NAB 2018: Prime Focus Technologies To Launch Content Supply Chain Solutions For OTT, Digital Transformation
Prime Focus Technologies (PFT), the technology arm of Prime Focus, will continue to reimagine automation across the content supply chain at NAB 2018 with the debut of new solutions leveraging the company’s flagship CLEAR Media ERP that features powerful work order automation embedded with MAM. The latest solutions target the developing needs of media and entertainment (M&E) industry customers dealing with complexity, volume, velocity and cost issues on the back of the OTT business models.
The impact of speed and scale on business processes throw a spotlight on human tasks and orchestration in conjunction with content-based workflows. New work order automation capabilities natively embedded in the CLEAR Cloud MAM module helps content creators better manage all media assets and tasks, including generation, timeline estimation, scheduling, assignment and execution across the content supply chain. These new features, along with CLEAR’s powerful workflow management capabilities, have led to the creation of powerful content supply chain solutions.
“PFT is continually upgrading and enhancing its CLEAR Media ERP Suite to provide higher levels of automation with tangible cycle time reduction and cost benefits,” says Ramki Sankaranarayanan, founder and global CEO at Prime Focus Technologies. “These new automations, leveraging the power of Cloud, empower users to better manage workflows across the enterprise, providing them with a competitive advantage in this highly driven and constantly changing marketplace.”
New solutions leveraging PFT’s CLEAR Media ERP include:
CLEAR Content Acquisition Portal: Facilitates management, planning, acquiring, evaluating, cataloguing, and scheduling of content. This portal makes it easier and less time-consuming to handle the ever-growing sources of original content. By automating and streamlining many of the processes in the content supply chain with end-to-end work order management and integrating with any in-house IT software, the CLEAR Content Acquisition Portal helps best manage media assets as they enter the workflow – all the way through distribution – automatically assigning tasks to different vendors and resources along the way.
CLEAR OTT Distribution: Addresses the growing need for improved content distribution and publishing to VoD platforms. The new solution acts as a one-stop-shop to manage, review, process, schedule, and publish content across all the platforms and devices of the broadcast universe, including archiving, content usage rights and royalties. Using the power of automation, CLEAR OTT Distribution detects when important elements are missing from a package and initiates the work orders to obtain the elements. Features of the solution include automated work orders, unified tracking dashboard, and integration with scheduling and rights management systems.
CLEAR Digital Lab: Brings together the various stakeholders and suppliers engaged in the production and post production processes with supply chain vendors for various tasks, such as editorial, VFX, post production, sound, localization, mastering, and downstream distribution. CLEAR Digital Lab creates a connected Cloud ecosystem for collaborators making it their media universe. It handles scripted, unscripted, short form, and digital content genres; files of different resolutions; and tracks and manages media logistics including distribution of varied content types across the production supply chain. PFT has partnered with Microsoft Azure as its preferred Cloud hosting platform – providing the scale, performance, accessibility, and reliability only Microsoft can offer.
CLEAR Ingest for Satellite and Terrestrial Distribution: Provides a single software to centralize and automate ingest, prep, QC and delivery of content to the MCR of the various TV stations. The solution thereby can eliminate the duplication of efforts at the various TV stations and handle the ingest of all types of content including long form and commercials. The solution is bundled with pre-integrations to Pathfire, Pitch Blue, Nexio and Signiant along with Satellite bandwidth management using Compusat and IDC XD.
Leveraging CLEAR’s built-in Business Process Management (BPM) engine, it automates file processing and generates real-time dashboards to drive underlying distributed workflows within a single user interface.