Day: Mar 14, 2019

Veritone Agreement Enables Carson Entertainment Group to License and Distribute Content

Posted on by contentntek in Multimedia, News, Products

Veritone Inc. announced an agreement with Carson Entertainment Group (CEG) to use Veritone’s digital asset portal, Digital Media Hub, to archive and license clips from the Johnny Carson Show’s 30-year history. Veritone added Digital Media Hub to its product offerings through its acquisition of Wazee Digital in August 2018.

CEG is the television licensing company established by Johnny Carson in 1981 to control the rights to “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” The entire Carson library of television episodes from 1962 through 1992 — 3,900 hours of programming — has been painstakingly cataloged, transcribed, and synced to timecodes for licensing through CEG. Digital Media Hub will provide an online, searchable platform for licensing and distributing these assets through the cloud to anyone with permission.

“We have 30 years of late-night television in our library, and after being off the air for 26 years now, there’s still a tremendous amount of demand for it, especially from the broadcast industry. As the industry evolves, we must evolve too,” said Jeff Sotzing, president, CEG. “Digital Media Hub takes large television and film libraries and makes them accessible — and will bring our company’s licensing operation into the here and now. The new platform will not only be great for our customers, but it will also make our business more visible and easier to find, which in turn will generate more sales.”

At CEG, Digital Media Hub will replace a 10-year-old online licensing platform that has served the company well but has not kept pace with customers’ evolving needs. The new Digital Media Hub will meet several key requirements, including accessibility across all platforms, a richer and more intuitive user experience, and more robust search capabilities.

With Digital Media Hub, licensed customers will be able to access the site, search and watch clips, make selections, and request pricing, all from a mobile device or the desktop. An all-new search experience will enable users to search across the entire video library for guests and phrases in a transcript, and find the clips that are most valuable to them, much faster and easier than the legacy system. A key improvement is an advanced and easy-to-use media player, which makes the process of marking specific points in a video clip smooth and precise.

“Being able to search a transcript of each show and find something very quickly is a major benefit of this search engine,” Sotzing said. “For example, if a client is doing a story about Michael Jackson, they can not only find the segments of the show that Michael Jackson performed on, but also go into the transcript and find out what people said about him during the show. For producers and researchers, that’s an invaluable tool.”

Veritone worked with CEG to configure the company’s new Digital Media Hub to their branding specs and migrate 75 terabytes of assets from the current CEG website to the new Digital Media Hub site.

“Digital Media Hub is the only turnkey product that delivers the user experience CEG requires, is fully configurable to their brand, and is cost-effective,” said Robin Melhuish, director of customer solutions for Veritone. “Through our platform, CEG and similar rights holders get a branded licensing portal that can be configured to fit their business needs. It offers an intuitive digital asset management portal in the cloud that makes it possible for rights holders to control and monetize their most valuable video assets directly.”

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LMT Picks Harmonic to Improve 4G Bandwidth Efficiency for its Live OTT Service

Posted on by contentntek in News, OTT & Streaming media

Harmonic announced that LMT has deployed Harmonic’s EyeQ™ content-aware encoding solution for its live OTT service, delivered to TVs via 4G set-top boxes. Using Harmonic’s award-winning EyeQ technology, LMT can deliver a consistent, superior video experience for live channels to TVs, with up to a 40 percent reduction in bandwidth and without having to perform a massive infrastructure upgrade. Harmonic’s reseller Hannu Pro ensured a smooth deployment at every stage of the project.

“Live events, which can incur a significant peak in viewers especially for TV applications, put considerable stress on our mobile network,” said Edgars Gončars, head of TV at LMT. “Harmonic’s EyeQ solution allows us to offer the best video experience to subscribers while reducing the amount of bandwidth we need and lowering our delivery costs, while increasing the quality of experience. With EyeQ, we have the ability to scale up during popular live events and deliver pristine video quality, which is a critical factor for our continued business growth.”

Harmonic-EyeQ

EyeQ encoding ensures that LMT’s subscribers can watch exceptional HD video quality on 4G-enabled TVs — even when networks are constrained. At the heart of Harmonic’s Electra® video processing system, the EyeQ solution provides LMT with significant opex and capex savings, reducing video traffic by up to 40 percent. With the capability to be deployed within any ecosystem, including appliances, virtual machines, cloud and SaaS, EyeQ content-aware encoding is a flexible choice for OTT service providers like LMT.

“LMT has one of the most efficient mobile networks and high-quality OTT offerings on the market, and that’s in part thanks to its forward-thinking technology strategy,” said Ian Graham, senior vice president of international sales and video services at Harmonic. “Since LMT’s OTT service is sent to TVs, the operator needed a high-quality delivery solution that could scale. Our EyeQ solution will ensure that LMT’s subscribers never miss a moment of exciting content due to bandwidth limitation or video-quality issues.”

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Yamaha UC Brings IT-Ready UC Solutions to IT Partners France

Posted on by contentntek in Multimedia, News

Strengthening enterprise UC strategy through simple deployment and management while delivering best-in-class collaboration experiences, the company will feature its portable YVC-200 speakerphone for on-the-go conferencing, along with the CS-700 Video Sound Collaboration System for huddle rooms and the Yamaha YVC-1000 conference phone.

“The meeting place is being transformed by users. They’re demanding the flexibility to meet anywhere while enjoying superior quality that’s traditionally only been offered in high-end, professionally installed boardrooms,” said Michael Fitch, vice president of global sales and marketing, at Yamaha UC. “At IT Partners France, we’ll help IT professionals understand this new landscape and the solutions that will deliver high-quality collaboration experiences whether their users are working from the home office, in a huddle room, and even large conference rooms and boardrooms, without adding complex deployments and setups to their workload.”

Making its IT Partners France debut, the Yamaha YVC-200 Portable USB + Bluetooth Speakerphone supports the best quality audio for remote meetings whenever and wherever. Compact and easy to use, the device leverages Yamaha’s superior audio technology to boost productivity when meeting remotely or in an open workspace. It is integrated with Yamaha’s leading sound-processing technologies, including acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) and human voice activity detection, which focuses on speech rather than background noise. The unit features an intelligent microphone and delivers full-duplex conversation without sound dropouts, even when multiple people are speaking at once. In addition, a powerful built-in speaker produces audio that sounds so natural, it feels as if every remote participant on the call is in the room.

yamaha_cs700

Designed for huddle rooms, the Yamaha CS-700 Video Sound Collaboration System delivers the highest quality audio, video, and collaboration capabilities in a simple and smart wall-mounted unit that is easy to install and deploy. It features an adaptive beamforming microphone array for perfectly captured conversation; four Yamaha speaker elements to provide the highest degree of audio intelligibility; and a wide-angle HD camera for the far-end participants to see everyone in clear detail. Users can quickly connect to an organization’s chosen UC platform using a single USB, eliminating the frustrations and inefficiencies of operating disparate video, audio, and collaboration components. In addition, the CS-700’s integrated network management system allows IT staff to deploy and remotely manage each unit from one location, increasing service response and efficiency.

Suited for large conference spaces and multipurpose meeting rooms, the Yamaha YVC-1000 conference phone enhances audio to achieve the best experience. It features a separate microphone and full-range speaker unit that can be placed close to the video display, so audio and video from the remote location blend naturally for easier, faster comprehension. It can support two external speakers and up to five daisy-chained microphones and is capable of being paired with other microphone systems via an input jack for even more scalability in larger meeting rooms. Its plug-and-play simplicity and auto-tune setup also allow participants to get started quickly with audio optimized to the room conditions. Yamaha’s AEC and other unique sound-processing technologies facilitate stress-free conversation.

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