NAB 2017: Wazee Digital Announces Upgrades to Digital Media Hub
Wazee Digital (Wynn Salon Suite 3903), a leading provider of cloud-native video-management and licensing services, is upgrading its Digital Media Hub, a centralized, web-based system that allows near-live moments to be captured and made immediately available for global highlights, publishing, and syndication as the event is happening. With the upgrade come two major enhancements: a gallery view to simplify content organization and search, and integration with Aspera Direct-to-S3 to accelerate file downloads.
Digital Media Hub was designed for sports-rights holders and media and entertainment organizations that need to provide permission-based access to content housed in a central location through a single portal. Content is captured and ingested directly into Wazee Digital Core, the cloud-native digital-asset–management solution that powers Digital Media Hub on the backend and similarly underpins all other Wazee Digital products and services. Ingestion happens in near real time, and, once the content enters Core, users can begin working with it in Digital Media Hub immediately.
The upgrades make Digital Media Hub even more configurable because content owners now have more flexibility in the way they parse and organize the content and more specificity in granting access. Likewise, users now have an easier, faster way to find and download what they need.
Specifically, the new gallery view enables rightsholders to organize content in a simple and intuitive way, with a completely configurable organizational hierarchy powered by content metadata. Rightsholders can also integrate thumbnails to depict hierarchical relationships among the content and make categories and subcategories easy for people to identify. For example, content from a golf tournament is categorized by day and then subcategorized by players who appeared on that day. Player tiles help visually organize content for a specific player based on images pulled from a database. If a player appeared on Day 4, for instance, the system automatically pulls an image and uses it to display a tile for that player on that day.
Once the content is organized, rightsholders can create user accounts and grant permissions as they see fit, such as allowing certain people or groups to access only certain categories or subcategories of content. These capabilities help drive users to specific content the rightsholder wants to highlight/distribute.
On the other end, people who access Digital Media Hub can find what they’re looking for more easily because they’re able to search for content in the more intuitive gallery view versus looking through a file directory. For instance, in the golf tournament example, people can click on an image tile and access all available audio, video, images, and transcripts associated with a given player on a given day.
Then, when they’re ready to transfer the files, they get one-click, accelerated downloads, thanks to the Aspera integration. Aspera Direct-to-S3 enables a direct download from Digital Media Hub without wasting time restoring or staging the asset. Instead, as soon as the user clicks “download,” the transfer begins.
Unlike FTP sites, file-hosting services, and “sneakernet” workarounds, such as hard drives or thumb drives, Digital Media Hub gives broadcasters administration and permissioning capabilities and flexible workflows for transcoding, metadata management, and more. Meanwhile, stakeholders get immediate access to broadcast-quality content; enhanced, searchable metadata; and preview capabilities all from one location.
Also, because content is delivered to a central database (Core) and then presented in Digital Media Hub — a unique quality among access portals — rightsholders can centralize multiple types of content previously hosted in multiple locations. In this way, Digital Media Hub embodies Wazee Digital’s “make once, use any” philosophy: create and ingest content one time into a central location and then access it anytime from anywhere through multiple workflows for unlimited use and reuse.
“Rightsholders using Digital Media Hub already benefited from having a single location for acquiring, processing, distributing, and storing media gleaned from live events. And users needing content already benefited from being able to search and download from anywhere in the world through a central portal,” says Brian Eldredge, director, product line management and Live Event Services, Wazee Digital. “Now, thanks to this upgrade, all of those users will notice even more flexibility, simplicity, and speed in organizing, finding, and downloading content. And as rightsholders deal with distributing an ever increasing amount of content these days, they’ll be able to retain control of how it’s distributed and to whom.”
More information about Wazee Digital’s products and services is available at www.wazeedigital.com.