Signiant’s Digital Media Galaxy

Great segment on NPR last night about what’s news and what isn’t. Shirley Sherrod loses her job over a botched video and thousands and thousands of documents are leaked to Wikileaks: these are a couple of recent “news” items that were talked about in the segment.

As I sit here typing away on this corporate blog of ours, I could be saying absolutely anything I want and in just a few moments it will be posted on the internet, it is so simple. Is this news?

Have a listen or a read…

“Through the battlefield smoke of the Wikileaks reports and the fresh news out of federal court in Arizona, a story from last week keeps ringing through the news business. The misrepresentation of Shirley Sherrod as a racist – and her sudden firing, then rehabilitation – has put the media, the news media itself, on trial. What has happened to the quality of this country’s national information flow? Is it poisoned? Is it now, really, propaganda? And whose?”

Very cool…

“Nation Geographic Channels Alien Earths, created by director/producer Dana Berry of Skyworks Digital, has been nominated for an Emmy in the category of Outstanding Animated Program. Point 360 West and animation director Jason Hearne, as well as animation director Dave Jerrard of Radical 3D, worked with Berry creating stunning animated effects of Super Novas and exploding planets adrift in the universe.”

Last night NPR aired a story – “Summertime And The Cable Is Boring” – and while I was listening on my ride home from work, I thought to myself, is this guy in my brain or what? I couldn’t agree more. Don’t get me wrong, I like to be outside in the summertime just as much as the next guy, but when it’s 95 degrees Fahrenheit and about 300% humidity, I like to sit inside in the air conditioned living room and just relax from time to time. You used to be able to rely on Cable TV with shows like The Shield, but these days it’s The Closer, yawn…..

Each month, HubSpot publishes a list of 100 customers enjoying the most success using their software. Signiant is in this month’s group of customers who earned this honor.In fact, we’re at the top of the list.

If you have no idea who Hubspot is or what they do, take a look at the list and peruse their site. We’re honored to be at the top of the list.

This post is a steal, literally, from Will Richmond’s VideoNuze newsletter today. Everyone loves statistics and as I’ve mentioned before, people are always asking us for numbers to compare one online event to another, here’s what Will had to say…

FIFA World Cup: ESPN3.com (7.4 million unique viewers, 15.7 million hours viewed), UnivisionFutbol.com (10 million hours viewed)

2010 NCAA March Madness: CBSSports.com (8.3 million unique visits to MMOD video player, 11.7 million hours of video and audio)

2009-2010 Sunday Night Football: NBCSports.com (2.2 million unique visits, 1M hours viewed, 29 minutes of average tune-in time)

2008 Beijing Summer Olympics: NBCOlympics.com (70 million video streams, 10 million hours viewed, 27 minutes of average tune-in time)

You can read the entire article with Will’s commentary on his site.

According to Broadcasting & Cable, “more than two million people watched [the] live feed of [the] starlet’s day in court”. I don’t know if you’ve seen it or not, I might have taken a peak on People.com, but if she had known THAT many people would be watching it live (not to mention on demand), I don’t think she would have behaved the way she did. The article states….

Nearly 2.3 million people tuned in to TMZ.com’s live stream of Lindsay Lohan’s day in court on Tuesday, July 6, in which Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Marsha Revel sentenced the troubled starlet to 90 days in jail and 90 days at an in-patient rehab program.

That’s by far the largest number of live streams ever delivered by TMZ.com. Prior to this, the site’s best days were during a previous Lohan hearing on May 24, in which 845,000 people streamed video on the site, and on June 25, 2009, when Michael Jackson died.

“The interesting thing is that people are typically on the site from five to seven minutes at a time, but yesterday they were on the site for 16.3 minutes,” said TMZ Executive Producer Harvey Levin. “People could literally not take their eyes off this. It was one of the most compelling court hearings I’ve ever seen.”

Personally, I wouldn’t have described it as compelling but anyhow, you can find the rest of the article here.

There’s an article today on paidContent.org called… Oxygen: Women Are Addicted To Facebook, But Unsure Where To Draw The Lines and it lists out some surprising statistics about my gender and its love of Facebook. I suppose that more than 400 million active FB users can’t be wrong about Facebook but seriously, checking updates before you brush your teeth in the morning? That’s just wrong. Another surprising one…32 % think photos of themselves or others making obscene gestures are appropriate. You’re not in Kansas anymore…

You can find the paidContent.org article and all of the statistics on their site.

For those of us in the US, it’s the Friday before our 4th of July long weekend so things are a little quiet. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to remind you all that plans are already underway for our participation in IBC. Each year, IBC hosts 1,300+ exhibitors, 1,000+ journalists and 45,000+ attendees from around the world – making it one massive show and well worth the trip to Amsterdam. We’ve already started booking meetings so if you’d like to meet with Signiant while you’re at the show, you can request a meeting today.

If you’re celebrating your independence this weekend, have a good one.

 Other Media: Download

If you haven’t already heard, Hulu announced Hulu Plus this week. Below you’ll find an overview of what the service is so I won’t go on about it. I have requested an invitation to subscribe to Hulu Plus but I haven’t heard back yet. When Hulu was first launched I also had an early subscription and I thought, and still do think, that Hulu is fantastic – so I’m optimistic about “Plus”. If you’re reading this post, I imagine you’re familiar with Hulu but if not, you’ve got to check it out. While you’re there, request an early invite to Plus too.

Okay, I admit it. I’m the one that put “Books” in the title of our press release today about how we’re working with the Library of Congress (or LOC), but it’s kind of clever. It’s not easy issuing a press release on a day like today, when everyone is talking about Landon Donovan, but it was already lined up, who knew? But back to the LOC, they are using Signiant to aggregate an enormous amount of content for the digital preservation project, which is pretty cool. We’re talking about the preservation of millions of books, audio clips, photographs, maps, video, and even tweets! And this is for the oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world.

Now every Friday morning as I listen to StoryCorps on NPR and they say…”you can find an archive of today’s story on the Library of Congress’ web site,” I know my company is playing a role in getting it there.

Since Signiant was involved in both the Beijing and Vancouver Olympics, we’re constantly being asked…”how do you compare the two?” And now that we’re involved with the World Cup, the question is starting to come up…”how does this compare to your involvement with the Olympics?”

paidContent ran a great article today that lays out some very interesting statistics. And it seems as if we’re not the only one being asked these questions….

“It’s an appropriate time to compare what we’re doing against the World Cup,”  Alex Balfour, the new media head of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games said, presenting these stats to the Social Media Influence conference in London on Tuesday…

• Competing nations: World Cup: 32 | Olympics: 205

• Athletes: World Cup: 736 | Olympics: 15,000

• Media: 20,000

• Tickets: 9 million

• Venues: World Cup: 12 | Olympics: 170+ venues

“The size of what we’re doing is absolutely enormous,” Balfour said. “Day by day, I get terrified by numbers about the range of things we’re doing. The scale is just absolutely huge.” The last, winter Olympics give an indication…

Vancouver2010.com stats from Balfour…

• 291 million visits (Beijing 2008: 105 million)

• 83 million uniques (Beijing 2008: 70 million – compared with Yahoo’s 32 million, NBC.com’s 20 million)

• Over 50 percent of all Canadians visited the site

• 8.7 million visits to mobile site, 1.25 app downloads

• 1.2 million Facebook fans (Beijing 2008: 320,000)

• “Every post they put on Facebook attracted about 100,000 comments.”

Read the full article on paidContent.org.

As I mentioned earlier, we attended Will Richmond’s VideoSchmooze in LA on Tuesday. The panel was entitled: How Hollywood Succeeds in the Digital Distribution Era and had some great panelists. Here’s a video of the panel…

Next week Broadcast Engineering is hosting an event in NYC - IT & Digital Workflow Boot Camp. They say…“Learn how you can build, manage and improve digital workflow throughout your facility – from the experts leading the way!” So we think it makes a lot of sense for us to be there, and we will! Sometimes marketing opportunities come along that are SO on target, you can’t pass them by, this is one of those times. We’re a proud sponsor of the event. If you’re interested in attending, check out their site.

A short while ago, Signiant published a press release about our involvement in moving files for the World Cup. We got a notice shortly thereafter saying that we didn’t have proper permission to use “World Cup” in our press releases – so we pulled it. But now publications are talking about our involvement with different customers of ours…so I’m forced to brag about it on our blog. I just can’t help it. In addition to working with ESPN (story below), we’re also working with LaserNet. Check out the story in Broadcast Engineering…

LaserNet uses Signiant to speed file transfer

How cool is that? Yes, Signiant is helping ESPN move files between the sports network’s HD production facilities in South Africa and its headquarters in Bristol, CT. Signiant software is also facilitating the transfer of audio and video files between venues and production facilities in South Africa.

“The is by far the largest event we’ve ever done…” said Kevin Stolworthy, vice president, technology, ESPN.

Read the entire article published in Broadcast Engineering.

As I was driving into work this morning, I heard the results of an interesting poll on NPR. And I quote…”A poll among English fans revealed that one-third of them would agree to do housework for a year and 12 percent of them would give up all sex for a year if, by doing such a deal with the devil, they could guarantee an English victory in the World Cup.”

12%? For a year?

You read that correctly, if you don’t believe me, you can read the entire story, As Soccer Grows, Passions Rise For World Cup, on NPR’s web site.

A few weeks ago Akamai hosted a live online panel that was broadcast over the Akamai Network; it was entitled “Constructing the ultimate online video experience…from the inside out”. It is very interesting and definitely worth watching. Panelists are from NBC Sports, EPIX, MTV and IDC.

Hear how they are using new technology to raise the bar and hide the complexities of online video, and create an entirely new viewing experience for a video-hungry audience.

You can view it by clicking here.

VideoSchmooze…I think I just like to say it, although I had to check the spelling. Will Richmond has pulled together another fantastic panel discussion – “How Hollywood Succeeds in the Digital Distribution Era” – with panelists from Disney/ABC, Warner Brothers, Netflix and more. The event is being held in LA on June 15, 2010 at 8am at the SLS Hotel at Beverly Hills. Click here for more details and to register.

Check out this article in TV Technology…written by by Claudia Kienzle

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
With an estimated worldwide viewership of 1.5 billion, the 2010 FIFA World Cup in Johannesburg, South Africa, June 11-July 12 will arguably be the world’s largest sports broadcast in history.

The greatest challenge broadcasters face is providing all 64 matches from this quadrennial men’s soccer event without any technical glitches. Broadcasters face complex logistics because some of the 10 venues are almost a day’s drive from Johannesburg.

Read the full story.

If you don’t know about EPIX yet, you really have to check them out. Some say they are akin to Hulu, they are to movies what Hulu is to television shows. Not exactly but that gives you an idea. EPIX delivers its extensive library of HD movies, concerts, and original content to subscribers across its premium cable channel, video-on-demand and online service.

Today Signiant announced how we’re working with EPIX – yet another extremely cool company in the Media & Entertainment industry to be partnered with.

The service is available to over 30 million homes nationwide through carriage agreements with Verizon, DISH, Cox, Mediacom, Charter and NCTC.

Maybe you have access to a ton of great movies and you don’t even realize it yet.

Did you know that the Library of Congress is going to be archiving your tweets? Check it out…

Are you new to Signiant? Or perhaps you know who we are but you want to learn more about the latest version of our software solution. Take a look at this newly created product tour and learn how Signiant can help your business streamline content supply chain management operations from production through distribution.

If you missed visiting Signiant at NAB this year, we invite you to listen to this podcast as Tony Lapolito is interviewed by Digital Production Buzz’s Larry Jordan on the show floor. Tony explains how our new offerings accommodate all customers, whether you’re just beginning to eliminate tapes or you’re connecting your entire content supply chain to streamline operations – Signiant can help. Have a listen.

Learn more by visiting the product section of our web site.

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Are you heading out to Vegas this year? If so, schedule your meeting with Signiant today! Fill out the brief form on-line and you’ll be automatically registered to win an iPad.

Come find out why we’re more than transport, we’re content supply chain management.

If you’re not yet registered, register on us.

Signiant is proud to have played a role in the successful delivery of on-demand video for NBC’s coverage of the Vancouver Olympic Winter Games…

“With hundreds of highlights and more than a thousand hours of coverage, we needed an efficient workflow to bring the Games to Olympic fans,” said Perkins Miller, SVP, Digital Media, NBC Sports and Olympics. “Signiant has been a critical partner in making this process fast and error-free.”

Read the entire Signiant/NBC Olympic press release.

The Signiant team has been on the road for the past few weeks hitting London, LA and NYC next week – visiting with customers, sharing new ideas and discussing solutions to common problems. The events being held have consisted of  compelling speakers, our customers, who really spoke to the critical issues that we all face every day. You can see some of those presentations delivered by executives from Discovey and BSkyB at: www.signiant.com/customer-council-london.

“One of the most interesting things I’ve observed as I travel around the world visiting M&E companies, is how little they really know about the content that they own or that is passing through their hands. For example, during a visit with a major broadcaster, I saw row after row of cubicles with interns scanning videotapes in search of specific 1970s news footage. This particular broadcaster has an initiative to digitize this content and then produce a series of shows based on that decade. “

Read the entire story, authored by Tom Ohanian and published on MediaPost.com

There was a great article this past week in Broadcasting & Cable about NBCU’s coverage of the 2010 Olympic games and how it will actually be generated by a significantly smaller staff and a leaner technical operation, a reflection of current economic realities, technology advances and NBCU’s growing expertise in pulling off these massive events. The article can be found here.

And of course here’s an excerpt which includes the role Signiant will once again play in the Olympics…NBCU will again use MediaGrid servers and ProCast IP technology for the Highlights Factory. A MediaGrid in Vancouver will connect to EVS XT[2] production servers to enable fast access to HD media. Edited content will be sent as 50 Mbps MPEG-2 files over AT&T fiber to a second MediaGrid system in New York, which will pump content to new-media delivery outlets under the direction of NBCU’s MICAH internal distribution system (a combination of Rhozet transcoding and Signiant file acceleration technology).

Everyone’s talking about security these days.  Whether you’ve just traveled internationally, or are about to, or if you’re one of many content creators who is trying to protect your very valuable content. Tony Lapolito recently wrote this brief, yet informative article about five best practices for securing content during collaboration. It was recently featured in TV Bay. Below is the opening paragraph, you can read the entire article by clicking here.

Drip…drip…Woooooooosh

That is the sound of your content leaking to the hands of pirates – costing the industry billions. Wolverine, Iron Manевтини мебели and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are just some of the movies reported to have been leaked. The same holds true for TV content – though some argue that when a pilot or season premiere leaks it falls into the promotion category…..

Signiant recently released version 8.2 of its Content Distribution Management software which was developed for B2B collaboration. Rick Clarkson, Senior Director of Product Management, delivered a webcast outlining the new functionality, if you missed it, you can view the recording, go to:  http://www.signiant.com/82-webcast-0. At the end, Rick answered questions from the audience. Here’s a sampling of what our customers asked…

Q: With the new Media Exchange and Media Publish Point [in this release], are you saying that I can send any size files to anyone similar to e-mail?

A: Correct, that’s what I am saying. Media Exchange is a great alternative to e-mail or FTP. Most people are familiar with the pros and cons of FTP, and certainly with e-mail you are going to be limited in the file sizes that you can move. For the folks on the webcast today, I am pretty sure no one is going to tell me that they are not moving large files – and it just can’t be supported with e-mail. So the answer to your question is yes.

Q: With the new Media Exchange integration and with the Central Management function, unlike FTP, do I have a complete log of all files being sent and received by users?

A: Yes, this is really important because recently had a lot of customer meetings at IBC and this is what they asked for. What’s great is you have all these neat features with Media Exchange and Media Publish Point and there is a lot of great work that has been done there for the user interface, but the real key thing that we’ve done here, is now you can upload Media Exchange into a workflow. So you could preset a workflow. For example, if I want to send a file to a location, but before I send it I wanted to transcode it, QC it, watermark it, and then send it. With Media Exchange, used in conjunction with our central manager, we can actually put this all together. So a non-technical user in the field can upload content to this “workflow special,” and when it uploads into the workflow, the manager would grab it, run it through the various processes, and then deliver it to the end user. The end user does not need to know all the details of how this process works, they just need to know to select the file off their desktop and move it up.

Q: Can Signiant send a file to multiple recipients, but with different meta data for each location?

A: Yes, and this is all part of the power of integrating our interface from Media Exchange with our Media Manager. Prior to 8.2, you had a pretty locked down Media Exchange start component. Now you can actually customize that start component and it will prompt you for a lot more information, it’s a much more powerful thing. This is a big takeaway that sometimes people miss. They see the big fancy end user interface functions within Media Exchange, but one thing, if you are using the Central Managers and Media Exchange, there’s a lot of power in connecting those things together.