Sony’s Ci Media Cloud Platform Announces New “Business Plan” and Enhanced Functionality

Ci Media Cloud has updated its offerings to include a plan optimized for small and medium businesses and added valuable functionality including Ci Transfer, a new desktop file transfer app, and enhanced support for Dolby Atmos audio files.

“We’re continually evolving our Ci platform to better address users’ needs and become an even more intrinsic part of their daily workflow,” says David Rosen, Vice President of Cloud Applications and Services, Sony Electronics. “With the addition of a plan created to address the requirements and budget of small and medium businesses, a rich new desktop app experience, and Dolby Atmos audio for immersive, authentic sound, we’re making Ci even more accessible, easy to use, and powerful for creatives and organizations in every facet of the industry.”

Business Plan Update

Ci just launched a new Business Plan as an addition to the Free, Pro, and Team online plans, which complements the custom Enterprise and Enterprise+ offerings. Optimized for independent creators or organizations with multiple teams, this online subscription option is a step up from Ci’s more introductory Team subscription. At about $249 a month (USD), businesses can create unlimited[1] Workspaces, access 1 TB (terabyte) of active storage, take advantage of 4 TB of archive storage, and leverage 500 GB (gigabytes) of monthly data transfers[2]. Featuring some of Ci’s enterprise-tier plans’ more advanced capabilities including custom branding and usage analytics, this new tier provides valuable benefits, a reasonable price, and simplified on-boarding.

Ci Transfer Desktop App and Sidecar Ingest Workflow

Ci Transfer is a desktop app that enables high-speed transfer of files and folders to and from the Ci Media Cloud platform. Available for Mac and PC devices, this new app supports multi-gig speed transfers[3], retries transfers after interruptions, and is optimized to handle hundreds of files. With pause and resume of transfers as well as transfer reports, urgent files can be prioritized for expedited transfers and once complete, validated in transfer logs. For larger organizations migrating archive libraries, the Ci Transfer app can be paired with a new sidecar ingest workflow to allow customers to move media libraries without losing sidecar metadata. By uploading both JSON files with media files, Ci will automatically link the metadata to the media files. Ci Transfer is available to download for free for all Ci users. The sidecar ingest workflow is an entitlement feature for enterprise customers.

Dolby Atmos Support

Video and audio files with Dolby Atmos can now be uploaded and playable in Ci’s player experience. The integration with Dolby.io enables support for ADM (Audio Definition Model) BWF (Broadcast Wave Format) Atmos audio and users can select to listen to and download a binaural or stereo audio proxies directly in Ci. Users can also visually see Loudness Unit Full Scale (LUFS) and True Peak levels in Ci’s built-in media analysis tool. Creative and quality assurance (QA) teams can listen to and work with immersive content, as it was intended to be heard.