The winners of the inaugural Best of SPROCKIT Awards have been announced at the NAB Show in Las Vegas. Five out of 30 startups showcased by SPROCKIT were chosen through voting by the trade show’s attendees. The winning companies were Fluendo (video analysis and multimedia), Psychability (big data and analytics for TV), Yottio (real-time video streaming and trafficking), ScoreStream (crowd-sourced sports information and chat), and Unruly (video ad distribution in native formats across the Open Web). Continue reading NAB 2015: Five Startups Win Best of SPROCKIT Awards in Vegas

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences used the NAB Show as the launch for the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) — a free, open, device-independent global standard for color management and image interchange that targets digital production, mastering and long-term archiving of motion pictures. The Academy also announced the support of 22 leading companies that will participate in the ACES Logo Program, which was developed to “encourage consistent, high-quality implementations of ACES concepts and technical specifications throughout the industry.” Continue reading NAB 2015: AMPAS Launches Global Standard for Color Encoding

At this week’s NAB Show in Las Vegas, Vision III Imaging has an impressive demo of a technology that adds parallax to professional camera images when displayed on normal consumer displays. Through the company’s patented process of rotating an iris inserted behind the lens at 4.3 cycles per second (e.g. parallax induction), they are able to enhance both 2D and 3D images. 2D images take on an almost 3D quality, while 3D images maintain a sense of multiple dimensions even when the viewer tilts his/her head to a full horizontal position. Continue reading NAB 2015: Vision III Imaging Demos Parallax Visualization Tech

We are past marketing and stunt VR, and now need to move quickly to paid live action VR experiences for the media to succeed, Ted Schilowitz, Fox’s Futurist said during the NMX panel “Why Content Creators Should Care About Virtual Reality” at the NAB Show in Las Vegas this week. Tim Street, board member of the International Academy of Web Television, moderated the panel that also included Cosmo Scharf, the founder of VRLA, Ikrima Elhassan from Kite & Lightning, and Michael Kintner, CEO of 260 Heroes. Continue reading NAB 2015: Why Content Creators Should Care About VR (Panel)

Anyone who has worked in the visual effects industry is familiar with the enormous volume of data involved in every production and the process of bringing shots on and offline to balance workloads. Jeff Kember, a cloud solutions architect at Google and a former computer graphics supervisor, introduced a new solution, Google’s Cloud Storage Nearline — a low-cost, fast-response storage service that enables quick data backup, retrieval and access — in his vNAB Cloud Conference presentation on Visual Effects Workflows in the Cloud. Continue reading Google Cloud Storage Nearline Presented at vNAB Conference

Roku has updated its Roku 2 streaming box and is introducing platform enhancements that make it easier to find video content across multiple apps. The new Roku Search allows users to search for movies, TV shows, actors and directors across all apps via the interface. Since the company does not produce any of its own content, it does not include any bias when displaying content on its UI, something that cannot be said of rival streaming platforms. This may be appealing to television manufacturers looking for platform partnerhips. Continue reading Roku Announces Refresh for Streaming Box and Updates Search

For music fans that want to catch acts such as AC/DC, Drake, Interpol, Jack White and Vic Mensa perform at Coachella this weekend, much of the three-day festival will be streamed on YouTube. Three channels of performances, commentary and interactive profiles will be made available as well as a schedule feature that offers updates based on a user’s time zone and channel choice, and a virtual map feature that will include photos taken during the live event. Coachella’s YouTube channel is sponsored by T-Mobile. Continue reading Coachella to Live Stream Performances and More via YouTube

Disney is reportedly investing $250 million in DraftKings Inc., a Boston-based online fantasy sports startup. DraftKings enables fans to play fantasy sports on a per-game basis with real money. As part of the deal, DraftKings has committed to spending more than $500 million in future advertising on ESPN’s platforms. While sports fans have enjoyed a variety of options for fantasy leagues from CBS, ESPN, Yahoo and others, the model involved tracking performances across an entire season — and did not involve playing for cash payouts. Continue reading DraftKings: Disney Investing in Online Fantasy Sports Business

Twitter has officially launched its “retweet with comment” feature, which enables users to embed a tweet in a tweet — and bypass the social platform’s 140-character limit in the process. This will allow users to share and comment on tweets without the need to shorten the original tweet, while preserving context and meaning. (However, users are not able to embed the full retweet and comment.) The new feature is currently accessible via the Twitter site and iPhone app; an update to the Android app is expected soon. Continue reading New Twitter Feature Offers Workaround to Character Limitation

Three new videos covering Big Data and Analytics comprise the final release of ETC@USC’s vNAB Cloud Conference, recorded at the YouTube Space LA in March. A total to 37 unique videos, encompassing the essential topics of media management in the cloud, are now posted to the ETCenterVideos YouTube channel. Brian Campanotti, CTO of Oracle/Front Porch Digital discusses trends in “Premises and Cloud: Effective Big Data Solutions and Services for Content Owners.” Pedro Szekely, project leader at The Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at USC, presents “Big Data/DIG: Domain Specific Insight Graphs,” a technology that harvests and harmonizes millions of Web pages to extract key elements of knowledge. Pivotal, represented by Noelle Sio, Srivatsan Ramanujam, and Jarrod Vawdrey, explore a framework and next generation applications that used Machine Learning and statistical modeling to answer “why?” things happen and “what will happen next?” in their presentation, “Open Source Framework for Deploying Data Science and Cloud Based Applications.” The vNAB Cloud Conference is an extension of the Media Management in the Cloud Conference that ETC@USC leads next week at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 14-15.

New playlists on Open Source Tools and Storage join the 30+ videos now live on the ETCenterVideos YouTube channel from the vNAB Cloud Conference. The early March event was an extension of the Media Management in the Cloud Conference that ETC is organizing at NAB on April 14-15. Joshua Kolden, CEO of Studio Pyxis and leader of the ETC Cloud Framework offers a comprehensive introduction to the Cinema Content Creation Cloud, otherwise known as the C4 Framework, endorsed by ETC and its member organizations to orchestrate connections between services, software and people for better digital production pipelines and to facilitate the future of production in the cloud. The revolutionary ability of OpenStack to transform video delivery is the subject of “OpenStack Meets TV Everywhere: Peanut Butter and Chocolate” presented by Yuval Fisher, CTO, MVPD of Imagine Communications. The Storage playlist features talks by Signiant CTO Ian Hamilton, “This is Not Your Parent’s Storage: Transitioning to Cloud Object Storage,” and John Tkaczewski, president and co-founder of FileCatalyst, “An Introduction to Data Gravity.”

Digital Domain Holdings Ltd. and Immersive Media are launching a joint venture called IM360. According to the two companies, IM360 plans to produce immersive content and services, including virtual reality content, by combining Digital Domain’s CGI and motion capture expertise with Immersive’s 360-degree video hardware and software. The 360-degree video tech is already being used for live-streaming VR content, and the software can send video to devices including tablets, smartphones and VR headsets. Continue reading Digital Domain and Immersive Media Join Forces for VR Content

The Second Screen and Over-the-Top (OTT) are the topics covered in today’s set of new videos released from ETC’s vNAB Cloud Conference. Can traditional, live, linear content distribution models effectively evolve from existing satellite communication networks to pure IP-based cloud-centric transit? Amazon Web Services (AWS) explores answers in its “Shoot the Bird” presentation. In “Managing the New Content Supply Chain,” Worldnow discusses the next evolution of powerful, cost-effective media management and workflows to efficiently reach and monetize audiences on all screens. Vubiquity’s presentation, “Cloud Atlas: A Movie or A Distribution Movement”shows how the cloud enables the transition from classic transactional VOD to Electronic Sell-Through for MVPDs and OTT players alike. The session concludes with HITS/MESA’s panel discussion, “Leveraging Cloud to Build Your OTT Channel,”featuring Akami, Optimity and ContentBridge. vNAB, recorded at YouTube Space LA on March 2, 3 & 4, is an extension of the Media Management in the Cloud Conference scheduled for NAB April 14-15.

Twitter unveiled its new Curator media tool this week designed to make more tweets available to a larger audience outside of its own site — and ideally build upon its base of 288 million users that log in at least once a month. The tool will help media organizations locate tweets and Vine videos that can be posted with stories and broadcasts. Publishers regularly create and share compelling content related to live events and breaking news. Twitter aims to leverage these publishers to help address its slowing user growth rate. Continue reading Curator Tool Will Help Media Publishers Share Tweets and Vines