I came away from IBC2018 with a host of helpful takeaways, but these five made the top of my list:

If you’re one of the many who have taken a “wait and see” attitude to virtual reality (VR) content creation, now may be the time to jump on board. Advocates who say VR won’t go the way of 3D TV were given more reasons to cheer last week — NBC announced it will provide 85 hours of 360° video from the 2016 Olympics in Rio next month.

The demands of media delivery have evolved drastically over recent years, with more and more organizations producing often large volumes of video content for a range of uses. As that media landscape evolves, so too must the enabling tools, such as the MAM systems. Naturally with increasing numbers of media files being created, effective storage solutions are becoming increasingly important. Quantum StorNext provides great flexibility and performance for media workflows. By integrating Cantemo Portal with StorNext, our users can automate migration of content based on policies to more cost-effective long-term storage within Quantum.

Whether it’s adding search and edit capabilities for captions and subtitles, enhancing chat and messaging modules, or publishing directly to Facebook and Twitter, Quantum partner Dalet is continuously working to streamline the content creation process with their media asset management (MAM) solutions. Quantum StorNext is tightly integrated with Dalet MAM solutions to further streamline workflows by seamlessly and automatically moving assets between disk, tape, object storage and cloud resources. Today, we’re sharing what’s new with Dalet and what they’ll be showing at IBC.

Another year, another new format – or ten! Broadcasters are now surrounded by a sea of formats. Everything from HD-SDI, streaming formats, 4K/UHD and last but by no means least the many variants of IP based transport mechanisms like J2K or SMPTE 2022. It’s an increasing challenge for the industry to handle the mixture of all these sources especially when distributing content to the many output channels a broadcaster needs to address on a daily basis. Adding custom graphics and branding to the video forces us to have multiple versions of the same clip, eating up storage space and increasing the need for video management. Meanwhile broadcasters are often still stuck having specialised devices for singular tasks - video server for video, graphics servers, audio systems and vision mixers to name just a few. This isn’t anything new but a solution is urgently needed as we’re seeing these new formats arrive constantly. As we gear up for IBC 2015, let's take a look at these basic concepts and the understanding of how an efficient broadcaster should ideally operate, and dive into the creation of a new video, graphics and audio workflow centered on Viz Engine as a powerful video playback system.

Media content consists of both essence (the content itself) and its associated metadata. Everybody acknowledges that the metadata is important to classifying and locating content, so media companies tend to put a lot of thought into collecting and managing metadata — what type of information will be collected, where it will be entered and how often, etc. The idea is to ensure consistent, thorough metadata collection so that users can find and remonetize specific pieces of content. Metadata-gathering is a critical part of the metadata management process, to be sure, but it’s only half the process. What people tend to ignore is the other piece of metadata management — ensuring that the metadata is secure and archived. Why do they ignore it? Because media companies tend to focus so much on securing the actual content that they put little if any thought into securing the associated metadata, which is often stored in another database separate from the content itself. Let's look at best practices for protecting your metadata is to ensure that, while you’re backing up your content, you’re also backing up and archiving your metadata database.