Deliver video content across platforms

The ways to publish video content are diversifying: terrestrial, satellite, cable, DVB, IP-TV, web - i.e. linear programming or video on demand. New publishing platforms and new business models emerge, requiring new management and publishing tools. However, you keep handling video content and your management processes remain the same: video programs must be produced, validated, archived and published.

Workflows are rapidly becoming entirely file-based. Still, handling video remains a special trade for several reasons:

• It is a real-time process;
• It requires handling vast amounts of data and storage;
• Metadata is not only file-related, but also time-code related. In other words, this data does not only describe a program, but also each of its segments;
• Content production asks for a variety of technical and creative skills;
• Technology increasingly allows video to be separated from process information. Consequently, you must ensure that each video keeps track of this vital form of metadata, throughout your entire production process. 
• Last but not least, since the core of IT- and web video technologies has been developed, many real-time critical issues have emerged.Think of instant playback within one frame, or synchronizing playback sources!

So, because of the large amount of skills and processes concerned, as well as the variety of technologies involved, video content management systems remain rather complex. Whereas it seems so simple from your perspective: a black box that can deliver the right video when you want, where you want.

Hence, SGT is offering Web Services. Web Services consist in an easy and straightforward toolbox to control an entire video or broadcast facility. Actually, it proves to be the obvious way to get your video content published across different platforms: your video content management system becomes able to provide the desired content to different delivery platforms seamlessly, regardless of their respective technology and vendor, according to the commands sent by your commercial front-end.

What will VEDA™ Web Services bring to you?

Web Services are the easiest and cheapest way to input and export the material that you need throughout your video content ‘factory’. All this, regardless of the size and complexity of your facilities!

Fast deployment

Concentrate on the products and services that you are offering. Use VEDA™ Web Services to extend your VEDA™ software suite. They can be accessed via a web-based client interface, by any third-party application or by other Web Services. Whether you develop an in-house application or a commercial web portal, use standard and interoperable technology with a quick learning curve! You will be on your way before you know.

Richer offer

Control the VEDA™ software suite to publish your assets on any new platform, from Video on Demand to Mobile, or web-based communities if you wish. Use Web Services to combine your offer with that of other providers such as news, sports, etc. All without headaches!

Low cost of ownership

You no longer need to develop expensive bespoke applications for integration. Web Services are easy to set-up and maintain, using low-cost technology to share and exchange information between different systems. Any change in the underlying technology, either in the VEDA™ suite or in any other third-party application, will leave the existing Web Services interface unchanged.

No restrictions

Web Services will be available for all VEDA™ functions and features, allowing you to create entirely new interfaces and services. Import, process and publish media, over an intranet or over the Internet, all with the same technology.

Key features of VEDA™ web services

Overview

Web Services are software components that communicate using HTTP and XML-based messaging. Web Services are designed to be accessed by other applications. They are based on open standards such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language). Web Services are hardware, programming language, and operating system independent.

This means that applications written in different programming languages and running on different platforms can seamlessly exchange data over intranets or over the Internet.

Overall architecture

• A shell to the standard components of SGT’s VEDA™ software suite
• Using SOAP or WSDL over XML and HTTP

Library examples

• Create media
• Search media
• Add, edit and retrieve metadata
• Transfer and transcode
• Publish
• ...

Create award-winning video content in a tapeless environment

Today’s video cameras are sophisticated computers that generate files. So, you need to handle files instead of tapes. Meanwhile, the amount of content that video companies manage tends to grow exponentially.

These trends create the need for cost effective video content management systems in production and post-production companies.

However, (post) production companies are not quite familiar with IT systems that integrate editing solutions such as Final Cut Studio. If this rings a bell, here comes the solution!

At the end of the day, you have to decide whether tapeless solutions can create value for your productions, by automating file-based workflows, such as:

• Ingest of incoming files and tapes, regardless of format
• Archiving and retrieval of material
• Delivery of edited material across various platforms and standards.

VEDA™ creates value for your production

Ingest material in a cost-effective, scalable and interoperable manner

If you operate a fully tapeless (post) production facility, VEDA™ ensures that all the files you receive are stored quickly at the right place in the system, that their quality meets your customer’s expectations, and that you minimise retyping metadata. In the end, it is all about streamlining the overall cost of your ingest operation, while ensuring smooth and effective further media processing subsequently.

VEDA™ draws on a library of nearly 300 wide-spread industry protocols, allowing you to use a large variety of ingest servers and devices.

Control your assets and boost your teams’ productivity

Every day your team has to tell compelling stories, one way or another. Your assets represent a colossal value. What could be better than using them as a source of material and inspiration for your program makers?

This is where VEDA™ comes in with unmatched benefits: you will inspire your team by revealing your assets in the most transparent way you have ever imagined. You will help them find and reuse content that you already own! This is where VEDA™’s unique semantic search engine comes into play. Your program makers will find media to illustrate their stories by using their own words and expressions. VEDA™ will spontaneously display names of persons, geographic locations and related stories, all of them highly relevant for your search.

VEDA™ also gets your teams to work together and to share content at any step of your production workflow. And to make sure that you can access and share content anywhere, VEDA™ supports Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer.

VEDA™ Final Cut Studio Plug-in

Make the most of your current editing infrastructure

When preparing a production you will save time and money by selecting your material and trimming it on standard low-cost workstations anywhere in your facilities, before going into the actual post-production.

VEDA™ allows viewing and pre-editing selected material. At their own desks your program makers work on high-quality but low-bandwidth files, reducing the costs relative to storage and network infrastructures. So, you start editing on low-resolution files with VEDA™ and then, you push the resulting EDL to a craft edit station, such as Apple Final Cut Studio or Avid Media Composer.

The story of Mostra

Mostra Communication is an agency located in Brussels (Belgium), specializing in institutional communication. Mostra brings over twenty years' experience in the field of high-quality audiovisual production.

Mostra recently decided to reinforce its technical infrastructure for the production of multilingual TV programs for European institutions and other customers.

Mostra selected VEDA™ to interconnect its editing workstations, its ingest devices and its archive. Mostra’s production teams and journalists are now able to share, index, archive and retrieve audiovisual content in 24 languages seamlessly.

One of the most important benefits for Mostra proved to be VEDA™ ability to search the archive with a multilingual semantic engine, that understands the meaning of your typing, rather than matching words that share a given character string.

The story of LCP

LCP is one of the two official TV channels of the French Parliament. They needed a powerful and user-friendly solution to browse and search their archive, as well as to move selected material back and forth between archive and production.

LCP chose VEDA™ for its interoperability and the unique capabilities of its semantic search engine, which allow program makers to retrieve highly-relevant material to create compelling stories in no time.

Ultimate power to exploit your assets

Tapeless production means managing a continuous stream of digital media. It is quite a challenge to ensure your assets are safely stored and instantaneously available. It is an unconditional requirement that these processes are conducted in a straightforward and efficient way. No wonder workflow is a hot topic in the broadcast industry. Rated as the most complete and user-friendly solution available, the VEDA™ workflow automation suite is the recognised answer to all your production and delivery requirements. Yet at SGT, we take the concept “instantaneously available” one giant leap further with VEDA™ Search & Retrieve, the ultimate tool for asset repurposing.

VEDA™ Search & Retrieve features the smartest search engine on the market, offering you unrivalled research power. While Search allows you to find material based on keywords you know, Research allows you to discover materials and story paths to create your story. Search & Retrieve is a semantic search engine. It understands your language and other languages; it will find synonyms, metaphors, related subjects, people, places, plus the media that goes with it, right on your desktop. It is pre-production paradise.

What other argument would you need to justify maintaining a digital archive? At IBC 2008, VEDA™ Search & Retrieve was rewarded with a Broadcast Engineering Pick Hit award, for the improvements and cost-savings it brings to the industry!

The value of VEDA™ Search & Retrieve

Powerful and Easy

1. you type your query in the search field like any other search engine. Search & Retrieve will give you results based on meaning, i.e. in addition to “car” you will also find “automobile”.

2. on the left side of the screen , you see lists of Related terms, Geographic areas, Persons, and even user-defined ones, such as Dates. These derive from the results you found, entirely automatically.

3. you can click on any of these listed items in any order, to narrow down your search. Just below the Search field, you see the history of elements you have already clicked . You can click anywhere in this thread to revert your narrow-down path.

4. In addition to the items suggested in the lists, you may use the Refine field to narrow down your search with any word you think of.

The search is cross-language. If you type “monde” in French, it will also find “world” in English.

You can playback any video on your desktop, bookmark it, and transfer it to postproduction. For example, with the optional Final Cut Studio® plug-in, you can transfer bookmarked material directly into a running edit session.

Making richer programs at a lower cost

VEDA’s Search and Retrieve will help you repurposing the assets you already own.

You will make richer programs at a lower cost. Not only will your search times drop drastically, logging or cataloguing is substantially less strict and will go much faster. No more need for an elaborate thesaurus.

Unlocking your assets increases their use. Wherever assets are unleashed, they will be used and start making money. It is a historical proof of concept!

This graph comes from a premium European public channel, resulting from a study that took place 10 years ago. The increased use of online available assets is substantial: it nearly doubled in three years time. Keep in mind that there was no VEDA™ Search & Retrieve at that time.

The VEDA Final Cut Studio® plug-in for direct access to VEDA™ (option)

• More inspired and productive research teams: Anticipate editorial needs and prepare features ahead of schedule.
• Shorter deadlines: structured and categorised content allows you to bring deadlines forward for faster delivery or to push deadlines back to produce more up to date material.
• More accurate results: you can use the automatically generated categories to narrow down your search, and enhance it with contextual information, parallel stories, and metaphors. VEDA allows you to offer complete and documented responses to complex enquiries.
• Richer results: with Search & Retrieve extended cross-referenced categories, you will retrieve material you did not yet connect to your subject or you did not even know you owned.
• Guaranteed editorial consistency: rely on content already produced in-house.
• Cost savings: By reusing existing content, you reduce the need to acquire material from external sources.

Key features of VEDA™ Search & Retrieve

• Compatible with Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer.
• Bookmarks to share content enterprise-wide.
• Optional plug-in for Final Cut Studio®, for direct access to VEDA™ from running editing projects.
• Export VEDA™ Off-line-editing sequences to Avid (AAF) and to Final Cut Studio® (XML Exchange).
• 1st level language support: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. 2nd level language support: Russian, Finnish, Danish, Swedish, Portuguese, Greek, Arabic (literary), Korean, Japanese, Thai, Chinese (Mandarin, Traditional as spoken in Taiwan and Hong Kong). Inquire for other languages.