing have proven themselves in the market, and we’ve expanded quickly,” Al-Jumaili said. “You always look for refinements to what you provide, and don’t rely just on your legacy when developing something new.”

ZOO Digital CTO Chris Oakley added, when the announcement was made: “We’re thrilled to join the AWS Partner Network, and have ZOOdubs recognized by AWS for its security, reliability and operational excellence. The certification of ZOOdubs as an AWS Partner Qualified Software further evidences the platform’s ability to provide the world’s best content creators with multilingual dubbing services.”

Al-Jumaili said ZOO is closely examining the role artificial intelligence and synthesized voicing will play in the localization corner of the industry, and that one big push the rest of 2023 will see from his company will be on the talent side. “We’ve nailed the technology, and our roadmap includes building up the talent pool to support the demands of content production,” he said. “This isn’t just an English-language business.”

He also touted ZOO’s work in providing free dubbing and subtitling tools to universities, in order to train the translators and subtitlers of the future. It’s that type of forward thinking investment that has ZOO in the position it’s in today.

“Younger people like being challenged with new ways of doing things,” Al-Jumaili said. “We need people who enjoy what they do.”

Language Metadata Table

From helping with MESA’s Take the DAM(n) Tour to meeting with most every metadata specialist of note in Las Vegas, Yonah Levenson, co-chair of the Language Metadata Table (LMT), was a constant presence at NAB. And the metadata and DAM strategist — and LMT — had reason to celebrate at the show.

“The inclusion of LMT as the language code standard in not one, but two IBC Accelerator projects — two years in a row — shows the media and entertainment industry need for standardized metadata code sets,” Levenson said. “I never expected that when my team and I normalized 129 language metadata codes for HBO back in 2016 that it would lead to the creation of an LMT working group supported by the biggest studios, broadcasters, and distributors who have now approved more than 270 language codes, with more to be added.

“Localization is a big driver for media and entertainment approved language codes. Subtitles, captions, dubbing — each needs to be clearly identified with a valid language code. Metadata standards drive M&E. The customer wants to know what language options are for their content, and the LMT covers that need.”

After being a major part of the Cloud Localisation Blueprint, launched in 2022, now LMT is involved in the Authenticated Data Standard, another IBC Accelerator-based project which would allow content owners to verify and authenticate their content data and imagery, and then publish it to third-party sources.

“Studios, content creators and broadcasters lose control of their metadata once it is published. As content is distributed and it works its way through the entertainment data landscape, it becomes augmented and the original quality, messaging and intent becomes compromised,” the IBC Accelerator project description reads. “This is why the industry needs the Authenticated Data Standard.”

Zixi

Winning a TV Tech Best in Show award at NAB for its Zixi-as-a-Service (ZaaS) offering, which provides broadcast infrastructure as a service and enables media companies and service providers to leverage SaaS to ingest and distribute live video over any IP, was just the icing on the cake for Zixi in Las Vegas.

The busy Zixi booth in the West Hall was a nonstop source of meetings, demos and interested-looking bystanders, with the company showing off a broad range of new products and updates running over its Zixi Enabled Network, to company-proclaimed ” industry’s largest ecosystem,” comprising more than 1,000 media companies and 400 technology partners.

Zixi highlighted both new and existing capabilities of the Zixi software-defined video platform (SDVP), including Zixi Broadcaster v17, featuring improved processing capacity that calls for 60 percent less compute than other industry options, as much as three times savings in egress costs for the same stream on competing platforms, and support for deployments on ARM-based instances.

Overall, Broadcaster v17 can give users between a 50-70 percent reduction in operating cost vs. traditional workflows, Zixi said.

Zixi’s ongoing partnership with AWS and the integration of Zixi SDVP in AWS Wavelength was on display, showing how customers can enable 5G and widescale adoption of low latency 5G MEC architecture. As was ZEN Master, Zixi’s live video orchestration and telemetry control plane that gives users the ability to manage large-scale configuration and monitoring of the Zixi Enabled Network live streaming platform. The orchestration and monitoring of AWS Elemental MediaConnect and MediaLive channels, utilizing the ZEN Master control plane, was among the more prominent demonstrations at both the AWS and Zixi booths.