LAS VEGAS — From virtual production and cloud storage to cybersecurity and anti-piracy, MESA members brought it all to the show floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center to open the 2023 NAB Show. Here’s a look at what some members of the MESA community had to share.
Sony Ci
Sony Electronics came into NAB with several announcements, including a new partnership with Deloitte, a strategic collaboration that will see Deloitte serve as a strategic service provider for Sony’s Ci Media Cloud platform.
The organizations also announced they’re banding together to deliver a comprehensive suite of media technology consulting and system implementation services for enterprise customers of Ci. Ci is currently used by several of the world’s largest media enterprises, along with thousands of creative teams and media professionals across industries. Ci is a centralized repository designed for users to store and manage digital content from every stage of the media life cycle.
“Deloitte is recognized worldwide as a dynamic leader in the professional space and their comprehensive efforts in cloud — from innovation and strategy to consulting and implementation — are outstanding,” said David Rosen, VP of cloud applications and services for Sony Electronics. “As they continue to champion cloud migration and adoption, Deloitte’s experience in building focused solutions and their skillful use of Ci’s APIs opens up new capabilities and provides additional power and customization that positively impact our community of professional users, allowing for ease of integration and helping to fulfill their most common requests.”
Also at NAB, Sony showcased its solutions for virtual productions, imaging, broadcasts, live events, and cinematic content solutions and workflows. Among the highlights is Sony’s expansive Networked Live ecosystem of solutions, products, and services, combining hybrid on-premises, and cloud processing and operations with network connectivity to transform live production. Key capabilities include network and resource orchestration, hybrid processing and operations and media processing and transport.
“NAB Show continues to be a testament to the power and ingenuity of our industry and as the event celebrates 100 years, it’s truly amazing to reflect on how much has changed during that time,” said Theresa Alesso, president of imaging products and solutions for the Americas at Sony Electronics. “The event is a springboard for revolutionary innovations and serves as a catalyst for connections — in every sense of the word. Building on that notion, our theme at this year’s show is Creativity Connected. You’ll experience the multi-faceted connections Sony is unlocking through focusing on trends and forging through our people and technologies.”
Meta Martis
Metadata and media monetization specialists Meta Martis used NAB week to announce a new deal with the Public Media Group of Southern California (PMGSC) that will see Meta Martis migrate thousands of hours of physical media to digital, then processed with GrayMeta’s on-premises machine learning data platform running on local hardware.
GrayMeta, creator of Curio Anywhere and the SAMMA solution, and Meta Martis are working together to bring all legacy professional content to digital. PMGSC tells stories that matter through original programs that reflect the diversity of their region, and through the full schedule of trusted PBS programs on their channels KCET, PBS SoCal, and Link TV.
This is the first deal signed with GrayMeta’s new product, Curio Anywhere, which brings AI-driven metadata enhancements for better search and content analysis. This is also the first deal for Meta Martis’ Fly Pack which brings GrayMeta’s SAMMA solution for the migration of physical media directly into your facility.
Meta Martis’ Fly Pack is a self-contained hardware solution that will go right into PMGSC’s archive media vault on-premises, plug into their decks and storage, and use the Emmy Award-winning SAMMA software from GrayMeta to migrate their physical media to digital files.
“This is game-changing for us,” said Patrick Yew, PMGSC’s senior director of post production. “Not only will we be able to finally access all the content previously locked away on physical media, but we can finally make sense of all our media stored in various storage locations across our facility. No more wasted time searching for that one shot or perfect moment from an interview we filmed years ago. And the fact that this will all happen on premises made it a no-brainer for us.”
Tim Stockhaus, president of Meta Martis added: “The combination of an on-prem, OpEx Fly Pack to digitize your physical media and then adding the rich metadata created by Curio gives our customers the best opportunity to monetize their valuable media and find those golden nuggets that otherwise couldn’t be found. It was ‘content is king’, now it’s ‘metadata is more valuable than the content.’”
Luminate
Entertainment data and insights firm Luminate made waves at NAB with the release of its flagship “Entertainment Diversity Progress” report, which was last released in December 2021, showing minimal growth in representation both on and behind the screen across multiple underrepresented groups between 2021 and 2022.
“One of our primary goals in creating the Entertainment Diversity Progress Report is to provide respectful, objective, and accurate information to help drive the much-needed change around diversity and inclusion in Hollywood,” said Mark Hoebich, EVP and head of Luminate Film & TV. “Our partners depend on our broader DEI dataset to measure internal progress, benchmark, and identify talent that can ensure authentic and respectful storytelling. When looking at the data in this most recent report, we encourage all our partners in Hollywood to celebrate the gains that have been made, like growth in female director roles and female series creators, while also urging them to look at places where growth was not seen, like films and series with Black and Latin/Hispanic stories at the forefront.”
The release of the report follows the launch of the Luminate Film & TV brand, announced in October. In addition to providing Hollywood with DEI and sustainability data, Luminate Film & TV maintains a dataset of more than 1.5 million creative personnel, including actors, influencers, producers, executives, directors, and below-the-line talent, along with production status updates throughout the industry.
The latest data shows that one of the biggest trends pertaining to diversity and representation on screen is the creation of stories that reflect intersectionality.
The idea that everyone is defined by multiple identities across race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, etc., is a reality that seems to be increasingly taken into consideration by Hollywood’s content creators, allowing films and series to better explore and reflect the nuances of the human experience.
The other clear trend that has emerged is the proliferation of non-English language content availability in the United States. The growth of available “primetime” content in languages like Spanish, Korean, Arabic, and Japanese has meant a marked increase in the representation of talent from those backgrounds and has provided multilingual audiences with relevant content.
Read the full story in today’s edition of MESA’s M+E Daily.
AppTek
The small NAB Show floor booth of AI, ML and localization tech specialist AppTek was tucked away from the massive central displays of the West Hall … and yet it was easily one of the busiest booths in Las Vegas, with a steady stream of content owners eagerly conversing with Kyle Maddock, SVP of sales and marketing. Everyone wanted a demo and hear the latest about AppTek’s automatic dubbing technology.
The world of AI-assisted content localization has never been busier.
“It’s an embarrassment of riches,” Maddock said of the traffic at the Las Vegas Convention Center. “We’re really excited.”
With technology that can use just a small sample of a voice to dub an entire piece of content, indeed … it’s exciting.
AppTek showcased production-ready innovations in automatic speech recognition and speaker-adaptive dubbing at NAB, including automatic speech recognition, metadata-informed, isometric neural machine translation, and speaker-adaptive speech synthesis, along with solutions for language identification, voice conversion, subtitling, automatic captioning and other high-performance AI tools.
AppTek’s fully automatic, speaker-adaptive dubbing solution is designed to accelerate the dubbing process and help content creators reach more audiences around the world without the high costs and lengthy timelines associated with professional dubbing services. The service touts itself as the first of its kind to transcribe and translate audio from a source language and present it back in similar-sounding voices in most any target language, while maintaining context- or domain-specific information needed to produce accurate dubbed output.
On the media localization subtitling and captioning front, AppTek’s ASR and meta-aware machine translation technologies are geared toward reduceing manual labor and accelerating production timelines, by making use of content metadata, such as genre, style, speaker gender, and more, to produce more accurate machine translations. The company’s “Intelligent Line Segmentation” technology is a separate neural network trained on the segmentation decisions of professional captioners and subtitlers. Used in combination with ASR and MT output, it delivers more accurately segmented automated subtitles.