A platform for success

Mark Layton talks to Dalet's Kevin Savina about the acquisition of the Ooyala Flex

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Mark Layton talks to Dalet's Kevin Savina about the acquisition of the Ooyala Flex

target=_blank title=Share on LinkedIn class=share-linkedin> Mark Layton talks to Dalet's Kevin Savina about the acquisition of the Ooyala Flex

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French technology provider Dalet says that its recent acquisition of the Ooyala Flex Media Platform will open new doors for the company and strengthen its content management services.

Dalet added the content supply business to its portfolio in July in a deal that included Ooyala's customer contracts in the UK, US and France, and the onboarding of its sales, marketing, engineering, professional services and support staff.

Kevin Savina, Dalet's director of product strategy, tells TVBEurope: Adding the Ooyala Flex Media platform to the Dalet product line-up strengthens our ability to answer the needs of our existing customers who are looking to expand their multi-platform distribution and OTT workflows.

Equally as important, the Ooyala Flex Media platform opens doors for Dalet into corporate brands, telcos, smaller leagues and sports teams. This includes brands like Audi or National Rugby League, who are not traditional media companies, yet require agile content management tools as part of their multimedia engagement strategy.

Savina explains that the union of the two services is good news for existing Dalet and Ooyala customers, with benefits going both ways: It adds depth to the existing Dalet offering for our typical clients, which are mostly large organisations in broadcast or in sports, in terms of multi-platform distribution and OTT workflows, where the Ooyala Flex Media platform has the leading product offering on the market.

Existing Ooyala clients will also gain added functionality from Dalet products and services, such as the Dalet AmberFin orchestrated media processing platform and Dalet Media Cortex AI service platform, enabling them to augment and expand their existing Ooyala Flex workflows.

Savina also assures existing Ooyala customers that they will see no immediate changes to implementation. On the contrary, this acquisition will drive further development, growth and innovation for the Ooyala Flex Media Platform solution. Dalet and Ooyala's joint R&D and engineering teams have already started to look at ways to integrate existing Dalet products with the Ooyala platform, so that existing clients can make use of additional functionality and features.

Dalet will, of course, be at IBC2019 in Amsterdam this month, sharing exhibit space with Ooyala, where visitors will have the opportunity to take a look at the platform first-hand, including some new features being unveiled at the show.

Now under the Dalet umbrella, the Ooyala Flex Media Platform also has a solid roadmap, reveals Savina. Increased support for OTT workflows is essential for a solid multi-platform distribution strategy, so the platform now includes the ability to publish to multiple online video platforms, such as Kaltura, JWPlayer and Brightcove.

Additionally, integration with Dalet AmberFin for transcoding will be demonstrated, developing the first synergies between the Ooyala Flex Media Platform and the wider Dalet product range.

Enhanced single sign-on functionality with OKTA is also being implemented into the platform, which will streamline tasks between it and other business applications. Support for MPEG-DASH, as well as increasing union across existing platforms, with pre-existing proxies and multi-site replication capabilities, will also be unveiled at the IBC.

Savina reveals that the Flex is not the only piece of kit that Dalet is excited to be showing at IBC2019. Making its worldwide debut at the show is the Dalet CubeNG, a new version of the existing Dalet Cube platform, which is used for news graphics creation and workflows.

Fully integrated across the Dalet Unified News Operations solution, powered by Dalet Galaxy five, the Dalet CubeNG utilises the Brainstorm Aston Graphics engine to deliver 2D and 3D branding and visuals, for both on-air and file-based graphics creation. Savina says that will allow news broadcasters to easily create dynamic branding and up-level visual storytelling across traditional, digital and social channels.

Dalet will also be unveiling its Media Cortex and Remote Editing systems for the first time in Europe at IBC. The Media Cortex is an AI Cloud platform that offers pay-as-you-go cognitive services which the company says goes much further than the basic benefits of standard speech-to-text, face recognition and sentiment analysis. Savina explains: Dalet Media Cortex orchestrates advanced automatic metadata enrichment to provide deep content insights and discovery and automated captioning. The service orchestrates combinations of cognitive services, fine-tunes the models, versions the data sets, aligns them with customers' taxonomies, and eventually surfaces the results at various levels of the Dalet application stack to provide actionable insights and real value to the users and to the organisation.

Dalet Remote Editing, meanwhile, offers a multimedia editing framework that is fast enough and has enough features for news or sports journalists and editors to work in the field or at remote offices without requiring asset management systems at every location.

Media organisations in fast-paced production markets such as news, sports and reality TV often have extensive in-the-field production needs that are critical to their business, says Savina. Unmitigated access to content located at the central hub and accelerated media exchange from the field to home and back are paramount f

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