The options for companies in the television industry to generate workflows in the Cloud are growing. The ease of content management and access from anywhere in the world are some of its characteristics.
By Richard Santa
It is increasingly common to migrate to the Cloud to manage files. Both for personal use and for companies, different solutions are known every day.
One of the most recent cases is the one announced at the beginning of June by Apple: the iCloud. This is a service that allows a user to save information such as contacts, event calendars, photos and files on the Internet, and have them available on iPhones, iPods and iPads, only with a wireless connection.
With this service, Apple enters the competition to offer spaces in the Cloud so that its customers can store information, as they have done with similar systems Google, Amazon and Dropbox, to mention just some of the best known.
These services have been very well received around the world, so much so that they are beginning to be seen as a more effective way to combat piracy than the laws that are being enacted in each country. This was stated in a recent statement to the media, the coordinator of the US department of intellectual property, Victoria Espinel.
Managing content in the Cloud has been one of the great solutions for the television industry, benefiting to a greater extent news agencies that have correspondents in different countries.
Application on TV
There are several companies that offer workflows that allow the management of content for television networks through the Internet. One of the latest developments, and one that is about to hit the market, is Quantel's Qtube.
It allows access to the medium and logging from anywhere in the world through a free tool through an Internet browser, which provides metadata editing, quality download and the framework, even precise editing, with low latency and full security.
In the future it will also provide the possibility that all content can be located in the Cloud. The latter, TV companies provide advantages from the economy of storage, to effective protection in case of physical disasters.
File virtualization is one of the most outstanding features of this solution, according to Rafael Zapardiel, Senior Sales Director for Spain, Portugal and Central America at Quantel.
He explains that "it is not necessary to keep one (or multiple) copies in low resolution at different qualities for use in Internet streaming. This avoids file generation time, saves space and prevents resources from being dedicated to tasks that are not in demand."
He adds that QTube is in the last Beta phase and therefore is not commercially available, although it already has many companies from all continents interested in acquiring the product. Even some of them have collaborated and continue to collaborate in this phase of development.
Other equipment
Front Porch Digital is another company that developed a workflow system for the television industry. Pablo Milliani, Vice President of Sales for Latin America of the company, explained that the Divapublish is a system for content distribution through the Cloud.
It makes it easy to deliver content to multiple locations and devices, while maximizing marketing results is achieved by integrating with partners for advertising, distribution, analysis and delivery of content.
This distribution, based on integrated results, allows critical decisions to be made in content selection, placement and growing the audience in new media channels.
Divapublish includes tools that allow you to determine how, where, and when content will be posted, including features such as domain restriction and syndication.
In addition, it automates the transcoding of profiles to make delivery simple to a large number of devices and portals, examines the multiple metrics to discover their best channels, best content and best results of programming, so that their publication is results-oriented.
It also supports a wide variety of models including free distribution, PPV, subscription and provides a highly configurable system that can be integrated into any workflow environment with a 24 x 7 service, plus a variety of service options as technical staff.
Safety
The representatives of the companies that created these products highlight that one of the most important features is that they offer a high level of security for the contents.
Rafael Zapardiel, Senior Sales Director for Spain, Portugal and Central America at Quantel, maintains that QTube is tolerant of internet connection conditions and has been able to work where Youtube is not, with optimal security conditions for all content.
"Thanks to Frame Magic technology and secondary compression that includes streaming local content to the main server, the work is done in less time. In addition, this system is open and has an API," concluded Rafael Zapardiel.
Security is a sensitive issue for all companies when thinking about migrating some processes to the Cloud, and although the risk is always latent, the different workflow systems on the Internet must guarantee that the risk that is run is minimal.
