INTERVIEW: Daniele Saretta, SI Media R&D Manager
SI Media at Nab Show: web proxy editor and artificial intelligence.
Also this year SI Media is going to present at Nab the latest news of its portfolio. We have taken this occasion to collect some previews with Mr Daniele Saretta, SI Media Research and Development Manager
1) Broadcasting market is rapidly changing. Which trends have come out in the latest months, also considering the different regions where SI Media is present?
Market is heavily pushing towards the IP transmission and management. This process brings several advantages such as the decrease of hardware costs and the possibility to virtualize in-house or through the cloud. It has become a global trend, from Europe, to Asia and North America, with many different shades.
SI Media, besides being one of the few software house able to provide and end-to-end ip workflow, is natively ready for the virtualization and for the cloud. Finally, the experience gained with the social media allow our automation playouts to be multiple endpoints, both towards classic media and new media such as Facebook and Twitter Live, Youtube, Livestream and many more.
Mostly in the Asian Market there has been a strong interest for the 4k contents management.
In this regards SI Media is able to utilize the resources of the latest GPU to obtain the same results in decoding, encoding and graphical enrichment of HD and SD environments.
2) Which are the latest news that SI Media will bring to the forthcoming NAB Show?
SI Media has been adopting ASD (agile software development) for many years, and products are constantly evolving. All our customers get the benefits of these developments and we take this occasion to invite all of them to come to our booth and see themselves the latest improvements of SI Media’s platform, which will be shortly available also for them.
This year’s biggest news will be:
-Web Proxy Editor: a smart and easy to use proxy based editor, now available also on our web client interface, with all the tools to allow journalists and editors to perform video editing from any device at any moment, allowing them to win the race against time of nowadays newsroom environment, being the first to publish a story
-Integration of SI Media MAM with AI (artificial intelligence): contents are automatically processed and cataloged, audio is recognized and converted into a subtitle which can be directly used by the playout. We have also included tools to recognize explicit contents as naked scenes or simply sequence with smokers for example
-Studio Automation: one of the latest products added in SI Media portfolio has been empowered with the addition of new functionalities, such as the quick menu to create macro and presets and with a substantial enlargement of the supported devices
3) This variable environment obliges software vendors to be more and more flexible and ready to implement new features and solutions. How SI Media is able to ensure on one side a first level support to the hundreds of customers all over the world and, on the other, a long term commitment to keep investing in research and development in order to anticipate the market demands?
The challenge imposed by this plurality of conflicting requests is a tough one. SI Media is answering increasing the efficiency and effectiveness inside the company and during the deployment of new projects. All the team is constantly involved and updated on customization and improvements so that the know-how is shared at best, and this, as chief engineer, is essential to maximize the result of r&d.
This is one of the most important “secrets” of SI Media. Team building among all the departments allows to generate new ideas and innovative approaches to the comprehensive platform we provide, collecting the different trends coming from our customers around the world and facilitating support activity.
