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.

• Work with your content faster: access, edit, and deliver content while it’s being ingested.
• Increased format support: seamlessly manage the latest production and post-production formats.
• Easier review & approval: eliminate bottlenecks and review on-the-go.
• Gain key business insights: keep tabs on system usage and related costs.

Let’s take a closer look at how the latest LTS release of Dalet Flex provides these benefits.

Live Scenarios

Efficiently managing, editing, and producing content while it is being ingested has become increasingly critical to meet current audience demands. Dalet Flex addresses this need even before content recording starts. When recordings are scheduled in Dalet Brio or Dalet InStream, placeholder assets are automatically created. These placeholders allow you to organize your media and pre-populate it with metadata in advance. Once recording begins, these placeholders become live-growing assets. Within Dalet Flex, you can preview, enrich with additional metadata, and even clip segments in real time. Live scenarios extend beyond Dalet’s ingest solutions, with added support for importing growing OP1a MXF and H.264 DASH files from Telestream Vantage and previewing them in FlexMAM.

If you need added editing functionality besides basic clipping, Dalet Cut now offers full editing workflows for growing assets. All collections created within Dalet Flex, including your ingesting assets, are accessible in Dalet Cut. This allows editors to seamlessly access both their editing tools and all of their content via a web browser from anywhere. Growing files can be directly added to the timeline and extended out as they grow. Dalet Cut timelines, complete with all ingested or still-growing content, are part of your media library and can be distributed using the same delivery workflows you already have. 

For more advanced editing, you can use FlexXtend within Adobe Premiere Pro: whether you’re starting your edit in Premiere or picking up a Dalet Cut edit, high-resolution growing assets are now available for editing through the Adobe integration panel.

More Formats

With a plethora of formats already in use, and new ones emerging regularly, the ability to manage and edit content in any format is crucial for business expansion. The latest Dalet Flex updates provide additional support for both production and post-production formats. A production-connected MAM must accommodate this variety, and Dalet Flex now extends its support to a wide array of camera formats, including updated R3D, ProRes Raw, and more.

For post-production workflows, the latest Dalet Flex LTS version introduces MXF Op-Atom support, allowing seamless import, transcode, metadata extraction, and export to facilitate full integration from Flex Core, FlexMAM, and FlexCUT into Avid Media Composer. Alongside video codecs, we have integrated additional formats such as .gfx so you can centralize and efficiently manage all your media through Flex.

Efficiency and Insights

While Dalet Flex significantly automates media workflows, certain critical aspects, such as review and approval, still require human involvement. The latest LTS version brings further improvements to the recently revamped Review & Approval application, offering users increased clarity in ongoing reviews through improved assignment notation and advanced search and filtering options. This enables reviewers to prioritize and identify what requires their attention next. Additionally, you can now access review sessions via FlexMobile, accelerating delivery by enabling users to work from anywhere.

And whether you need to identify open review sessions, or monitor potential bottlenecks across production workflows, understanding system usage and anticipating issues are crucial to gaining operational efficiency. Recent updates to Dalet Flex provide expanded data and dashboards for increased in-depth system monitoring, including user, workflow, and resource utilization insights. For AWS-hosted instances, additional data collection facilitates advanced cost monitoring, enabling cloud cost analysis at the project level. This allows for granular reporting on a per-production basis for storage, data transfer, and transcoding expenses.

There’s more…

At Dalet, we remain committed to delivering updates that help our clients enhance their operations and expand their business opportunities. With its cloud-native architecture built on microservices, the Dalet Flex platform is consistently updated to ensure compatibility, security, and the introduction of new features. Beyond the updates mentioned above, additional features and fixes have been implemented. For detailed release notes and documentation, please visit the Dalet Support Hub.

The post Accelerate Production and Expand Business Opportunities with the Latest Dalet Flex Release  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.

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.

These challenges underscore the critical importance of adopting robust media supply chain management strategies and tools. Let’s explore the key challenges faced by organizations in managing a media supply chain and the transformative impact of adopting robust solutions.

Can a media supply chain platform improve ROI? Can it truly boost revenue generation? Go from chaos to intelligence with your media supply chain. Sign up for a free consultation with a Dalet expert.

Challenges of Managing the Media Supply Chain

1. Inefficient Workflows 

Manual and disjointed workflows can lead to inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and missed opportunities. Content creation, editing, and distribution can be time-consuming and error-prone without automation and streamlined processes. 

2. Disorganized Content 

With the sheer volume of multimedia assets being generated, disorganization can quickly become a stumbling block. Media files scattered across different storage systems, folders, and devices can hinder efficient retrieval, leading to delays, duplicated efforts, and frustration among content creators and distribution teams. 

3. Version Control 

Maintaining accurate and up-to-date versions of media assets is a challenge. Teams working on content often create multiple iterations, and without a robust version control system, it becomes difficult to track changes, leading to confusion and potentially using outdated assets. 

4. Lack of Visibility 

Without real-time visibility into the media supply chain, decision-making becomes less informed. Inefficient tracking of content usage, performance, and engagement can hinder the ability to make data-driven adjustments to content strategies. 

5. Multi-Platform Distribution 

The explosion of digital platforms and devices requires content to be tailored and optimized for various channels. Adapting content to different formats, resolutions, and requirements for broadcasting, streaming, social media, and websites can be resource-intensive. 

6. Content Security and Rights Management 

Media content often comes with complex usage rights and licensing agreements. Ensuring that content is used in compliance with legal and contractual obligations while safeguarding against unauthorized distribution is a significant challenge. 

7. Rapid Content Turnaround 

In industries like news, where content needs to be delivered in real time, managing the rapid production and distribution of media assets can be challenging. Quick turnarounds require efficient workflows and collaboration tools. 

8. Audience Engagement 

Engaging audiences across different platforms and demographics requires creating diverse and compelling content. Ensuring that content resonates with various segments of the audience and fosters engagement is a continuous challenge. 

9. Monetization and Revenue Generation 

Identifying and capitalizing on revenue opportunities, such as pay-per-view events, subscription models, and advertising, requires effective monetization strategies and accurate tracking of content performance. 

10. Technology Integration 

Integrating various platforms, tools, and systems, such as content management systems, editing software, analytics platforms, and distribution networks, can be complex. Ensuring seamless communication and data exchange between these systems is essential. 

11. Evolving Technologies 

The media landscape is constantly evolving, with new technologies and platforms emerging. Staying up to date with the latest trends and adapting to technological changes while maintaining operational efficiency is a continuous challenge. 

12. Quality Control 

Ensuring consistent quality across different content formats and platforms is essential for maintaining the reputation of the organization. However, without proper quality control processes, variations in content quality can arise. 

Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive approach to media supply chain management, including the adoption of an advanced, modern media supply chain platform. By leveraging technology to streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, and gain insights into content performance, organizations can overcome these challenges and thrive in the dynamic and ever-evolving world of media content creation and distribution. 

The ROI of a Media Supply Chain Platform

Effectively managing your media supply chain is not only crucial for significant returns on investment (ROI) but also for achieving time savings. Media supply chain management improves ROI by optimizing workflows, reducing operational costs, enhancing content quality, and enabling data-driven decision-making. By delivering engaging content efficiently, organizations can attract larger audiences, leading to increased monetization opportunities. 

Implementing a media supply chain platform can result in cost savings by reducing manual labor, minimizing errors, optimizing resource allocation, and streamlining content distribution. These efficiencies lead to decreased production and operational costs. 

Moreover, the timeline for ROI depends on factors such as the size of your organization, the volume of content produced, and your monetization strategies. Many organizations start seeing improvements in efficiency and engagement shortly after implementing the platform. 

A media supply chain platform saves time for content creators by automating manual tasks, such as asset tagging, version control, and content distribution. This automation frees up content creators’ time, allowing them to focus on more creative and value-added tasks. 

Furthermore, it can reduce content production timelines by streamlining workflows, automating repetitive tasks, and enabling collaborative editing. This accelerates the content creation process from ideation to distribution. It centralizes content management and distribution, making it easier to publish to multiple platforms simultaneously. This efficiency ensures that content reaches the intended audience promptly, enhancing engagement. It also facilitates faster content localization by providing tools to manage and track translations, adaptations, and regional variations. This ensures that localized content can be produced and distributed efficiently. 

In conclusion, organizations seeking time-saving insights can rely on a media supply chain platform, featuring robust analytics to track content performance, audience engagement, and workflow efficiency. These tools not only identify bottlenecks but also present opportunities for impactful optimizations. Streamlined collaboration features in a media supply chain platform enable team members to work together seamlessly, reducing communication delays and eliminating the need for manual coordination. This leads to faster content creation and distribution.  

Selecting the best media supply chain management platform is a critical decision that can redefine your organization’s content creation and distribution strategies. Explore our comprehensive guide on how to choose the best Media Supply Chain platform to make the right choice.

Empowering Success Through Media Supply Chain Mastery

When every pixel weaves narratives and every frame tells a story, the role of the media supply chain emerges as the unsung hero behind the scenes. As our thirst for multimedia experiences surges, the intricate dance of content creation, distribution, and engagement unfolds seamlessly, thanks to the orchestration of media supply chain platforms like Dalet Flex. 

Recognizing the juncture at which your organization stands, poised to embrace these tools is both a strategic imperative and a transformative opportunity. When content overload threatens to drown your resources, when workflows meander through bottlenecks, or when collaboration is hindered by geographical divides, the stage is set for media supply chain management tools to take the spotlight. 

Imagine a future where asset retrieval becomes an instantaneous affair, where tailored content gracefully conquers platforms, where real-time insights guide your narrative, and where compliance complexities are tamed. This isn’t an illusion, but a reality sculpted by the dexterity of media supply chain management and automation tools. As audience expectations soar, revenue horizons expand, and the canvas of content grows, these tools remain your steadfast allies, scaling alongside your ambitions and ensuring that operational efficiency remains unwavering. 

Amid the plethora of options, Dalet Flex stands as the vanguard of media supply chain management solutions. Its magic isn’t merely in transforming challenges into triumphs; it’s in reshaping the way you approach content orchestration. With Dalet Flex, you’re not just managing a supply chain; you’re navigating a symphony of streamlined efficiency, enriched collaboration, enhanced content quality, and empowered engagement. 

Embrace a modern, efficient media supply chain and embark on a transformative journey. Request a demo of Dalet Flex today and witness the convergence of content mastery and audience resonance. 

The post How to Increase Your ROI with a Media Supply Chain Platform appeared first on Dalet.

Here’s a comprehensive overview of media archive management, highlighting its benefits, discussing the challenges involved, and offering actionable tips on how to leverage your media archive effectively.

What is Media Archive Management?

Media archive management involves the systematic organization, storage, and retrieval of various types of media assets, including videos, audio files, and related content. It encompasses tasks such as metadata tagging, file storage, content preservation, and efficient retrieval of assets when needed.  

The goal of media archive management is to ensure that media assets are securely stored, easily accessible, and can be efficiently repurposed for future use and monetization. 

Who Needs Media Archive Management? 

Media archive management is indispensable across a wide range of industries and organizations. Here are some specific sectors that greatly benefit from implementing robust media archive management systems: 

• Media and Entertainment: 

From production houses and film studios to television networks and streaming platforms, the media and entertainment industry handles massive volumes of media content. Effective media archive management allows these organizations to access and repurpose content easily for new projects, re-releases, or licensing opportunities reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of their content. It also facilitates efficient collaboration among teams working on different projects. 

• Broadcasting and Journalism: 

News agencies, broadcasters, and journalism organizations heavily rely on media archive management to maintain a vast library of news footage, interviews, reports, and documentaries to access today and in the future. Media archive systems help journalists and editors quickly retrieve relevant footage for news stories, analyze historical trends, and create compelling visual content. Additionally, media archive management ensures compliance with copyright regulations and licensing requirements. 

• Advertising and Marketing: 

Advertising agencies, marketing departments, and branding companies work with a wide range of media assets, including images, videos, audio files, logos, and campaign materials. Effective media archive management streamlines the process of organizing and accessing these assets, ensuring consistent branding, quick content retrieval for campaigns, and efficient collaboration between creative teams and clients. 

• Education and E-Learning: 

Educational institutions, e-learning platforms, and training organizations deal with a vast array of multimedia content, such as lecture videos, training modules, interactive presentations, and educational resources. Properly managed media archives facilitate easy access to relevant content for educators, students, and learners, enabling personalized and engaging learning experiences. 

• Government and Public Sector: 

Government agencies, public institutions, and archives often deal with large amounts of media content, including historical documents, photographs, audio recordings, and videos. Media archive management ensures the preservation, organization, and accessibility of important cultural and historical assets. This allows researchers, historians, and the general public to access valuable information, fostering transparency and supporting educational initiatives. 

• Corporate Enterprises: 

Large corporations across various industries can benefit from media archive management to efficiently store and manage marketing assets, brand assets, training videos, corporate communications, and product documentation. Having a centralized media archive system enables easy sharing, version control, and collaboration among different teams and departments. 

The Challenges of Managing Media Archives 

Managing media archives comes with its own set of challenges. Some common issues include: 

a) Volume and Variety: The sheer volume and diversity of media assets can pose challenges in managing media archives. With the exponential growth of digital media content, organizations accumulate vast amounts of files in different formats, resolutions, and metadata structures. This variety makes it challenging to ensure consistent organization, standardization, and efficient retrieval of assets. 

b) Storage and Infrastructure: Media files, especially high-resolution videos, and images, can consume significant storage space. Managing storage infrastructure and implementing scalable solutions to accommodate growing archives can be complex and costly. Additionally, organizations need to consider backup and disaster recovery strategies to protect valuable media assets from loss or damage. 

c) Metadata and Tagging: Metadata plays a crucial role in media archive management as it provides essential information about each asset, including title, description, keywords, date, creator, usage rights, and more based on the specific needs of your business. Consistently and accurately tagging media files with metadata is time-consuming but crucial for effective searchability and retrieval. Ensuring that metadata is entered consistently and following established standards is vital for efficient management.

d) Access and Permissions: Media archives often involve multiple stakeholders, including content creators, editors, marketers, clients, and external partners. Managing access permissions and controlling user roles and permissions to ensure appropriate access to specific assets can be challenging. Organizations need to implement robust access control mechanisms to protect sensitive content while enabling collaboration and efficient sharing. 

e) Preservation and Longevity: Media archives often include valuable historical or cultural assets that require long-term preservation. Technological obsolescence, file format changes, and degradation over time can pose risks to the integrity and accessibility of media files. Implementing preservation strategies, such as format migration, regular backups, and metadata preservation, is crucial to ensure the longevity and usability of media archives. 

What are the best practices? 

Once the challenges have been identified and strategies implemented, the next operational objective is to leverage media archive management effectively to maximize content value and reduce TCO. It’s not a linear path, but following these best practices will ensure robust media archive hygiene: 

Define a Clear data model: Establish a well-defined organizational structure for your media archive, including taxonomies, metadata standards, and naming conventions. This structure should align with your organization’s workflows and enable efficient search and retrieval of assets. 

Implement Robust Metadata Tagging: Consistently tag media assets with relevant and accurate metadata using standardized schemas and keywords to facilitate searchability. Harness automation to extract and concatenate all possible metadata sources into a centralized repository. Consider further enriching with automated metadata extraction tools and AI-based tagging solutions to streamline the process. 

Utilize Advanced Search and Retrieval Capabilities: Implement a robust search and retrieval system that enables users to find assets based on various criteria, such as keywords, file types, dates, and usage rights. Incorporate advanced search features like facial recognition or object detection for efficient asset discovery. 

Embrace Cloud Storage and Backup Solutions: Leverage cloud storage platforms for scalable and cost-effective storage of media assets. Implement regular backups to safeguard against data loss or corruption. Consider redundant storage solutions and disaster recovery mechanisms to ensure business continuity. 

Implement Automation and AI Solutions: Consider leveraging automation and AI technologies to streamline media archive management. Automation tools can help with tasks such as metadata extraction, file organization, and bulk tagging, reducing manual effort and increasing efficiency. AI-powered solutions can assist in content analysis, automatic categorization, and intelligent search capabilities. 

Enable Collaboration and Sharing: Implement collaboration features that enable seamless sharing and collaboration on media assets. This can include functionalities such as commenting, annotations, version tracking, and approval workflows. Collaborative platforms allow teams to work together efficiently, share feedback, and maintain a centralized repository of asset-related discussions. 

Monitor and Analyze Usage Metrics: Track and analyze usage metrics to gain insights into how media assets are being utilized within your organization. Understanding which assets are frequently accessed, modified, or shared can help in optimizing your archive management strategies. It can also provide valuable insights into user preferences and content trends. 

Establish Access Controls and Permissions: Implement a granular access control system to control user permissions and restrict access to sensitive content. Define user roles and permissions based on job functions and responsibilities. Regularly review and update access permissions to reflect organizational changes. 

Implement Version Control and Collaboration Tools: Use version control mechanisms to track revisions and changes to media assets. Implement collaboration tools that facilitate efficient teamwork, feedback, and approval processes. Consider integrating project management systems for streamlined workflows. 

Plan for Preservation and Future-Proofing: Develop a preservation strategy to ensure the long-term integrity and accessibility of media archives. Regularly assess and update file formats to prevent technological obsolescence. Consider migrating files to new formats to ensure future usability and compatibility with hardware. It’s also worth assessing the storage of files; Will you keep them on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid environment. 

By following these best practices and leveraging suitable tools and technologies, organizations can effectively manage their media archives, streamline workflows, and maximize the value of their media assets. 

How to know if Your Media Archives Solution is Obsolete?  

To evaluate your current media archive solution, key indicators will help you determine if it’s time to consider upgrading to a more efficient, feature-rich, and future-proof solution that addresses your organization’s needs and ensures smooth operations in today’s digital content landscape: 

a) Inadequate Search Results: If it feels like finding specific media assets is taking forever or worse yet not yielding the desired results, it might be a sign that your archive solution isn’t optimized with today’s modern search and filtering tools. 

b) Slow Retrieval time: Finding your assets is one thing, quickly and easily accessing them is another. Delays in accessing media files from various storage tiers can hinder productivity and disrupt critical workflows, leading to frustration and decreased efficiency. 

c) Inefficient Metadata Management: If your current system lacks user-friendly metadata management capabilities or requires manual input for every asset, it’s probably time to consider an upgrade. Efficient metadata management is essential for organizing and categorizing media assets effectively. If your solution falls short in this aspect, it can result in inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and difficulties in locating and accessing the right assets when needed. 

d) Limited Collaboration and Sharing: Collaboration and seamless sharing of media assets are vital for effective teamwork and streamlined workflows. If your current solution doesn’t support seamless collaboration and easy sharing of media assets across teams or departments, it could hinder productivity and create inefficient workflows. In today’s interconnected work environments, it’s essential to have a media archive solution that enables collaborative editing, real-time feedback, and easy sharing of assets, allowing teams to work together seamlessly. 

e) Outdated Technology and Compatibility Issues: As technology advances rapidly, media file formats and storage requirements evolve. If your current media archive solution struggles with compatibility issues or fails to support emerging media formats, it may be a clear sign of obsolescence. Outdated technology can limit your ability to work with modern media files, leading to compatibility errors, loss of data integrity, and difficulties in integrating with other software applications within your organization’s ecosystem. 

f) Lack of Scalability: The volume of media assets continues to grow exponentially, and your media archive solution should be able to scale accordingly. If your current solution lacks scalability, you may encounter storage limitations and face challenges in managing the increasing number of assets. A scalable media archive solution, with object-based storage ensures that your organization can handle the growing volume of media assets efficiently, without compromising performance or incurring excessive costs. 

g) Inadequate Security and Data Protection: Media assets often contain valuable and sensitive content, making security and data protection crucial considerations. If your current solution lacks robust security measures, such as access controls, encryption, multi-factor authentication, and backups, it exposes your organization to potential data breaches, unauthorized access, and loss of critical media assets. Inadequate security not only puts your organization at risk but also undermines trust and credibility with your stakeholders. 

Key Features of a Media Archive Solution 

To make the most of your media archive management and ensure its effectiveness, here are 10 core features and functionalities required to optimize your workflows, content value, and, importantly, futureproof archive for years to come: 

Centralized and Scalable System: Implement a centralized media asset management system that can handle your growing volume of assets and can easily scale to accommodate future needs. 

Metadata Standardization: Establish a standardized metadata schema and apply consistent metadata tagging across all assets. This will make searching for and discovering assets a breeze. 

Automation and AI Integration: Embrace automation and artificial intelligence technologies to streamline your workflows including metadata tagging, content recognition, and asset categorization. This will save you valuable time and effort. 

Backup and Disaster Recovery: Manage your various storage tiering options of individual media assets, ideally through a metadata-driven, rule-based, automated process, and have a solid disaster recovery plan in place to protect them from potential loss or damage. 

Access Control and Permissions: Implement proper access control and permissions management to ensure that only authorized personnel can access and modify media assets. This will help protect sensitive content and maintain data integrity. 

Version Control: Keep track of changes, revisions, and updates to media assets by maintaining version control. This ensures that you’re always working with the most up-to-date and accurate versions of your assets. 

Regular Maintenance and Clean-up Workflows: Automate regular maintenance tasks, such as checking file integrity, removing duplicates or outdated assets, and optimizing storage resources. This will keep your media archive organized, improve search efficiency, and reduce storage costs. 

User Training and Documentation: Provide comprehensive training to your team on media archive management processes, best practices, and how to properly use the media asset management system. Clear documentation and guidelines ensure that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities in managing the archive. 

Integration with Existing Workflows: Integrate the media archive management system with your existing workflows and software applications. This will improve efficiency by allowing for seamless collaboration and preventing duplication of effort. 

SaaS-based Options: We’ve mentioned how quickly the digital landscape has changed a few times already; one thing’s for certain and that’s it’ll change again soon. SaaS offerings allow you to streamline your operational costs and scale up and down as needed. Always stay up-to-date and ahead of the curve (and your competition) with the latest features, workflows, integrations, and releases while optimizing your TCO. 

By following these ten steps, you’ll optimize your media archive management processes, enhance productivity, and maximize the value of your media assets. It ensures that your media archive is well-organized, easily accessible, and contributes to efficient workflows across your organization. 

How to Choose the Best Media Archive Solution 

We could easily say ‘Just get in touch!’ here, or even point you in the direction of our comprehensive Customers page to look at all the success stories, but being objective, when choosing a media archive solution, keep the following factors in mind: 

a) Functionality: Assess the features and capabilities of the solution, such as metadata management, search functionality, integration with existing systems, and support for different media file formats. 

b) Scalability: Ensure that the solution can accommodate your organization’s current storage capacity and user access needs, as well as future growth. 

c) User Experience: Evaluate the interface and usability of the solution to ensure that it’s intuitive and user-friendly for your team members. 

d) Support and Training: Consider the level of customer support and training provided by the solution provider to ensure smooth implementation and ongoing assistance. 

e) Expertise and Stature: Assess the provider’s experience and track record in delivering media archive management solutions. Ensure the provider has a clear roadmap, strong team, and financial solidity. 

Dalet is a leading provider of media asset management software that offers numerous benefits for effective media archive management. Dalet Flex is a comprehensive solution that addresses the challenges of managing media archives, including powerful metadata management, scalable storage options, AI-powered automation, and seamless integration with various media production workflows. With Dalet Flex, organizations can streamline their media archive management processes, enhance collaboration, and improve overall operational efficiency. 

Top 5 Media Archive Management FAQs: 

1. Q: Can media archive management be beneficial for small organizations? 

  A: Absolutely! Media archive management systems offer numerous benefits for small organizations as well. While the volume of media assets may be smaller compared to larger enterprises, the need for efficient organization, accessibility, and utilization of media assets remains the same. Implementing a media archive management system allows small organizations to effectively categorize and store their media assets, making it easier to locate and retrieve specific files when needed. It also helps streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, and ensure that valuable media assets are properly preserved and utilized, regardless of the organization’s size. 

2. Q: Is Dalet suitable for cloud-based and hybrid environment media archive management? 

  A: Yes, Dalet offers cloud-based and hybrid environment solutions specifically designed for efficient media archive management. Embracing cloud-based media archive management provides organizations with numerous advantages. Dalet’s solution offers flexibility, allowing users to access and manage their media archives remotely from anywhere with an internet connection. The cloud environment also ensures scalability, enabling organizations to easily accommodate growing storage needs without investing in additional hardware infrastructure. Furthermore, Dalet’s cloud-based solution provides enhanced security measures, data redundancy, and backup options, ensuring the safety and preservation of valuable media assets. Cloud-based media archive management with Dalet enables organizations to leverage the benefits of modern technology while optimizing their media workflows and ensuring seamless collaboration across teams, regardless of geographical location. 

3. Q: How can media archive management improve content reuse and repurposing? 

  A: Effective media archive management plays a crucial role in facilitating content reuse and repurposing. By implementing a robust media archive management system, organizations can easily store, categorize, and retrieve their media assets. This streamlined accessibility enables content creators and editors to quickly locate relevant files, repurpose existing content for new projects, or create compilations with ease. Media archive management systems often include features like metadata tagging, allowing users to assign descriptive information to assets, making it easier to search and identify suitable content for reuse. By maximizing the value of existing media assets through efficient management, organizations can save time and resources while ensuring consistent branding and messaging across different platforms and projects. 

4. Q: What are the potential cost savings associated with media archive management? 

  A: Media archive management can lead to significant cost savings for organizations in several ways. With a well-structured media archive, organizations can avoid duplication of efforts and unnecessary expenditures on recreating or repurchasing media assets that already exist within their archives. Efficient organization and categorization of assets help teams locate and utilize the right media files without wasting time and resources on searching or recreating content. Additionally, implementing a media archive management system can reduce total operating expenses by optimizing required resources and storage costs. Whether it’s through a full SaaS offering or harnessing the cloud there are many ways to optimize your storage tiering and expenses. By centralizing media assets and implementing best practices for media archive management, organizations can effectively reduce costs associated with content creation, storage, and retrieval all while increasing revenue potential 

5. Q: How does media archive management support compliance and legal requirements? 

  A: Compliance with legal and regulatory requirements is of utmost importance, especially when dealing with media assets. Media archive management systems provide essential features to support compliance efforts. For instance, robust metadata management allows organizations to track and manage usage rights, copyright information, and licensing agreements associated with media assets. This ensures that content usage remains within legal boundaries and prevents unauthorized or improper use of copyrighted materials. Additionally, media archive management systems often offer access control and permissions management, enabling organizations to define user roles, access levels, and restrictions to comply with privacy regulations and data protection laws. These features not only help organizations meet legal requirements but also provide an audit trail and accountability in case of any compliance-related issues or inquiries. 

These questions from our customers shed light on the benefits of media archive management in terms of content reuse, cost savings, and compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. By implementing effective media archive management practices, organizations can harness the full potential of their media assets while ensuring legal compliance and cost-effective operations. Dalet’s cloud-based solution for media archive management can provide valuable insights and facilitate improved productivity, streamlined workflows, and enhanced accessibility to media assets. 

So, why is media archive management business-critical today?  

Efficient media archive management is crucial in today’s content-driven world, where organizations deal with an overwhelming volume of digital assets. By implementing the right media archive management solution, such as Dalet Flex, organizations can overcome the challenges associated with organizing, storing, and retrieving media assets. Following best practices and leveraging advanced technologies, it’s now possible to streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, and maximize the value of media archives.  

Embrace the power of media archive management to unlock the true potential of your organization’s media assets. 

To learn more about how you can revolutionize your media archive management, check out our brand-new eBook Unlocking the Value of Your Archives, or contact our team to schedule a personalized demonstration. We’re here to help you optimize your media archive management and unleash the full potential of your media assets. 

The post What is Media Archive Management and How to Make the Most out of it? appeared first on Dalet.

For many organizations, this has accelerated the transition to cloud-based media workflows solutions, which provide ways to address remote access challenges. But they do not come without technical trade-offs and associated business transformations can prove difficult.

The good news is that this switch does not have to be a definite decision between cloud vs on-premises: hybrid media workflows models can offer a more gradual transition path.

The Cloud Question

When considering a migration to cloud solutions, several key benefits are usually at the center of discussions. For Dalet Flex systems, we have found that cloud deployments bring great value to our customers especially regarding:

• Elasticity: Media Workflows can require considerable processing power, especially when working with heavy production formats (e.g. Image Sequences). With auto-scaling capabilities based on Kubernetes, Flex can ensure cloud resources are made available when you need them, without generating extra costs when they are not used.

• Removing network bottlenecks: if a significant part of your workforce is accessing your system from remote locations, assessing cloud vs on-premises hosting solutions is key. Hosting this system on-premises can require high network performances. Host this system in the cloud and part of this network pressure will be redirected accordingly.

• Disaster Recovery: with numerous options available to deploy systems and back-up options in different datacenters and regions, disaster recovery is a key concern that the cloud helps address – and at a lower cost when coupled with auto-scaling functionality.

However, such benefits do not come without their own challenges that can complicate the strategic approach to either cloud or on-premises solutions. When it comes to media workflows, they are often linked to:

• Performance: part of your workforce, especially editors, may require access to heavy high-resolution media files. Accessing those files through an internet connection can prove difficult and impact the user experience.

• Egress costs: cloud providers traditionally charge a fee based on the volume of data read or downloaded from their data center. Solutions must be optimized to reduce those fees that can otherwise add up to significant bills.

• Leveraging existing infrastructure: if you already have an on-premises solution to orchestrate your media workflows, you probably cannot afford to let the underlying infrastructure investment go to waste. If elasticity is a key strength of cloud deployments, relying on your existing infrastructure to provide a resources baseline can be a good approach.

Cloud vs. On-premises Media Workflows: The Hybrid Answer

Hybrid deployments do not require a strict cloud vs on-premises solution decision. With some components on-premises and others in the cloud, can allow you to get the best of both worlds. When it comes to Dalet Flex hybrid solutions, we can distinguish two main categories: multisite deployments and distributed deployments.

The Multisite Model

In a hybrid multisite architecture two Dalet Flex sites are deployed: one on premises, and one in the cloud. Each instance is a full Flex site, able to run independently from the other. We then deploy a Replication Gateway, in charge of replicating content and configuration between those sites. The result is two identical Flex sites, but able to run independently if required.

Several business requirements can lead us to advise a Flex multisite design – amongst them we often encounter:

• Disaster Recovery: one great benefit of such architecture is the ability for each site to run independently, even if its sibling cannot be reached. For instance, if the connection between the cloud and your facilities is interrupted ,users working on your local network will still be able to connect to your on-premises site, while users working from home will still be able to connect to the cloud site – and an automated synchronization will occur when connections are restored.

• Users spread around the globe: we work with a number of broadcasters whose workforce is spread over large geographical areas – sometimes across oceans. In such scenarios, opting for either a cloud or on-premises solution can become problematic. Users far from the physical location of an on-premises Flex site will encounter issues to get a smooth experience (even if only due to physical constraints such as latency). A multisite design can answer this concern.

• Getting started with cloud: a multisite approach can also be a step towards a gradual transition to cloud-based solutions. You can imagine a first step with a cloud Flex system used only for DR purposes or for people working from home, and see this site gradually grow along with new business needs, or as you progressively reduce your Flex on-premises infrastructure.

This is only the tip of the iceberg: the flexibility of our tools governing exchanges and jobs management between sites allows us to further tailor the architecture to your business requirements, even in more complex scenarios:

• Replication policies allow you to define rules narrowing down replication to selected assets and/or configuration items.

• The Jobs Remote Engine service allows you to trigger jobs on your remote cloud site from your local site.

If you are interested in better understanding how a multisite Flex deployment could help you, contact us!

The Distributed Model

You have probably guessed the main downside of multisite deployments: costs. Running multiple full Flex sites will result in a larger technical footprint than a single-site deployment.

Depending on your business requirements, spreading the components of a single Flex site between the cloud and your premises, a distributed architecture can offer an interesting alternative that allows for more flexibility compared to an exclusive cloud or on-premises solution.

The design of a distributed Dalet Flex architecture begins with the deployment of a Dalet Flex instance either on-premises or in the cloud. When it comes to supporting cloud infrastructure providers, Dalet Flex works on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud, making it one of the most open and integrated media workflows solutions in the market. Once the initial deployment is in place, we will leverage Flex’s microservices architecture to implement some specific services in additional locations.

Let me give you a use case to make this clearer…

The On-premises Satellite

So, you’ve decided to migrate your content supply chain to a cloud infrastructure. This could be a business-driven decision, to reduce upfront investments and transition to OpEx and subscriptions costs, or a technical decision to accommodate for the increasing number of users working remotely, be it from home or other locations.

This, however, often brings new challenges, especially for production workflows where you may be ingesting large high-resolution files on premises, pre-existing tools deployed in your local infrastructure (QC, transcoding, editing…). Storing such files in the cloud may not be your best option: in addition to performance issues, egress costs (billed by most cloud providers when content stored in the cloud is read by external systems) can be prohibitive.

So you really need to get the best of both! Do consider the following architecture:

• The Dalet Flex Core is in the cloud. This includes databases, storage for proxy files and all the applications that power both the front-end and APIs.

• Your production storage will remain on premises, together with limited computing power running the specific Dalet Flex micro-services that manage high-resolution files and create proxy versions sent to the cloud, so that users can search and preview content in FlexMAM.

The microservices deployed on premises will be fully integrated into the cloud-hosted Flex Core, and can be driven with Flex’s workflow engine just as if they were cloud-hosted too! This hybrid deployment is typically implemented to manage the on-premises content lifecycle, together with smart archiving processes.

Alternatively, you may want to leverage cloud-based artificial intelligence services, like Dalet Media Cortex on the cloud-based proxy files, and trigger specific actions (e.g. archive, task allocation, transcoding….) on the corresponding on-premises high-res content.

All in all, the fact that microservices are spread across different cloud and on-premises locations is transparent for both Dalet Flex and your end users.

What’s the Catch?

When considering a distributed deployment, you should keep in mind that solid and secure cloud connectivity for the on-premises services to connect to the cloud instance is a must.

In addition, whereas in a multisite deployment on premises and cloud services can run independently, this is not the case in a distributed deployment. If a network outage interrupts the connectivity between the on-premises site and the cloud, local users will not be able to access FlexMAM and on-premises services will not be driven by the workflow engine as expected.

To mitigate such risks, we can work with you on Disaster Recovery workflows to keep you working during a possible outage. Of course, such DR transition would be smoother in a multisite architecture which brings additional redundancy, but at a higher cost.

Another point to consider is the need to access high-resolution content from remote locations, for example when video editors need to work from home. An option is edit on the proxy, and render on the local on-premises site… but if editing on the high-res content is required, this will increase the load on the internet connection that serves your premises.

And so… to Cloud or not to Cloud?

If you are pondering over the technical design of your current, or next, media workflows solution, the choice between on premises or cloud is not mutually exclusive. Hybrid solutions provide a gradual transition path to the cloud, be tailored to your business and technical requirements, and optimize your costs. All options come with benefits and trade-offs, which we have briefly summarized in this blog post.

If you’re ready to dive deeper, the Dalet engineering team can help you explore best practices and recommend an approach that meets your business priorities and technical constraints. To find out more about how Dalet Flex can transform your media workflows, get in touch.

The post Hybrid Media Workflows: Cloud vs. On-premises – Why Not Both?  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.

Looking at the trends

What we saw at NAB was aligned with the trends identified by Caretta Research ahead of the show and what we have seen since the beginning of the year. The first trend we saw is that investment in media technology is now driven by problem solving. While new technology, prototypes, and product reveals still make the headlines, the NAB Show has now clearly taken the trajectory of a business show. Business, editorial, and creative decision makers are looking for solutions to the problems they encounter along the media value chain, especially around remote production and collaboration, scale and automation, as well as digital-native content operations.

A second trend noticeable at the event is the desire for flexible deployments and the demand for modular technologies. Media-rich organizations want to “future-proof” their operations and to enhance the management of components’ lifespan. Open platforms and “operating systems”, seamlessly integrated into the wider ecosystem, are becoming the focal point of media production, management, and distribution workflows, often with marketplace models.

The third major trend is about cloud-native architectures and how they enable products that are faster, more reliable, and more affordable. SaaS offerings with a lower cost of entry are being brought to market, thanks to multi-tenanted architectures that enable economies of scale. With the elasticity of the cloud at their fingertips, media organizations can quickly scale resources as required with control over budgets.

We at Dalet are embracing these trends to always bring more value to our customers with transformative products. The launch of Dalet Flex for teams, a SaaS solution that provides professional-grade media logistics tools to smaller crews and organizations, is the perfect reflection of that.

Making time to talk

Communication is important with our customers. We truly believe we work better as a team. Open communication is at our core, and co-innovation is a mantra. We’ve discussed countless number of times with our customers and partners how agility has become so important. The ability to deploy solutions easily and to be extremely fast in launching new initiatives has become paramount. SaaS is a key ally in this endeavor.

Achieving scale through automation and workflow orchestration is still very high on the list for our customers, and our products have been making a difference in that area for many years. In addition, and together with smart, AI-powered tools, media-rich organizations are now putting much more focus on UI and UX, a big shift in our industry. These discussions with customers are becoming more common, as well as more advanced in terms of the strategies they deploy to distribute the right content to the right audiences on the right platforms. Helping customers scale and streamline their operations is a major focus.

Conversations around onboarding, training, user experience, and customer success are also much more common. These are very much valued by all stakeholders. Dalet is a customer-centric company; and we are building the teams and the structure around customer success. We help media-rich organizations maximize ROI and outcomes on their investment and overall satisfaction with a simple philosophy: their success is our success.

So, book a meeting with us sometime. It’s great to talk!

An interview with IABM TV on industry trends, the latest releases from Dalet, and what is coming in the future (Click here to watch the interview)

Showcasing Dalet latest innovations

In the same mindset of remaining customer-centric, Dalet’s leadership team and media workflow specialists were at the event, showcasing our latest innovations in content workflow solutions, cloud-native technology, and user experience.

Attendees stopping by the Dalet booth were able to discover two offerings for the first time, Dalet Flex for teams offered as-a-service for all teams with digital media management and multiplatform delivery requirements, and Dalet Pyramid solutions to enable modern storytelling and news production practices with centralized planning, remote editing, and digital-native production capabilities.

The industry recognition we received for these new offerings was a proud moment for the #DaletTeam. While Dalet Pyramid won NewscastStudio’s Broadcast Production Award for “Best New Product or Service – Production”, Dalet Flex for teams was awarded “Best in Show” from TVTech.

As a key technology partner and their chosen Media Asset Management partner, Dalet was also present at the AWS booth. Both Dalet Flex as-a-service and Dalet Pyramid running on AWS infrastructure were on display and received a warm welcome. Dalet and AWS power some of the most advanced cloud-native and hybrid media workflows.

Dalet Flex for teams was a featured demo at the AWS booth on the 2022 NAB show floor

What comes next? Focus.

The question we find ourselves often asking is “What comes next?”

For us at Dalet, we keep our attention on the value we provide through state-of-the-art media workflows – the life’s blood of any newsroom, sports coverage, content owner, or media production facility. This is what we do, and we focus on it. Today, our customers not only evaluate products but also roadmaps, development priorities, and company culture. They buy from companies they want to work with. We are more than software.

With that in mind, I’ll conclude this article with a quote from Dalet’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Stephane Guez:

“We’re thrilled to reconnect in person with our partners and customers to share our latest innovations for digital media workflows. We’ve been hard at work investing in and developing modern technologies to meet the demands of today’s media rich organizations. To support this, we have expanded the Dalet Team with media, cloud, and security experts whose focus is to enable wider market adoption of Dalet solutions beyond the traditional borders of broadcast. These investments coupled with our intense R&D and project management efforts have enabled us to deliver an NAB showcase that we’re incredibly proud of: budget-friendly pre-configured, convenient, yet secure workflow cloud-based offerings with state-of-the-art UX and UI experiences customers expect.”

We are part of an industry and a world in a state of permanent change. Mature and stable like a large corporation, yet agile and growing like a start-up, we continue to shape the future of media production, management and distribution workflows. Join us!

The post What Happened in Vegas – NAB 2022 in Review 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.

From incredible footage of mountain views and panoramic seascapes, video content as seen in shows like Moving Pictures and A World of Calm makes the booking of a trip happen. With this targeted content, trip brokers are now leveraging social video platforms, over-the-top (OTT) streaming services, over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts, and popular augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) channels in order to attract would-be globetrotters.

Viral Vacation Movies: Social Video Platforms

Travel videos are key during the “Dreaming Stage” of the traveler’s planning with so many of us having been stuck in that planning stage for the last several years. If the content is inspiring and delivered efficiently, the potential exists to reengage high-value customers whose passports have been gathering dust during the pandemic. Visual storytelling is a powerful way to build a relationship with potential travelers. A well-produced travel video is just about as close as potential clients can come to experience a travel organization’s packages firsthand, Untethered Media points out. Capturing footage of familiar, iconic cities like New York, Paris, or London entices people to travel. Many trip planners, excursion agents, and others in the travel industry actively solicit video footage from their previous clients, repurposing home movies as quick and polished promotional materials for destinations abroad. Not only will a travel broker’s marketing team have to manage all these videos fine-tuned for different social campaigns, but the associated metadata, too.

TikTok, a platform at one time reliant on dance videos, lip-syncing, and animal tricks for viewers, has evolved into to a tool with broader marketing power and the viewers to match. Don’t worry, there’s still plenty of pet videos, but now there’s global interest in TikTok from the travel marketing community. Hashtags such as #travel and #tiktoktravel are seeing more than 50 billion views combined, Skift.com reports. TikTok’s algorithm, however, represents a challenge to content creators. The content needs to be app specific and not a reworking of content previously posted for it to be exposed to as many viewers as possible.

Then there is YouTube, still the place for long-form video online and a powerful solution for travel marketers. Averaging 14.3 billion visits a month, according to the Hootsuite blog, it only makes sense to cultivate a strong presence on the platform. Travel brokers are taking the opportunity to build on YouTube a relationship between themselves and potential tourists. Video optimization on these travel channels — keywords, video descriptions, assorted thumbnails, and relevant content associations — are essential, as ReelnReel points out. Dalet Flex can manage it all, whether it is producing a multitude of video shorts optimized for TikTok or managing longer-form content for YouTube, running seamless workflows enabling travel organizations to get media optimized and online faster and with greater frequency.

Over-the-Top TV (OTT) and Streaming Services and Over-the-Air (OTA) Broadcasts

About 76% of OTT television streamers watch on an ad-supported platform. Content here tends to be highly focused to specific audiences. The benefit here is that travel marketers are able to create advertisements, campaigns, and even full-on content that will reach viewers who want to visit specific destinations or use an advertised tourism organization to create their ideal adventure. Offerings such as the earlier mentioned Moving Art which, for several seasons, provided breathtaking footage of locations such as Thailand, New Zealand, and Canada; while A World of Calm, produced specifically for those feeling the walls close in during the pandemic, showcased beautiful vistas with soothing narration from Keanu Reeves, Oscar Isaac, Nicole Kidman, and others. For the travel marketing campaign, these sorts of shows are direct sales to destinations abroad. To accomplish this not only requires the content, but the data as well to make the linkage across searches, viewers, and channels. All of the content and associated dynamic metadata need to be organized in a meaningful and accessible way and benefit from AI-driven solutions like Dalet Flex.

These kind of documentary-style, nature and environment productions appeal to audiences across demographics. Older audiences traveling through retirement, younger viewers collecting experiences after college — the reach of these channels is wide and varied. Until a time where viewers move entirely to streaming solutions, marketers must include these potential viewers as part of their campaign as well.

Seeing the World from Home: Virtual Tourism

Much like with YouTube, VR is used in the pre-trip “dreamer” stage in tourism, with people looking at where they might want to go. Kuoni’s, a tourism operator, offers potential customers the ability can take a 360-degree tour of the upmarket Sandy Lane luxury resort in Barbados, an article in the Guardian notes. It’s also important to mention that 360 and 180 VR content is available on YouTube.

As Immersion VR, creator of VR content for marketing accurately, states: one of the greatest strengths of VR is allowing the user to experience the feeling of “being there.” 360 VR content is one of the most common methods out there and is accessible not in just headsets but can also be accessed with mobile devices. Although VR projects take more time to produce and are typically more expensive, they provide a more immersive travel experience. These videos feature head tracking so the user can move their head to explore the surroundings in a realistic way, Immersion VR explains.

What better way to inspire someone to get their suitcases out of the attic then allowing them to stand on that sun-soaked beach in VR?

How Does the Travel Industry Make Sense of All this Content?

To run effective and sustainable video marketing operations, travel marketers and multimedia content producers should look at Dalet Flex when it comes to multiplatform distribution. Powering video campaigns with Dalet Flex offers businesses the ability to easily capitalize on social platforms, and then offer content for OTT advertising solutions utilized by streaming providers. Dalet Flex can also take your content into the broadcast television arena, and even further into Virtual Reality. Destination videos, testimonials, and 360 tours of locations, and more traditional advertisements all call for media asset management, metadata, and safe archiving, all of which Dalet Flex provides.

To effectively leverage these assets and create engaging campaigns, content must be indexed and tagged in meaningful ways and must be accessible to producers across systems and locales. AI-powered, cloud-based content management and supply chain platforms like Dalet Flex become invaluable in taking advantage of the large, diverse content libraries that are so commonplace in the travel and tourism industry and that will be only grow in years to come.

As for today, travel and tourism need that extra boost and a good video campaign will make the difference between someone choosing yet another stay-cation versus getting out of the house and seeing the world that’s been waiting the last several years.

The post Why the Travel Industry Needs Video Content to Stage Its Comeback appeared first on Dalet.

Lights out.

Now joining the roar of engines is a particular scent. You might think it’s “burning rubber” but to the spectators in the grandstands wearing the papaya of McLaren, the emerald of Aston Martin, or the tri-color combination of Alfa-Romeo, this is the cologne of competition. This is the thrill of the Grand Prix. This is Formula One. This is also MotoGP, NASCAR, and the Baja 1000. This is the essence of motorsports, and fans everywhere are celebrating the new season starting this month. That celebration is just a part of the raw desire fans of motorsports have for content. From the new season of Drive to Survive to updates from Twitter and Instagram, fans are hungry for the latest news, clips, and race updates.

But before you jump free from the opening crush with a media production schedule that will deliver to the fans what they want, you should first get your video engagement strategy together.

The Starting Grid: Building a Video Engagement Strategy for Your Franchise

When building your content strategy, the best starting position is not necessarily pole. Pole position, in this case, would be the launching point — you’ve got your goals and targets lined up and you are ready to take the lead; but in this analogy, the drivers in the back of the grid can be looked at as the strategy’s foundation. What stories do you have to tell? What broadcasting and social platforms do you want to occupy? And finally, what are the tools you need to bring this strategy to fruition?

Let’s take a closer look at that grid, waiting to start. What are the stories you want to tell in motorsports?

• The race. When it comes to the race itself, the story is omnipresent within the intensity of the start, the battles far from the lead where drivers battle for points, the fastest laps, and the most overtakes.

• The franchise. In the words of Lawrence Stroll, one of Team Aston Martin’s principal sponsors, “It’s the car of James Bond. Of course, they need to be in Formula One.” Every one of these franchises, from McLaren to Mercedes to Hass, has stories; and these are stories that are waiting to be told.

• Off-the-Track Tensions. To say there is a lot of drama in motorsports would be an understatement. Racing features competitors becoming teammates, and rivalries between drivers coming to the surface well after the race is done. When Dale Earnhardt ruled the NASCAR circuit, his nickname of “The Intimidator” didn’t just apply to his racing tactics. Soap Operas don’t have a thing against the behind-the-scenes stories of motorsports.

From the Grandstands to the Couch: Where Are Your Fans?

Once the race is underway, drivers focus on reaching the finish line, ahead of them miles on miles of movement, pit stops aside. The same can be said for the fans of motorsports. Consumption of media happens anywhere and everywhere now, and just as drivers like Sebastian Vettel, Kyle Larson, and Rahel Frey are off the line and on the go, so are the fans. With so many consumption platforms, though, where do you begin to lay down the groundwork?

Begin with the basics: Video. When cars are revealed and analysts come in to break down the race, YouTube tends to be a popular video engagement platform for motorsports. Here, production facilities can easily shoot, edit, and release breakdown videos. From these videos, clips can be repurposed for other popular platforms like Instagram and TikTok, bringing the best of the race to mobile devices around the world. Branching out from the basics, you can look at other platforms — including a franchise’s website or the motorsport’s website — that feature native formats exclusive to these other platforms.

Final Lap: Gathering the Tools for Your Video Engagement Strategy

Your stories are ready to be told. Your distribution platforms are targeted. Your strategy is taking shape.

Now, you need to make it all work.

Like a solid gearbox, good brakes, and tires ready to take on the track in its current conditions, you also need the right tools to create and deliver your videos whenever and wherever the story emerges. This is where and when Dalet offers you award-winning platforms that allow you to get your video engagement strategy underway.

When it comes to organizing all these assets — footage of drivers, of races, and hours behind-the-scenes and between-the-races — Dalet Flex can leverage AI solutions to index, catalog and manage your assets, archiving clips for later projects while organizing other assets for present projects, and prepare your content for a variety of social and digital platforms. Speaking of those numerous viewing platforms, what will you need to prep those clips, recaps, and moments from the Pit Crew for all these output options? Coming out of the chicane and passing on the inside is Dalet AmberFin, granting you the ability to transcode your media to numerous formats and codecs for best results on both mainstream media and mobile outlets. These solutions are ready to take your strategy to a higher level of efficiency.

But is there an up and coming driver to watch?

Around the turn comes Dalet Pyramid, our latest offering for news planning, production, and distribution optimized for on-location and mobile storytelling. This next-gen, storytelling-centric newsroom solution is ready to take your strategy to the cloud, giving you the ability to keep your motorsport community always informed and constantly connected through your media productions.

And That’s a Checkered Flag

Presently, other motorsports are looking for their own Drive to Survive sensation; but even without a popular Netflix series promoting their particular brand of automotive prowess, motorsports remain a popular pastime, its history reaching back to the end of the nineteenth century. Technology now grants everyone involved, from the sports organization themselves down to the individual drivers, to build or even rebuild their brand, create communities, and make connections through audio and video.

Dalet can help you nurture these communities, build these connections, with the content product, management and distribution solutions we have created so you can achieve your video engagement goals. Our solutions make it easier for you to create compelling content, reach audiences everywhere, and be ready to scale when the time comes.

The post Drive to Thrive: The Growing Market of Motorsports Video Engagement 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.

Chapter 1: Evolution of Post-Production Workflows
Chapter 2: Mandating a New Post-Production Workflow Architecture
Chapter 3: How One Post House Scaled Operations to Capture New Business
Chapter 4: What It Takes to Evolve Your Post-Production Workflow
Chapter 5: Evolve or Perish: The Future of Post-Production Workflow

Evolution of Post-Production Workflows

The past two years have witnessed some incredible disruptions in the media industry. What was once considered “exciting new ground” for the future became something of an upheaval of broadcasting’s status quo. Nothing calls more urgently for change than the need to accommodate the realities of a decentralized work environment. Surging volumes of work orders, shorter turnarounds, new distribution outlets seeming to appear online in the blink of an eye, and both open source and proprietary formats have combined at an accelerating pace to outdate current, trusted post-production workflows.

Media producers are re-evaluating their post-production workflow for efficiency and productivity in order to remain relevant in this new market of video-on-demand. Many of these new workflows are built from the ground up to accommodate the complexities of content, optimized for a vast spectrum of platforms ranging from traditional television markets to streaming services, those services targeting a vast spectrum of devices ranging from smartphones to high-end home theater displays.

With content creators looking to new post-production workflows, the need for cloud-based solutions became evident. Working in the cloud affords great flexibility in workflow configurations.

Striving to Be Better: Mandating a New Post-Production Workflow Architecture

The reasons remote post-production capabilities are so vital to success are well documented. Several significant drivers, starting with the trend in remote workforce collaboration, are behind this need to change the standard workflows in the market.

1) The rise of remote work in post-production workflows calls for a cloud-based environment.

Hybrid combinations of centralized and remote contributions to post-production workflows are here to stay. Researcher FutureSource Consulting stressed the point in a recent report on trends in post-production: “As in many other industries, the seismic shift to remote operation at scale seen in the past year has caused a cultural shift in mindset to the reliability and openness of remote working. Many mission-critical applications must still remain on premise, but we expect to see technology providers continue to place strategic emphasis on developing their products to facilitate and support even more ambitious remote production workflows in the future.”

Producers need to engage their post-production staff with confidence whether they’re working in the same town or a continent apart. Their collective output will be on par with traditional single-location operations. A cloud-based platform can cover every aspect of the post-production process to ensure content is packaged in every required format with all relevant assets, metadata, language-accurate closed captions, and any remaining essential elements required for every type of distribution.

2) Distribution requirements are constantly in flux, driven by the unrelenting increase in Over-the-Top (OTT) video services.

Streamed video services, now topping 80% of households in at least five countries, including the U.K., Canada, the U.S., Sweden and Denmark, averages close to 29% of worldwide audiences. Considering the popularity of these services, OTT platforms such as Disney+, Apple TV+, and Netflix are on a projected course to hit 35% of media viewership by 2025. In the U.S., OTT penetration stands at 82% compared to 58% for legacy pay TV with the number of services, often including pay TV, averaging close to four per household.

Insatiable consumer appetites for more choices ensure there will be ever more OTT services for producers to target as distribution outlets. By one count, at least 11 OTT services worldwide have more than 30 million subscribers. And there are hundreds of new OTT services reaching niche audiences, which, on a global scale, are often too big to be ignored.

3) There is more original content entering post-production than ever before.

OTT providers became the driving force behind this surge of original movies, series, and documentaries, following Netflix’s success at employing original content as a major audience draw. By 2019 Netflix accounted for nearly a third of 1,178 U.S.-produced dramatic series, documentaries, and other original projects. Amazon Prime quickly followed suit, although at 314 hours of first-run content running worldwide in 2019 its output was dwarfed by the 2,500 hours produced by Netflix. This competitive impact triggered bigger commitments from other networks and studios as well, many of whom now depend on self-branded OTT.

4) The demand for live-streamed content is creating new opportunities for post-production workflows suited to providing cloud-based support for editing, transcoding, packaging, and quality control.

With online viewing of content taking hold, live-streamed video traffic is projected to exceed on-demand video traffic by 2023. Adding momentum to the phenomenon is the use of the internet to live-stream content that can’t be found on traditional broadcast TV.

Sport is the biggest contributor to this evolution. Much of the testing of post-production workflows applied to streaming content comes from the sports industry. Streaming the latest tries of a rugby final, the moment of “Lights Out” at the Turkish Grand Prix, or the grand slam hallmarking a World Series is simply a matter of augmenting packaging processes to reach new affiliates who win rights to existing broadcast productions. This has created a demand for low-cost, professional-caliber remote production capabilities.

Photo credit: NRL Pictures

More significantly, esports have moved well beyond niche status to reach a global fan base topping 800 million on its way to a billion by 2024. Game publishers, who began staging big esports events as a way to boost the popularity of their core products, are now capitalizing on esports streaming as a business in its own right, by staging more events for online distribution and augmenting productions with social networking, viewer-selected camera views and other features.

5) The variety of devices and platforms used for content consumption is adding ever more complexity to post-production workflows.

The way people are watching content now extends across smartphones, tablets, PCs, TVs. TV media players, game consoles and even internet-connected virtual reality (VR) head-mounted devices (HMDs). When streaming is in play, content must be transcoded and packaged into multiple adaptive bitrate (ABR) profiles for each type of device, and each platform — be it Twitter, Twitch, or TikTok — has specific needs for their own post-production. From presentation to codecs, preparing media for content distribution and consumption has become something of a challenge.

Increased consumption of streamed content on connected TVs has fueled a surge in 4K UHD and HDR formatting among OTT providers, which has created competitive pressure on cable and broadcast outlets to follow suit. Nearly all original content produced by Netflix and Amazon is now offered in UHD, much of it enhanced with HDR. As of mid-2018, Netflix said 30% of its subscribers worldwide had opted for its higher priced 4K/HDR service tier. Other global OTT providers of 4K and HDR-enhanced 4K content include Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV+, FandangoNOW, and YouTube.

Taking the First Step: How One Post House Scaled Operations to Capture New Business

Breaking away from the familiar is always challenging. Is the risk worth the reward? Changing post-production workflows you are familiar with, from media giants to independent post houses, can test the logistical limits of your projects. However, solutions do exist that can smooth the transition to cloud-based workflows. The crucial role Dalet plays in helping customers thrive in this new environment is illustrated by the London-based post-production company Smoke and Mirrors (S&M), now Tag Collective.

Tag Collective needed to find a cost-effective way to scale operations to better pursue business opportunities. This had to be done in the context of addressing ever more complex business rules for content quality control, effective transcoding and distribution while reducing administrative overhead, retiring aging legacy systems, and removing the bottlenecks imposed by tape-based operations. Implementation of an automated, intelligent task management was made possible thanks to Dalet Flex’s configurable post-production workflows. Data-driven workflows tied to over 100 scripted actions curtailed human error and duplication with a far more agile approach to executing changes, resulting in an average 85% reduction in project completion times.

What It Takes to Evolve Your Post-Production Workflow

This is but one example of how the new post-production workflow feels native with the Dalet Flex platform and integrated tools. Dalet Flex also offers freedom to create content supply chains perfectly matched to a studio’s or production house’s needs. Such adaptability is vital to updating post-production workflows, as seen in Dalet Flex and in the high-performance transcoding flexibility of Dalet AmberFin, a highly scalable, media processing platform for video/image, audio, and subtitle/caption processing. Eliminating the need to create multiple versions of content allows significant reductions in storage space and optimized management for multiple distribution outlets. This scalability is essential in meeting the tight time-to-market deadlines imposed with all types of video content entering post-production workflows, including non-linear as well as live programming.

Evolve or Perish: The Future of Post-Production Workflow

When searching for your own next step forward in updating your post-production workflow, Dalet Flex supports the automation and orchestration essential for successful post-production operations designed for the premium video marketplace. Dalet Flex can run on commodity appliances across any combination of private and public clouds to support workflows involving any combination of remote and centralized inputs. There’s no better way to accommodate today’s market and its remote team working behind-the-scenes in content delivery than with implementation of Dalet Flex, together with Dalet AmberFin. Success can be achieved for your media productions at minimal initial and ongoing operational costs compared to any other approach, ensuring customers will be able to reap the benefits for years to come.

The post Putting More Flow Into Your Post-Production Workflow appeared first on Dalet.

With the growing demand for multimedia content, changes are needed in the way video is produced, managed and distributed. Video Asset Management makes media production and distribution more efficient and more adaptable to meet the evolving demands of the global marketplace. Here’s how to get started!

Chapter 1: Analyzing the Industry
Chapter 2: Organizing Content & Streamlining Workflows
Chapter 3: Importance of Metadata
Chapter 4: Creating a Collaborative Operations
Chapter 5: Tools to help you master Video Asset Management

Analyzing the Industry

It is a well-known axiom in the media industry that content is king; and to those offering the best content will retain the keys to the castle. Those creating the best content will continuously and consistently attract audiences, and therefore have the best chance at long-term success. Simply look at HBO who began this trend with The Sopranos and continued to do so with such offerings as Game of Thrones and Westworld. With the video landscape now extending across digital platforms raging from wide screen LCD TVs to handheld devices, the need for content has become even more imperative as it is everywhere — on every screen, around the world, at every minute of the day.

If there is any question if new, original content is worth the investment, consider that annually, Netflix now spends $8 billion on original and acquired content, HBO spends $2 billion, and Facebook and Apple both spend around $1 billion. This demand for original content is hardly reserved for the entertainment industry. Take Red Bull as an example: an energy drink company that has achieved incredible success with their own media productions, elevating the brand well beyond “energy drink production” to a symbol of living life on the edge. The same could be said for Patagonia, a store known for clothing but turning their success as a business into a platform for environmental action and advocacy through film. Then there is NASA, their content archive a treasure trove of flight and space exploration. Truly, the media amassed over seventy years of science is stellar, and the public never tire of consuming the content coming from Mission Control.

While billions are being spent on creating original content, most content providers don’t have multi-billion-dollar budgets to produce or acquire a level of programming needed to attract and keep audiences. Productions need to be more strategic, and creators must manage their content in order to make the most of their video investments and stay in the game. In this dynamic content environment, Video Asset Management is vital to survival.

Video Asset Management: Organizing Content & Streamlining Workflows

Exactly what is VAM, or Video Asset Management? When you create multimedia content of any kind, you need assets — video files, audio files, support graphics, and other elements that support your production. In order to keep everything organized, you need Video Asset Management, a comprehensive strategy providing storage, organization, distribution and archiving. Reliable Video Asset Management goes even further, offering advanced metadata and workflow management for all your multimedia projects.

Intelligent workflows can incorporate automated business logic and user-defined rules to determine how an asset is treated during production. Media Logistics platforms can automatically detect and validate files during this process and then orchestrate their formatting and delivery. An example of this would be if a syndication partner requests all the content a studio can provide, but only if it meets certain technical criteria and contains all mandatory metadata. If your Video Asset management system is manual, sorting out content meeting these criteria would be incredibly time-consuming.

For example, the Dalet Flex platform does this to avoid any potential issues and possible bottlenecks. Once a distributor’s packaging and managing profile is built, the syndication of assets including multiple audio tracks, subtitles, or images, and their corresponding data to multiple places is streamlined in a workflow that truly helps you create content — whether it is your own content or content for syndication — on demand and optimized for a variety of platforms. These workflows would be tedious and cumbersome unless metadata and other details determined by the user can be assigned during the media’s import into projects. Reliable Video Asset Management can automatically convert your content into required formats, assign assets with relevant metadata for both editing or archiving, or repackage them with the original elements. The best format for each distributor’s channel can be automatically generated, at the highest quality, lowest cost, and fastest delivery time.

Ultimately, this kind of strategy helps ensure tasks are completed successfully and video assets and their metadata end up where (and how) they need to be as quickly as possible. But what is it about metadata that makes it so important? When investing in Video Asset Management, why is automation of metadata so essential?

Metadata? Video Asset Management’s Ultimate Superpower!

You hear it mentioned often when it comes to building a library of media, creating an optimized Video Asset Management system, or when working remotely with a production team. What exactly is metadata, and why is it so important to the success of your VAM?

When putting together workflows best suited for you and your production team, it is essential to come up with a system and a strategy that takes the effort of organizing and cataloging your footage easily for everyone involved. This is where a Video Asset Management platform earns its place in your media production process. A VAM platform should offer advanced metadata capabilities in an easy-to-use interface. Reliable VAM platforms make integration into your workflows and sharing search terms between various media assets effortless.

Metadata is specific information embedded directly into a media asset or can be associated with assets as separate data files. This specific information pertains directly to the content of the media asset, ranging from specific keywords associated with the content, timestamps, closed captioning, audio languages, and other aspects of your project. Its creation, assignment, and management had once been regarded as one of those tasks that used to be manually driven, akin to managing budget spreadsheets, or re-entering metadata manually when sharing media between producers, or updating scripts in pre-production and pushing them into production systems. Video Asset Management platforms, like Dalet Flex, can now automate this, saving time, cost, and potential for human error.

Metadata is entered once and then carried across each asset, platform to platform. Depending on the ecosystem you can create, the metadata should carry across a variety of systems, whether the applications you have implemented are provided by the same vendor or not. Dalet Flex includes partner integrations where metadata can be shared, such as multimedia editing tools and with A.I.-driven cognitive service applications that tags various media through such details as facial recognition, object tagging, and audio transcription. Video Asset Management systems harness metadata to perform focused asset searches within applications and archives, and transform them into productive, targeted and monetizable content for engaged consumer audiences.

A good case study highlighting the importance of metadata in a reliable Video Asset Management strategy is the National Rugby League of Australia (NRL). The organization has been continuing its investment into content creation and media production, and their success is seen by how passionately their fans are demanding more of their content. As a result, they have established themselves as a leading sports media and digital technology business. The NRL now delivers engaging content to fans much faster across various platforms (Internet, mobile apps, and social media) while continuing to manage a complex network of asset sources including broadcasters, other rugby clubs, production partners, each with different rules and workflows. The NRL was looking for technology to manage workflows better and to automate production tasks so that its team could focus on creating and curating high-earning content. The NRL also wanted to eliminate duplication around metadata and user permissions, allowing each team member access, specifically and exclusively, to the information to which they are entitled.

NRL found their solution by building a reliable, efficient video asset management platform implementing media logistics that addresses all these challenges and automate asset ingest and distribution. The implementation of a VAM frees up the production team to work on creative and high-value tasks.

When content is published whether it is to a Video-On-Demand portal, a social media platform, or some other delivery service, specific metadata fields, ranging from celebrity names to special events to more general keywords or technical information associated with the content, are also leveraged. Along with aiding in search terms and “Other media you would be interested in…” suggestions, monetization opportunities are added in this automated chain by looking at metadata and creating tailored pre-roll ads based on metadata associated with the media. Dalet Flex sends media through an automated workflow from import through to distribution. Harnessing third-party services compatible with Dalet Flex, the media logistics platform analyzes a variety of metadata elements associated with cataloged assets in order to optimize the search process as well as monetize the media itself. All this information is then automatically logged as timecode-based metadata as part of the asset within the media logistics platform for future consumption.

Metadata, its management and implementation, is essential in building a successful Video Asset Management solution for you, your team, and the wider organization.

So Happy Together: Creating a Collaborative Operation!

When implementing your Video Asset Management platform, collaboration on projects immediately improves (as well as your productivity) based on how easy internal teams, external partners, and systems seamlessly integrate—whether separated by an office, a country, or — in the case of 2020 — a pandemic.

Finishing a single piece of content can require a vast number of elements and stages being tracked and managed by a variety of team members. As seen during the many COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, these workflows can be automated, starting at the earliest stages of content development, commissioning, and pre-production. During physical production and continuing through to post-production, reviews and approval processes managed by Dalet Flex can help in avoiding communication breakdowns, thereby helping to complete projects faster—even if they require input from various teams. Crew members can shift to higher-value activities such as developing new content, leaving software-defined tools to handle the rest. Companies can take advantage of this Video Asset Management strategy to complete more projects, scale their existing video investments, and adapt far more quickly to the inevitable changes to come in production processes and media partner requirements.

Taking the Next Steps Forward

As media-rich organizations move more towards cloud-based operations and virtual offices, the benefits of this Video Asset Management approach with Dalet Flex are enhanced. Our platform simplifies, streamlines, and connects the entire content supply chain to help teams:

• plan and manage
• produce and package
• curate and archive
• orchestrate and automate
• distribute and publish
• analyze and monetize

Dalet Flex supports companies and creative teams whether they work in one area or across all and can be customized to meet specific needs. With an integrated content supply chain ecosystem, content creators can now automate processes for metadata, cataloging, Video Asset Management, and other tasks that run within these operations to create and deliver the robust and targeted content that audiences actively look for.

The demand for multimedia content will only continue to expand. So will the demands for producing even more great content at the lowest possible cost and in the shortest time frame, whether it is for news broadcasters, media & entertainment companies, sports teams, leagues and federations, brands, corporations and any other media-rich organizations. Video Asset Management coupled to workflow and process automation, in whatever form it takes, promises to be a key factor in separating successful content providers from the rest, setting a higher standard for productivity.

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