I’ve been thinking and reflecting on how to properly characterize this year’s show and the one word that kept surfacing to the top of my mind is audience. While IBC stayed true to its B2B roots, this year’s edition finally put the audience at the very center of every conversation, workflow and applied technology demonstration that you could possibly find across the RAI convention center.

Acknowledging the deep market shifts, this year’s show revolved around audiences’ insatiable craving for fresh content and more personalised, immersive experiences on the devices and channels of their choice.

For broadcasters and media organizations, it highlighted one thing: the need for greater agility, faster adaptation and collaborative innovation. Not only do media professionals need to think “out of the box” about linear broadcast and traditional consumption formats and devices, but they need to think tactically on how to build meaningful, complementary content experiences.

The Efficient Media Factory

Multiplatform Production, Versioning and Automated Distribution

This is a good segue to talk about how our agile Dalet Galaxy five platform is enabling broadcasters and media organizations to meet their audiences’ expectations and build strong, open foundation for future requirements.

A key concern today is how to address the many outlets, program categories and flavors of a particular program simultaneously. Our Director of Product Strategy Kevin Savina explains in a Rapid TV News interview at IBC the complexities of delivering hyper-curated content to multiple platforms and how broadcasters and media organizations need to embrace the new way of thinking and working when it comes to building and distributing their content.

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Agile platforms like Dalet Galaxy five drive workflows with a component-based approach, enabling industrialization of key industry standards like IMF and creating real business benefits and opportunities for international content distribution. More than a technical uplift, component-based workflows really allow an operation to change the value model and ultimately change the way the media business engages its viewers and customers who want to purchase their programs with hyper-targeted content delivered to any platform, any country en mass.

Let’s take a real-life example with the leading European media brand Euronews. A finalist of the prestigious IBC Innovation Awards alongside Dalet, Euronews piloted a strategic transformation to put content customization at the heart of its operations. Tapping fully into the agility of the Dalet Galaxy platform and component-based workflows, Euronews, in essence, reinvented its broadcast journalism, taking its “one-size-fits-all” approach to news, which was one video with 11 voice-overs, into 12 distinct localized channels. They increased digital content output by 20% and television content by 100% with the same staff and headcount.

Johann Zemmour, Dalet General Manager, EMEA & APAC; Francois Schmitt, Euronews COO; Yannick Agaësse, Dalet Sales & Business Development Manager

Euronews achieved its vision and became the world’s first truly ‘Glocal’ news channel, providing audiences important global headlines with perspectives and viewpoints relevant to their regions, cultures and communities. This transformation also allowed Euronews to become the perfect media partner for advertisers looking to run impactful international advertising campaigns with the ability to adapt their message to the characteristics of local markets.

Another great example of customer success is Sportcast, a subsidiary of DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga. Sportcast operates the largest digital football archive in the world. Producing the 617 yearly matches of the German Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 for DFL, Sportcast manages the entire content value chain from the stadium to the world with the Dalet Galaxy platform. You can hear from them directly the importance of an agile platform in managing, enriching and delivering content:
 

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Live Show Production & Complementary Content Experiences

With the launch of Dalet OnePlay at IBC, we had the chance to talk with many attendees about the importance of complementary content experience around live shows. I am happy to report here that our new solution received a very warm welcome from both the Dalet stand visitors and the press, nabbing the TVBEurope Best of Show Award for its innovation and outstanding product development.

In the conversations we had, most media operations need a way to better control content and engage their audiences during live playout. Not everyone can afford to run every production device manually to get that granular control. It’s simply too costly and too cumbersome. Dalet OnePlay controls all core production device types, including video switchers and servers, cameras, audio mixing consoles, graphics, lighting, routers and more. In addition, it orchestrates multimedia content distribution, including social media delivery, thanks to the native connection with the Dalet Galaxy five orchestration layer. You can read more about Dalet OnePlay capabilities in the interview with Dalet OnePlay product line manager Raul Alba.

Raul Alba, Dalet Product Line Manager for Studio Production, Broadcast Graphics, and I/O Solutions

Making Media Businesses Smarter. The AI Revolution!

The notions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) may sometimes remain a bit difficult to grasp. Well, we have a suggestion: get the benefits of AI, not the complexity!

At IBC2018, we revealed the first version of Dalet Media Cortex, a cloud service that enables media organizations to connect and orchestrate various types of AI technologies everywhere they add value to operations & business. A plug-and-play service, the first release of Dalet Media Cortex enables media organizations to consume cognitive services such as celebrity identification, label, brand and scene detection, sentiment analysis, and visual content moderation, on demand in a pay-as-you-go model.

The AI-generated data is then displayed at various levels of the Dalet Galaxy five application, in a set of new intuitive UIs, to provide contextual, actionable insights and recommendations to the users.

The full launch of Dalet Media Cortex will be in Q1 2019 and you can learn more about our AI as well as social media plans in the What Caught My Eye’s Business Transformation session – see video below, starting at 41:20 and until 46:20 – featuring Dalet VP of Marketing Arnaud Elnecave:
 

Connecting a Globally Distributed Workforce

Also making its debut at IBC2018, the new Dalet OneCut remote editing workflow was demonstrated on the stand by product line manager Golan Tsarfaty. The new remote editing capabilities give journalists out in the field a way to upload materials easily as well as develop stories remotely using content from the central newsroom and archives. They can submit drafts or finalize their piece from anywhere.

You can learn more about this remarkable workflow in this in-depth interview with Golan.

This feature is the perfect illustration of decades of R&D and innovation in collaborative media workflows. Collaboration is a core concept of the Dalet Galaxy platform and spans across the entire workflow: from planning through scripting, production all the way through broadcast and distribution. All of these activities are served by a single, unified content catalogue and accessible from multiple devices. Shared media bins make the life of teams easier than ever, chat rooms allow users to open up projects quickly, using ad-hoc groups to exchange media, scripts and ideas. Last but not least, collaborative script editing in editorial workflows is a game-changing feature!

Thank You, Dalet Community!

I could not conclude this blog article without praising the amazing Dalet community!

Dalet Pulse was once again a unique demonstration of how powerful, diverse and vibrant our community is today. On behalf of the entire Dalet Team, thank you to everyone for attending and engaging in so many discussions around the latest technology and business trends, as well as sharing best practices and use cases. Also a big thank you to our event sponsors and key partners Adobe, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Quantum and Dell EMC. See you soon…
 

Any questions? Did you miss us at the show? Let’s talk or meet at our next event!