Braving the British Wer

The beginning of December can mean only one thing a return to ITV, an integrated producer broadcaster, operating the largest commercial family of channels in the UK, for the annual NMR User Meeting. It was great to see so many people brave the cold British weather and give up their evenings to see what is new in Cantemo Portal, as well as some of our partners solutions. The provision of beer naturally helps with the motivation but I like to think they also learnt something new. Indeed, Vidispines Isak Jonsson, commented no-one gets the roadmap as detailed as this, except at this event.

There were a number of recurring trends throughout the evening. Firstly, many of the companies presenting have grown over the past year, with the majority either in new offices or in the process of moving. In case you arent aware, we moved back into our new office earlier this year. It is of course a really positive sign for the industry and for video management and the associated features and applications. With so many different organisations now producing large quantities of video, it really shouldnt be surprising that the need to manage those videos is also growing.

The other major recurring theme was hybrid cloud. Neil Anderson of NMR mentioned it in his introduction, citing a growing trend for companies looking to adopt a hybrid approach, rather than having everything on premise or everything in the cloud. ITV talked us through its Project Phoenix and why it adopted a hybrid cloud approach, enabling easy sharing of content through the cloud, whilst not sucking up too much bandwidth with the hi-res content, which is still kept on premise. Alistair Geer from ITV did also note that this particular project only involves short form content, therefore some of the usual cloud concerns are not relevant. Project Phoenix itself is extremely impressive, as a purpose-built system for all the short form content, such as promos. Thanks to our flexible platform, ITV was able to quickly adapt is software platform to meet rapidly changing business requirements and is now fully operational with its new system. The user interface has been kept clean and simple and users can add the actions and features they need on an individual level to keep it uncluttered.

As always, the evening also covered recent developments and upcoming features in various solutions. From our side, our CTO, Jimmy Engelbrecht, talked through the recently launched Cantemo Portal 3.0. He also gave a little preview of some of the things in our roadmap, including a Windows agent for all those customers not using Macs, more archive methods, and a number of innovations around metadata and item relations.

Vidispines Isak Jonsson also gave an update on the latest version of Vidispine, followed by a detailed overview of the Vidispine roadmap, which includes a number of enhancements, such as IMF creation, API request caching for faster APIs, and DIVA partial file restore, amongst others.

Another partner, Automate-IT was introduced by Julien Gachot. Started as a part of his other company, Ivory, Automate-IT is now a fully fledged separate company providing simple solutions to sophisticated workflows. As Julien pointed out, Automate-IT is there for users who want to automate sophisticated After Effects workflows, leverage their infrastructure better and deliver faster, or connect their creative team with their MAM or BPM.

MediaSmiths is another growing company. Its easy-to-use Profile Panel does some really sophisticated work in the background and enables Adobe Prelude users to connect it with Portal. This means you get Portal templates available for shots selection. It also enables offline working, crucial for on location with no connection.

Last, but by no means least, we heard about an EU funded project to develop a platform for automatic metadata extraction and transcoding for live content. The project, ReCAP, is being driven by NMR, together with ToolsOnAir, Nablet, and Joanneum Research.

LINK:	http://www.cantemo.com/news/2016/12/braving-the-british-weather/...
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