Signiant’s Tom Ohanian and Tony Lapolito discuss their observations while at CES in Vegas.

Though Tony focuses on Panasonic’s 150″ Plasma TV, Tom’s biggest takeaway from the show is that companies are focused on servicing the consumer, now, more than ever. There’s also a lot of discussion about the many devices that are available today to deliver quality content to the consumer.

As always, there’s a lot of interesting banter and observations in this Podcast, have a listen.

In this Podcast, Signiant’s Tom Ohanian and Tony Lapolito are joined by Joe Maidenberg, the VP of Post Production Services, and Dave Simon, the Director of Broadcast Engineering at Current (www.current.com), the industry’s first Emmy® Award winning peer-to-peer news and information network.

Joe and Dave discuss the many unique facets of Current including the fact that viewers create all of the short-form, non-fiction content and how Current manages its completely tapeless, file-based workflow.

They also explain the challenges, but more importantly, the benefits of their tapeless environment. The Podcast offers many interesting technical details, have a listen.

In this podcast, Tom Ohanian discusses collaborative post production and the trends that are affecting (shrinking) the production schedule. Tom explains that certain variables, including distributed sets of individuals working on a 24/7 schedule and the cost of storage decreasing all the time, are just a couple of the factors that are contributing to the need for digital media supply chains. Further, Tom details how Signiant’s technology powers Avid-to-Avid transfer across WANs.

Inside Digital Media is a place where you can see and hear interviews with thought leaders in the Digital Media industries.

After the presentation, there were a lot of great questions so it’s clear that moving digital media content over networks is of concern and that, if anything, being part of the digital media supply chain whether you’re an editor, graphics designer, sound mixer, etc. will continue to place demands on working in distributed, collaborative environments.

But, of course, because it was an Avid event, prior to my formal Signiant presentation, I told a few stories about the early days at Avid (I was employee #8). While preparing for the event, I had done some rummaging through my Avid archives and started off the night by playing back what I believe is the earliest known video of “The Avid/1 Editing System”. This was done in August 1987 and prior to the system being given its formal name: “The Avid/1 Media Composer” (that came much later, in 1989). The video that you see below is the early prototype that ran on an Apollo workstation. Notice that the editing model is quite different than the eventual source/record model that defined the product in its first release. In this video, however, the filmstrip model is much more similar to early Quantel products. In any case, enjoy. It’s a piece of digital nonlinear editing history.

You can also find the video on YouTube. May the force be with you.

Listen in as NBC Universal’s Nader Kazemi, Deployment Manager for Digital Media Delivery, explains the challenges he faced before having Signiant in place and how Signiant solved his problems. It’s less than 10 minutes long and worth the listen! Nader specifically discusses having:

• A globally distributed environment with high latency

• Many different workflows with a number of variations, requirements

• The need for a central management of aggregated systems

In this episode of the Digital Media Galaxy podcast, Tom Ohanian and Tony Lapolito discuss what’s been happening at Signiant these last few months. The pair discuss the recent success of IBC and Tom offers the details of a couple of new Signiant customers and the problems that Signiant solved. The two also dish on ravioli in Italy…you’ll have to listen in!

We hope you enjoy this podcast. If you have any comments or feedback, please email editor@digitalmediagalaxy.com.

Listen in as Tom Ohanian discusses the explosion of digital media and how you can service the Digital Media Supply Chain with so many distribution channels. Tom describes how you can go from content creation to ingest to manipulation to editing to transcoding and encoding and ultimately to delivering your media files.

In this episode, Tom Ohanian introduces a completely new concept for the media & entertainment industry: the idea of the digital media supply chain. In addition to the audio podcast, there is also a PDF transcript of the podcast. iTunes subscribers can view this directly in iTunes and visitors to the blog may download it using the link below.

We hope you enjoy this podcast. If you have any comments or feedback, please email us at editor@digitalmediagalaxy.com.

In this episode of the Digital Media Galaxy podcast, Tom Ohanian describes how integrated security is part of any complete digital media distribution management system.

We hope you enjoy this podcast. If you have any comments or feedback, please email editor@digitalmediagalaxy.com.

There are two formats of the video available. One is formatted for the iPod. iTunes viewers should right click the playback window and select “original size” to more clearly see the demo portion of the video. The other file is formatted for Windows Media Player. The iPod-formatted file is approximately 19MB; the Windows Media file is approximately 62MB.

Whichever file you view, in just a few short minutes, you will see why Signiant is being greeted such anticipation in the media and entertainment industry.

In this special podcast, Tom Ohanian describes the success Signiant had at April’s NAB 2007 trade show. Tom also outlines the real-world broadcast file-based workflow demonstration of Digital Media Distribution Management Suite that was given live at the show. Tom also promises that we’ll have a recording of the demo for this podcast, so stay tuned.

If you have any comments or questions, please email us at editor@digitalmediagalaxy.com.

And, just for good measure the YouTube Flash version is embedded here, as well.

We hope you enjoy the cartoon!

Just in time for your plane ride to Las Vegas, Tom Ohanian has recorded a quick podcast with his tips on what’s going to be hot at the National Association of Broadcasters 2007 trade show. NAB 2007 is running April 14 - 19, with exhibits open from April 16.

Please stop by Signiant’s booth (SU9027) to see Digital Media Distribution Management Suite, watch our cartoon and to meet Tom and the rest of the Signiant crew in person.

We hope you enjoy the cartoon as much as we did producing it.

Continuing our titillating previews of the content we’ve developed to premier at NAB 2007, this post contains two different goodies. Just click on the icons and/or links at the bottom of this post to play the audio and video files.

First is an iPod-ready eight second shot from the cartoon revealing the design of the much-anticipated (well, at least by us caffeine addicts) Signiant Digital Media Rush energy drink. Even if these libations aren’t…ahem…your cup of tea, you should stop by NAB 2007 booth SU9027 just to see what happens to the staff when it’s all we have to drink for four days.

Next, we offer a :30 spot that we’ll be playing on the monorail and which we hope will repeat in your mind ad infinitum while you are in Las Vegas.

Episode #7 is an overview of Signiant Digital Media Distribution Management Suite’s automation capabilities.

Not to be confused with “broadcast automation,” Tom Ohanian describes how tasks are combined into workflows which are then managed across the enterprise by Signiant.

As always, we welcome your feedback and comments to editor@digitalmediagalaxy.com or on the blog at www.digitalmediagalaxy.com

In episode six of the Digital Media Galaxy podcast, Tom Ohanian talks about the fundamental difference between simple WAN acceleration of large content transfers and the capabilities of Signiant’s software, which combines acceleration with central management.

We welcome your comments on this podcast. Please post comments here on the blog, or email editor@digitalmediagalaxy.com.

In this podcast, Tom Ohanian introduces the specific capabilities of Signiant Digital Media Distribution Management. This is the first of a series of more technically-oriented podcasts which will describe the capabilities and features of this important new solution for managing the explosion of digital media and formats.

In this episode Tom Ohanian discusses the real impact of next-generation DRM on consumers. Given the high level of discussion and anxiety taking place as a result of the publication of Peter Gutman’s white paper and Security Now! episodes 73, 75, and 75 on this topic and Tom’s long experience in the media and entertainment industries, we hope to offer a more balanced view of next-gen DRM.

Thanks for listening, and as always, we welcome your comments to editor@digitalmediagalaxy.com

In this, our third podcast, Tom Ohanian explores the impact of user-generated content on the broadcast industry. It’s a fascinating discussion of the changes and impacts the explosion of media has unleashed on the media and entertainment industry.

I want to apologize to our audience for the audio quality of DMG #3. I made some last-minute changes to the settings on our recording rig and something happened to cause us to get a low-quality recording. I decided to put this into the feed in spite of the audio problems because Tom’s perspective is so illuminating.

I hope to have the audio issues cleared up for our next episode.

Thank you for listening and/or subscribing and make sure to tell your friends about the Digital Media Galaxy podcast. As always, we welcome comments and feedback to editor@digitalmediagalaxy.com

In episode two of the Digital Media Galaxy podcast, Tom Ohanian elaborates on why central management of digital media distribution workflows is an absolute requirement for effective collaboration and coordination in the the entertainment industry’s production ecosystem. We welcome your feedback. Please email editor@digitalmediagalaxy.com or post a comment on our blog at www.digitalmediagalaxy.com

Our initial podcast is now online. We hope you like it…and that you’ll let us know what you think. We had originally intended for the podcast to be about 10 minutes. But, as you’ll hear, we had so much to say, we ran for about 30 minutes. That tells us there’s a lot more we want to say…so we’ll be back with another podcast very soon that expands on the subjects discussed here.
In this episode, Tom Ohanian describes what he means when he talks about “file-based workflows” and why this change in the way media and entertainment companies work is so incredibly important in today’s competitive marketplace.