Posted by While digesting the events at IBC2017 and preparing for NAB Show New York, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Arnaud Elnecave, vice president of marketing at Dalet. Arnaud has been at Dalet for 10 years and as vice president of marketing, he sets Dalet’s long-term objectives and develops the marketing strategy to increase the company’s global brand awareness. We’re excited to share the big trend he saw at IBC2017, his take on how media companies can improve their workflow efficiencies, if artificial intelligence (AI) can enable media professionals, and what he’s most excited about showcasing at NAB New York.
Quantum: What was the biggest new trend or reinforced trend you saw at IBC2017 this year?
Elnecave: IBC’s 50th edition was a very interesting show! There are some important technology trends that get the lion’s share of buzz and display: cloud and smart hybrid infrastructure, video over IP, workflow orchestration, and task automation—and last but not least, big data, machine learning, and AI. While it is very true that these topics drove many conversations on the show floor and can be real game changers, we believe that these are in fact enablers of a much bigger trend: better serving and engaging with audiences.
Better serving and engaging with audiences will move up the chain from a distribution issue to become a multi-platform production issue. And we currently see a number of development areas to help our customers build deeper, more sustainable engagement with audiences:
- Full-featured, story-centric social media production, management, and distribution tools for broadcasters and media organizations—allowing them to put social at the heart of their operations and better engage with audiences as part of their everyday workflow.
- Detailed analytics and reporting dashboards for business intelligence (BI) tightly integrated into media management platforms, allowing organizations to better monitor performance of their crews and assets, identify trends, understand audience expectations, and continuously adjust strategy and operations accordingly.
- Fully converged workflows for digital, TV, and radio, enabling broadcasters to deliver unified and complementary content to the ever-wider array of distribution outlets and platforms available.
- New and more immersive content experiences through ultra-high-definition (UHD), 360-degree, VR, second-screen apps, fully localized content, and live media experiences, powered by Media Asset Management (MAM) and orchestration platforms, such as Dalet Galaxy, that are able to handle the complexity of these new media objects, thanks to advanced and evolutive media-aware and business-aware data models.
Better serving audiences is a very serious topic for broadcasters and media organizations—in the long run it is a question of staying in business. While looking at key technology trends such as AI, the cloud, and orchestration is a must, organizations should always keep business needs at the top of their priorities. At Dalet, we fully subscribe to this audience-centric trend and enable strategic change within our customers, with a robust, agile, and innovative technology foundation that allows them to capitalize on their brands, deliver customized and immersive content to their audiences, and expand into new horizons. To see an illustration of this trend in the news segment, watch this customer story with Pan-European broadcaster Euronews.
Quahttps://youtu.be/MQJJoIhK16Mntum: What are you most excited about over the next year with our joint partnership?
Elnecave: Quantum is a very important technology partner for Dalet. Together, Dalet and Quantum have successfully worked to design, deploy, and support customers with very large and complex environments. For nearly a decade, both companies have collaborated to optimize and integrate the joint solution at the deepest level. The solution provides the workflows users need while reducing complexity. And the Dalet and Quantum teams are continuously incorporating what they have learned from customer installations into best practices.
For the next few months and throughout 2018, we’re really excited to continue developing our offering for the sports content industry. These joint solutions allow national and regional sports networks, leagues and teams, as well as digital sport video services, to optimize their content production and distribution by bringing all of their workflows into a single collaborative platform backed by market-leading infrastructure.
Additionally, we’re keen on developing new solutions for cloud and hybrid workflows, as well as machine learning and AI, thanks to Dalet’s orchestration technology. A true enabler, it combines a mix of processes into a single workflow that uses dedicated, on-premise resources and processes that dynamically consume Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. The framework is a robust foundation for next-generation adaptors to connect new types of services, such as AI models, that need to be driven in context with complex data sets, as we showcased with Dalet Labs prototypes at IBC2017.
Quantum: We work with some of the largest sports broadcasters—what can the entire industry learn from these broadcasters to improve workflow efficiencies?
Elnecave: Sports networks are operationally intense, complex, and demanding. Producing and managing game-time highlights, in-game and post-game analysis, sports news and magazines, and better promos, and then distributing all of this across a growing number of platforms is not an easy mandate. This requires specific tools and workflows that enable collaboration, fast turnaround, productivity boosts, multi-device delivery, agility to adapt, and flexibility to scale. With Dalet and Quantum end-to-end solutions, you can optimize your operations by connecting siloed teams and bringing all of your workflows into a single collaborative platform. Not only will you maximize your game-day coverage, but you’ll be able to fully leverage your library of key plays, highlights, and top hits assets in order to build new content experiences that you can effectively serve to your audiences whenever and wherever they want it.
Quantum’s StorNext® high-performance storage infrastructure and Dalet’s end-to-end production, management, and distribution platform are seamlessly integrated to provide a complete solution to help you make the most of your content—easily and efficiently. Click here to read the joint-solution brief.
Quantum: AI continues to be a popular topic. How do you see this technology enabling media professionals?
Elnecave: It’s all about the rising importance of data. Building smarter, data-driven media operations and strategies will soon become our customers’ top priority.
The amount of multimedia content created and distributed is growing at an exponential pace in all verticals. On the other hand, the data generated by the viewers and their activity is “big,” and mining it will become a key strategy for those who understand and embrace the new paradigm. As broadcasters and media organizations look at the best ways to tame this tsunami, streamline operations, and maximize the value of content, AI-enriched media management and workflow solutions will become a vital part for continued relevance and sustainable growth. Potential business benefits are immense and immediately tangible: from automation of complex tasks in a process and—in the near future—smart resource provisioning and system scaling with self-adaptive capacity planning, all the way to augmented production workflows with smart and timely recommendations, better content insights, and discovery, thanks to intelligent auto-tagging features.
Quantum: With NAB Show New York just around the corner, what are you most excited about showcasing?
Elnecave: NAB Show New York has significantly grown over the past two years. Today, it is one of the key events of the media and entertainment industry in North America with exciting keynotes and technology reveals. With an expanded presence at the show and a number of new products and solutions on display, Dalet is gearing up for the event! We will be located at booth N344 to offer demos of all our products and solutions.
Our media workflows specialists will take you through the latest developments of our workflow solutions for news (Unified News Operations), sports, media management and versioning, enterprise orchestration, and visual radio, as well as support for the latest standards like IMF and SMPT ST 2110. Also, we will be showcasing the latest features of the Dalet Galaxy platform with our award-winning social media panel, state-of-the-art collaboration capabilities, BI and analytics configurable reports, and a preview of a selection of applications and use cases connecting AI services to Dalet Galaxy.
Finally, we’re organizing a social hour around AI with partners Veritone and Quantum at 5pm on October 18 to discuss the future of the industry and unwind with industry peers at the end of a busy day. Drinks and hors-d’oeuvres are on us!
Click here to learn more and book your meeting at NAB Show New York.
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