Wazee Digital upgrades Media Hub

Wazee Digital has announced an upgrade to Wazee Digital Media Hub, a 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 is 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.

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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 or distribute.

On the other end, users accessing 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 in a statement.

“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.”

[nab-2016]

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