DENVER — April 25, 2017 — Wazee
Digital, a leading provider of cloud-native video management and
licensing services, today announced an upgrade to Wazee Digital Media
Hub, the only 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 new 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 company's
cloud-native digital asset management solution that powers Digital Media
Hub on the back end 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 when granting access. Likewise, users now have an easier,
faster way to find and download what they need.
Specifically, the new
gallery view enables rights holders to organize content in a simple and
intuitive way, with a completely configurable organizational hierarchy
powered by content metadata. Rights holders 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 that 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 Four, 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, rights holders 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 rights holder 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,
based on the earlier 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 — rights holders can
centralize multiple types of content that were 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.
"Rights holders using
Digital Media Hub already benefitted from having a single location for
acquiring, processing, distributing, and storing media gleaned from live
events. And users needing content already benefitted from being able to
search and download from anywhere in the world through a central
portal," said Brian Eldredge, director of product line management and
Live Event Services for 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 rights holders
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."
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