NAB 2023: Amagi Demonstrates Enterprise-Ready Cloud Transformation Solutions for Broadcast and CTV-Led Streaming
Amagi is celebrating 10 years of pioneering and shaping cloud adoption in the broadcast and streaming industry at the 2023 NAB Show. Combining a decade of experience in driving technology transformation in media & entertainment, the company will demonstrate an array of best-in-class, safe, reliable, and sustainable solutions for the TV and OTT ecosystem.
Amagi has announced strategic partnerships with Encompass Digital Media and Imagine Communications that are designed to facilitate cloud transformation and value realization for customers.
The strategic partnership with Imagine Communications, a global leader in advertising and media software and solutions, provides significant benefits to TV networks and broadcasters, including a better-managed path for cloud migration, hybrid operations and orchestration, improved monetization through advertising, and extensive reach into free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) and CTV platforms.
The partnership with global media services company Encompass Digital Media combines the strengths of both companies — Encompass Digital Media’s expertise in managed broadcast services and Amagi’s leadership in cloud-native playout and content monetization — to provide customers with the ability to upgrade legacy workflows and scale faster through cloud-based solutions.
Amagi will also be hosting sessions on FAST opportunities and enterprise transformation. Srinivasan KA, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Amagi, will join Meredith McGinn, NBCUniversal Local’s Executive Vice President of Diginets & Original Production, for a special Streaming Summit session on Monday, April 17 at 1:30pm in West Hall Meeting Rooms W223-W225. In How Traditional Broadcast Networks Can Become Major Players with FAST Services, Srinivasan and McGinn will explore the potential for large traditional broadcast networks to become major players in FAST, the business motivations for launching FAST channels, and the mindset change required for broadcast networks to adapt to the FAST world.
During the NAB Show conference, Srinivasan will speak on a panel concerning the trends that have evolved and proliferated the use of FAST. In Monetizing Content Through FAST, hosted Monday, April 17 at 10am in the West Hall Meeting Rooms W213-W215, Srinivasan and other experts will discuss how traditional broadcast organizations can utilize FAST to maximize reach, create incremental revenue streams, and offer improved user experiences.
Amagi’s inaugural Cloudport Practitioner course — a new certification program offered through its flagship, broadcast-grade channel playout platform — will be available free-of-charge on a first-come, first-served basis at NAB Show. Designed primarily for schedulers and operators, the course modules cover the fundamentals of broadcast and streaming TV workflows while exploring key features like media ingest, scheduling, playout and more.
“Amagi has put together an incredible resource to make the process of building a channel more streamlined and efficient,” said Matt Celement, MRC Media. “Once the course is completed, you will have the in-depth knowledge required to lead your team to success utilizing Amagi Cloudport.”
Amagi’s new unified self-service portal, Amagi Now, delivers comprehensive channel management and monetization to help media companies increase operational efficiencies and optimize content performance for linear and video on demand (VOD) platforms. With competition in the streaming ecosystem growing even higher, the modular SaaS solution provides content owners and platforms with a vital advantage, improving time-to-market and achieving faster revenue realization by automating processes that increase operational efficiencies.
At NAB, Amagi will demonstrate how NOW helps content partners benefit from automated content workflows in one place, integrated scheduling and monetization, a hands-on approach with a consistent user experience, and pre-integration of platforms for linear and VOD delivery.
Key highlights include: Comprehensive workflow functionality, reducing the complexity of creating and managing channels, orchestrating ingest to publishing within minutes; greater process automation, allowing content management, scheduling, distribution, and monetization to happen in a unified, intuitive and automated way; and seamless playout to one or more channels with rich metadata and advanced EPG support.
It also integrates with Amagi Thunderstorm, providing advanced analytics to improve revenue-boosting insights on performance, monetization, and viewership, thereby expanding device reach, avoiding ad blockers, and delivering better-quality viewer experiences with integrated server-side ad insertion.
The third generation of Amagi Thunderstorm, the company’s dynamic, server-side ad insertion (SSAI) solution, offers content owners and platforms higher revenue opportunities. The newest version is built to provide best-in-class ad render rates — the ratio between the number of ads inserted and the number of ads available — and provides modern-day broadcasters and media content owners with a wide range of benefits, enabling them to achieve ad revenue growth at scale on OTT and FAST platforms.
At NAB, Amagi will demonstrate how Thunderstorm increases ad revenue and relevance by enabling advanced ad formats, contextually relevant ads, flexible ad sourcing options, and adaptability to a wide range of media devices and platforms.
The new version of Amagi Thunderstorm significantly increases monetization by enabling a double-digit increase in render rate, driven by lower latencies on ad requests, ad request optimization based on playlist requests, better caching of ads, configurable delay adjustments for each demand, and better user ad request management. It is available both as a SaaS-hosted offering and as an API-driven module in the customer’s own cloud, enabling customers to manage their investments effectively.
Amagi Thunderstorm also now offers support for advanced ad formats including overlays, L-Bands, and lower-thirds as well as dynamic brand insertion, providing new revenue opportunities without disrupting viewer engagement, in collaboration with partners like TripleLift. It natively supports contextual targeting, allowing better monetization of ads and improved targeting for advertisers, and its real-time alerting framework will detect anomalous drops and spikes in metrics to enable quick corrections and reduce faults. The real-time alerting framework will detect any issue, such as a fall in ad render rates or response rates, and automatically alert Amagi’s NOC team to identify and help fix the underlying problem.
The latest version of Amagi Cloudport, the company’s broadcast-grade channel playout platform, offers various features that simplify programming and streamline workflows for broadcast and CTV-led FAST. From media ingest to scheduling and playout, Amagi Cloudport delivers comprehensive workflow functionality, providing greater value to content while reducing the complexity of managing it. As a high-performance solution, it offers HD and UHD video quality, captions support, advanced graphics, low latency, and ad placement with a choice of redundancy levels to make sure channels never go down.
The latest improvements allow for more efficient operations by a single user, make programming simpler and faster, and help streamline playout workflows. At NAB, Amagi will host two separate demonstrations on Cloudport’s orchestration for sports and news segments.