Hiren Hindocha in conversation with TM Broadcast International about AI and Big Data for M&E organizations

Answers supplied by Hiren Hindocha, CEO, Digital Nirvana

What does Big Data bring to this sector?

When we talk about big data in broadcast, we’re talking about the hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes of data that a system gathers during direct interaction with end users. Typically that happens when broadcasters make their content available through VOD or streaming options. Broadcasters can analyze this big data to understand customers’ preferences, which in turn helps them serve better content to viewers and serve the right demographic to advertisers.

Besides the massive amounts of data exchanged between broadcasters and end users, big data also refers to the many content feeds most broadcasters ingest continuously and simultaneously. For example, the volume of incoming video feeds for a news organization is huge —several hundred gigabytes to terabytes on a daily basis.If broadcasters can make sense of that big data, they can use it to help make content.

What are the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence in the broadcast industry?

Applying artificial intelligence across audio and video opens a world of possibilities for the broadcast industry. For example, speech-to-text technology has reached a point where it is better than humans at understanding specific domains. A well-trained speech-to-text engine can provide a very accurate transcript and captions of incoming content. At the same time, other well-trained engines can extract facial recognition, perform on-screen text detection, detect objects in the background, and more.

In the case of multiple and continuous incoming video feeds, artificial intelligence can help describe what is in the feed and make it very easy for editors to find what they’re looking for. AI capabilities can also generate metadata that makes the content easily searchable and retrievable, leading to easier content creation and better content publishing decisions.

How can all these technologies enrich the content consumer experience?

Once content providers become more familiar with user preferences,they can bubble up content within their archive that is better-suited to those preferences. They can also use AI to quickly access data that will inform their content feeds, such as in social media channels. Take World Cup soccer, for example. Rightsholder Fox Sports could use AI technology to identify moments in the game that are worthy of viewing, and within a few minutes of the game ending, they can put up those highlights on YouTube. Before AI, this process would have taken a human many hours.

And of course, the more consumers watch content that is in tune with their preferences (action, drama, certain news topics), then the better the system gets at predicting and serving similar content. That’s an example of tailoring the content for a better consumer experience.

How should traditional broadcasting adapt to these technologies to get the most out of them?

Broadcasters need a website or platform where users can search, find, and consume content. The smaller the chunks broadcasters produce, the greater the consumption,which means they need to be able to capture all of that consumer information and make it useful. (See examples mentioned before.) To be able to do that at scale, broadcasters have to adopt technologies that can process the information faster and better than employing an army of people.

From what perspective does Digital Nirvana approach the use of technology associated with Big Data?

We don’t do anything with big data at this point.

From what perspective does Digital Nirvana approach the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence?

Digital Nirvana believes AI has great potential to accelerate media workflows and make life easier for our clients. To realize that potential, we’re always looking for new and better ways to help our clients use artificial intelligence tools like speech to text and facial or object recognition to describe what is in their audio and video.

Digital Nirvana is doing a lot of work on training speech-to-text engines to automatically recognize who is speaking and what they are saying — such as distinguishing one media personality from another and identifying different topics.

How does Digital Nirvana intend to take advantage of the confluence of both technologies?

Our focus right now is to leverage AI technologies in the audio, video, and natural language processing sectors. Natural language processing is the ability to understand what is being said in the content. Not only can we provide a verbatim transcript of what is being said, but then we use natural language processing to figure out who is doing the talking and what the topic and context are.For example, our Trance application uses multiple technologies, including automatic speech to text and an automated translation engine. Our goal is to make sure those engines keep getting better and better.

It has not yet become main stream technology, but there are already many developments and pilot projects. Which ones would you highlight as the most challenging and interesting?

One pilot project we’ve been working on with a major U.S. broadcaster is automatic segmentation and summarization of incoming news feeds. Suppose the programming in the feed lasts 60-90 minutes and contains multiple segments on different topics. Today in production, we are generating real-time text of that content, but in the future,we’ll automatically be able to figure out which people and places are being discussed in that feed, then provide a headline and summary of each of the segments.We’ll also be able to detect changes in topics and categorize accordingly. This is not an easy thing to do.

A similar use case relates to podcasts. Today, a well-designed podcast will have what we call chapter markers within an hour long or 45-minute podcast. The chapter markers delineate the different segments, and there are show notes related to each chapter marker.Right now this process is done manually. We foresee technology that will listen to a podcast and automatically generate chapter markers along with a summary of each chapter.

Finally, Digital Nirvana is developing an advertising intelligence capability for a large ad intelligence provider that needs to analyze advertisements at scale. This provider must process close to 20 million advertisements per year, and there is no way to do it manually. They have to use technology.

The technology we’re developing will look at an advertisement —whether it be outdoor creative, a six-second social media advertisement, or a 30-second broadcast commercial —and determine the product, the brand, and the category (e.g., alcohol ad, political ad, automobile commercial).That kind of analysis is a challenge, and being able to do it automatically will significantly improve this company’s workflow.

What future developments is Digital Nirvana involved in regarding the capabilities of this technology?

Digital Nirvana already processes media in a multitude of languages. Our goal is to keep evolving so that we not only improve the accuracy of our existing languages but continually add new ones.

Also, we are looking at ways to apply generative AI —AI that helps generate content — to the media and entertainment space.

MetadataIQ – Winner for Media & Entertainment: Best in Market 2022 Awards, presented by TV Tech

media

We are pleased to announce that our product MetadataIQ has won in this year’s Media & Entertainment: Best in Market 2022 Awards, presented by TV Tech.

The awards aim to recognize the very best in innovative products from the last 12 months that have made an impact within the media and entertainment industries. Our product was judged based on its feature set, innovation, perceived value and ease of use, following which it was deemed to be a standout within the sector and selected as a winner.

The awards’ editorial team have said that “these awards have proven to be more popular than we anticipated, with a vast range of products and solutions to consider from all corners of the industry. Overall scoring was high, meaning that those who have been selected as a winner really stood out – a huge success for those companies and we extend our congratulations to all those who won.”

We’re thrilled to have won this award, if you would like to see our winning product then please click here.

https://digital-nirvana.com/products/automated-metadata-generation-metadataiq/

You can read more about our success on TV Tech’s website, in their regular newsletter and other promotional channels from the brand in the coming weeks.

Digital Nirvana Makes Metadata Generation Tool Available To More Avid Users

MetadataIQ

Avid users can now use MetadataIQ to generate metadata automatically without Interplay

FREMONT, Calif.—Digital Nirvana has added support for Avid CTMS APIs to its MetadataIQ software-as-a solution (SaaS) tool for automatically generating speech-to-text and video intelligence metadata, the company said today.

With the new Avid support, editors and producers using MetadataIQ can extract media directly from Avid Media Composer or Avid MediaCentral Cloud UX (MCCUS) rather than being required to connect first with Avid Interplay. As a result, broadcasters, post houses, sports organization and other Avid users are not required to have Interplay in their environments to use MetadataIQ, the company said.

The support gives all Avid Media Composer and MCCUS users the ability to insert speech-to-text and video intelligence metadata as markers within an Avid timeline, it said.

It also enables the ability to:

  • Ingest different types of metadata, such as speech to text, facial recognition, OCR, logos and objects, each with customizable marker durations and color codes for easy identification of metadata type.
  • Submit files without having to create low-res proxies or manually import metadata files into Avid Media Composer and MCCUX.
  • Automatically submit media files to Digital Nirvana’s transcription and caption service to receive the highest quality, human-curated output.
  • Submit data from MCCUX into Digital Nirvana’s Trance product to generate transcripts, captions and translations in-house and publish files in all industry-supported formats.

These capabilities will improve the workflow for media companies that use Avid Media Composer or MCCUX to produce content, it said.

“MetadataIQ used to only connect with Avid Interplay for media extraction, which meant customers had to use Interplay in their Avid environments to use MetadataIQ. With the success of MetadataIQ and its ability to enhance content production, Digital Nirvana… received a lot of requests from prospective customers to extend our services to non-Interplay users. And that’s exactly what we’ve done,” said Digital Nirvana CEO Hiren Hindocha.

“This integration makes it so editors can use MetadataIQ throughout the entire pipeline without having to create additional proxies, import metadata files or anything else — and no Interplay required,” he said.

More information about Digital Nirvana and its products and services is available at www.digital-nirvana.com

Automated transcription and metadata generation can transform the operation

Automated transcription

In today’s fast-paced media landscape, broadcasters are always looking for tools to help them get content to air faster and with less effort. A news workflow is the perfect example.

In a large and busy broadcast news operation, content never stops coming in. Much of it lacks context and needs metadata to make it accessible and actionable. So, teams of staffers have the tedious, and time-consuming task of trying to manually review, de- scribe, and log the continuous flow of incoming content. The goal is to tease out which sound bites and video are relevant and important assets, and which are not. Once con- tent is logged, it is commonly stored in a production asset management system (PAM), for producers and editors to access to create finished news content

Transcribing the content would be an ideal way to generate the much-needed metadata. Unlike manual tagging, which only captures a few keywords, transcriptions offer a record of every spoken word within a piece of content, giving producers infinitely more detail to search against. But in a fast-paced news environment, broadcasters do not possess the staff or the time necessary to do the tagging, let alone transcription. And then correlating it all in the content management system? It’s all just too much.

Artificial intelligence was born to solve such problems. Let’s dive deeper.

How can AI and machine learning make things faster and easier

Applying AI and ML technologies to news work- flows yields automatically generated, highly accurate metadata of video content more quickly and less expensively than traditional methods. That translates to major money, effort, and time savings. It also means better-structured, more detailed, and more accurate metadata and shorter content delivery cycles.

What does an AI-driven metadata automation tool look like?

MatadataIQ

Today’s cloud-based architecture for AI and ML components offers broadcasters easy access to these technologies with the promise of accuracy, scalability, and trainability. Certain AI-driven metadata solutions combine high-performance AI capabilities in the cloud (speech-to-text, facial recognition, object identification, content classification, etc.) with powerful knowledge management orchestration tools.

The ideal tool also integrates the metadata into the production environment. In other words, it not only generates speech-to-text transcripts of incoming feeds (or of stored content) in real time, but it then takes the transcript, parses it by time, and indexes it back to the media in the Avid environment, where producers and editors create the content.

The results: actionable intelligence for media operators and faster search, retrieval, production, and delivery of news content

What results are news broadcasters seeing?

One U.S. news and entertainment network has put this solution into action, transforming its news production workflow.

With upwards of 100 live news feeds continually coming in, all with little to no context or perspective, even this news powerhouse couldn’t employ enough people to log all these feeds around the clock, day after day. The cost is too great, and a human workforce could never scale appropriately. This news organization understood that automated, real-time transcripts would accelerate awareness and accessibility of its content, so it turned to the AI-driven solution described above.

The solution uses a variety of AI and ML technologies to process all live news feeds simultaneously from a wide array of sources (24x7x365 basis). No human team, no matter how large, could ever hope to perform concurrent, real-time processing of this quantity of media.

In the current implementation, the solution leverages multiple AI engines and language models, which include the following capabilities:

  • Automatic speech recognition (ASR)
  • Natural language processing (NLP)
  • Language Model Adaptation (LMA)
  • Automated transcript generation
  • Frame accurate time indexing of metadata to media

Planned expansion of the core solution in phases two and beyond will include various video intelligence capabilities, including:

  • Facial/name recognition
  • Emotion detection
  • Program segmentation
  • Logo detection
  • Object identification
  • Optical character recognition (OCR)

SOLUTION BENEFITS

1.Automated transcript generation of live feeds greatly accelerates postproduction within the Avid PAM environment. This functionality not only delivers real-time, searchable transcript metadata, it empowers producers and editors to locate, retrieve and create finished news content faster than ever before.

2.Integrated, SaaS-based transcript editing tools, which allows operators to refine and perfect machine transcripts of high-value content that will live on indefinitely in the MAM and long-term archive.

3.Increased awareness and visibility of all assets, including legacy media archives for optimized utilization and monetization.

4.Transcribed media that can be further refined as needed to generate closed caption files and/or subtitles for applications requiring media localization in up to 108 alternate languages.

5.Fully automated transcription generation, which eliminates human resource limitations and allows all content to benefit from metadata-rich enhancement.

How does it work?

As media content is ingested, it is routed via an API to cloud-based AI engines for speech to text processing. The resulting transcript metadata is then returned and processed through a series of real-time orchestration software layers in which markers are generated and the media and transcript metadata are frame accurately time indexed within the Avid Interplay PAM environment.

Prior to the advent of AI and machine learning, the benefits of automated transcript generation were not available to the broadcast and M&E marketplace. Today, this technology opens new doors of efficiency, accessibility, cost savings and opportunity for expanded monetization for the broadcaster and media operators across the industry

Digital Nirvana Introduces Metadata Automation Tool for News Broadcasters

MetadataIQ

FREMONT, Calif. — Sept. 2, 2022 — Digital Nirvana, a provider of leading-edge media monitoring and metadata generation services, today announced the availability of MetadataIQ for News, a new variation of its MetadataIQ SaaS-based automatic metadata generation tool. MetadataIQ for News uses news-specific speech-to-text technology and machine learning capabilities to describe quickly the assets that appear in a news broadcaster’s feed. As a result, editors and producers can find what they need and create news shows more efficiently.

News providers get multiple news feeds from bureaus and other providers, such as The Associated Press. There can be as many as 100 continuous feeds at a time, depending on the size of the news organization. It is impossible for humans to keep up with tagging all that media. There are many speech-to-text engines on the market that can produce decent output on general-purpose language, but they tend to falter when it comes to identifying names and places that are in the news.

Unlike those general-purpose STT engines, MetadataIQ for News was made just to handle news content. It ingests all feeds in real time and applies a speech-to-text engine that is fine-tuned for news production. Digital Nirvana uses its MonitorIQ automated broadcast monitoring application to ensure MetadataIQ for News continuously improves. Every day, MonitorIQ records multiple news channels, including the audio, which contains the proper pronunciation. Then, using AI, MonitorIQ automatically identifies all names and places, and feeds all the data back into the STT engine’s dynamically updated vocabulary. This process is what makes MetadataIQ for News unique and able to generate highly accurate output.

Two major news organizations — one in the United States and another in the Middle East — have been testing these capabilities in their live news operations. They have found that applying ML technologies to their workflows yields automatically generated, highly accurate metadata more quickly and affordably than traditional methods, which translates to money, effort, and time savings. It also means better-structured, more detailed, and more accurate metadata and shorter content delivery cycles.

“We designed MetadataIQ to describe content from multiple cameras of a reality show. But news broadcasters needed an application that was built specifically to handle news content, which is constantly changing and therefore doesn’t conform to general-purpose speech-to-text engines,” said Hiren Hindocha, CEO of Digital Nirvana. “Because the application is continually training the engine to recognize new names and places, MetadataIQ for News ensures news broadcasters always have an accurate description of their content, even though there’s something different every day.”

More information about Digital Nirvana and its products and services is available at www.digital-nirvana.com

Digital Nirvana Introduces Trance 4.0, Adding Modular Applications to Its SaaS Transcription and Captioning Tool

FREMONT, Calif. — July 28, 2022 — Digital Nirvana, a provider of leading-edge media monitoring and metadata generation services, today announced an upgrade to its Trance self-service SaaS application. Trance 4.0 works within a media company’s own workflow to generate transcripts, closed captions/subtitles, and translations automatically for content localization. Both enterprises and individual users will benefit from new features and capabilities, including elaborate account management, modular rights for users, and an advanced pro-captioning window.

Major changes in terms of user experience are broadly classified into the following categories:

Modular Application: Now the application can be used as a combined or individual tool for transcription, captioning, text localization, or conformance of existing captions.

Transcription: The new and improved transcription window can now be used as a stand-alone app instead of being part of a three-step transcription, captioning, and subtitling workflow that only generates output after all steps are complete. Users can upload media assets and quickly gain access to highly accurate, time-coded, speaker-segmented, automatic transcripts in the transcription window in real time. In addition to media and entertainment content, users can now get interviews, meetings, podcasts, and more quickly transcribed, reviewed, and exported in different formats.

transcription services

Captioning: The pro-captioning window has undergone a major change to make it both user-friendly and efficient. Machine-generated timecodes can now be adjusted using spectrogram and manual inputs. It is now possible to ingest predefined sound cues, import custom vocabularies, view frames, and import guidelines to view across the organization. The stand-alone pro-captioning window will allow users to upload media, generate automatic captions, and display in the pro-captioning widow using the desired presets defined by the user or the organization.

Text Localization: An extension of the pro-captioning window, text localization can now be used as a Trance module to focus on localizing captions. Users can now import existing captions and quickly use the machine translation feature to generate highly accurate localized text specifically designed for subtitling purposes. Then they can review it side by side and export in various formats. Users can also create different presets for various languages since localization varies from language to language. This capability helps enterprises easily localize both legacy and new content and extend the content to a wider audience.

Caption Conformance: This application enables users to import text with new presets to conform with various publishing platforms. In addition, the application will automatically review the text and highlight any nonconformities with the selected guidelines. For example, if a user wants to publish content on Netflix, they can import the caption file, and the system will generate a time-coded alert against each nonconformity, enabling the user to quickly navigate to each instance and correct it. This helps enterprises avoid rejections from the publishing platform.

Management Functions: Digital Nirvana has upgraded the dashboard for better real-time visibility into which users are online and the progress of jobs. Administrators now have better management controls, including the ability to define user hierarchy, monitor user performance, and grade users. They can also see commercial usage in real time, add multiple projects with different presets, and upload custom vocabulary, among many other capabilities.

User Control: Users now have more control over processing jobs, including the ability to choose from available jobs, import a transcript, and create captions in existing or new presets if required. There’s also speaker differentiation, single-click access to predefined sound cues, options for a personal dictionary, the ability to precisely time captions by moving the spectrograph or overwriting manually in the caption window, easy-access icons on the top array, and advanced position controls.

transcription

Assigning Internal and External Tasks in the Same Application: Enterprises are now able to use Trance 4.0 to both assign work items to internal staff and to share work items with Digital Nirvana’s service team to receive fully qualified, human-curated output using the same application. This eliminates the need to go to multiple places for data sharing.

Also, in an industry first, Digital Nirvana has implemented machine learning- and NLP-based presets to segment transcripts accurately into captions.

“Our customers asked, and we delivered. With this release, we’ve given Trance a major upgrade in capabilities and user experience,” said Russell Vijayan, director of product at Digital Nirvana. “With advanced management controls, real-time monitoring of online users, better visibility into commercial usage and status of jobs, access to advanced security, and so much more, users will see a significant boost in both efficiency and experience.”

Trance 4.0 is scheduled for release in September. Existing users will be notified when the upgrade is ready. New users will see the updated interface while onboarding.

More information about Digital Nirvana and its products and services is available at www.digital-nirvana.com

Digital Nirvana Partners With eMAM For Automated Metadata Generation, Enhancement

Digital Nirvana, a provider of media monitoring and metadata generation services, announced a new technology partnership with EMAM Inc., creator of the eMAM media asset management and workflow management platform for broadcasters, media companies, government, and corporations.

Under the agreement, Digital Nirvana’s automated, AI-driven STT transcription, subtitle, and video intelligence metadata generation capabilities — collectively known as MediaServicesIQ — integrate directly with the eMAM suite of solutions via API. This integration enables eMAM users to generate metadata automatically and link it to the assets in the platform, making it faster and easier for them to do their jobs.

“Rich media is the key for all modern organizations. Media tagging is essential for turning historical content into a living archive and for rapidly using live content,” said David Miller, EMAM president.

The initial rollout focuses on generating speech-to-text (STT) transcripts of live and file-based content and then linking that transcript metadata to the media assets residing within the eMAM suite.

While eMAM boasts a full media production experience, offering tools to manage content throughout its life cycle, it had no mechanism for automatically tagging media. The integration with Digital Nirvana’s MediaServicesIQ adds this capability.

By integrating eMAM’s media management features with MediaServicesIQ’s speech-to-text capabilities, organizations can quickly produce and organize media, generating transcriptions of live-streamed or individual assets. The process is seamless and instantaneous, optimized for time efficiency.

File-based assets can be automatically or manually selected for transcription, sending them directly to Digital Nirvana for processing straight from the eMAM interface. MediaServicesIQ does the work invisibly in the background and sends the transcript metadata back to eMAM for immediate access.

For live content, transcript metadata is streamed back into the eMAM interface with a latency of three to five seconds. All metadata auto-populates and is time-indexed into eMAM, where users can search and interact with it.

The capability will primarily benefit media and entertainment clients that require automated transcript metadata, but it extends to eMAM users in other industries.

“It’s gratifying that eMAM has chosen Digital Nirvana as a trusted partner to help expand the utility and value of its platform to the broader media asset management marketplace,” said Hiren Hindocha, Digital Nirvana CEO. “The integration with MediaServicesIQ complements the already powerful eMAM platform and relieves a pain point for its users. In real-world terms, this partnership elevates the visibility, accessibility, speed, and productivity of the media creation process for eMAM clients.”

More information about Digital Nirvana and its products and services is available at www.digital-nirvana.com

Digital Nirvana Announces MonitorIQ RM for Monitoring Remote Hub or Headend Sites

Digital_Nirvana_MonitorIQ_RM

FREMONT, Calif. — April 12, 2022 — Digital Nirvana, a provider of leading-edge media monitoring and metadata generation services, today introduced MonitorIQ RM, a cost-effective video monitoring solution for remote hub and headend sites. MonitorIQ RM addresses the critical need among video distributors to replace the antiquated Slingbox and obsolete Volicon RPM solutions, which provided remote video monitoring at the edge

A derivative of Digital Nirvana’s MonitorIQ, the most reliable and intuitive solution for broadcast compliance and media monitoring on the market, MonitorIQ RM is designed to monitor huge numbers of individual locations very quickly. Through MonitorIQ RM, cable operators and other video distributors can monitor hundreds of servers across a large geographic area to verify ad insertion, signal quality, service delivery, and proper programming placement at the local level — all from one or many central locations anywhere in the country. MonitorIQ RM allows technical and support teams to provide service and monitor high-profile events live from any central location without having to be on-site, which eliminates unnecessary truck rolls.

Through the MonitorIQ RM interface, technicians can see the entire channel lineup; change channels; and view, fast forward, rewind, and scroll through live or recorded content using remote control — all by region, ad zone, or even down to specific hubs or headends.

Technicians can also schedule recordings quickly through the electronic program guide in just a few simple steps, a feature that saves a significant amount of time when programming the same recording many times over. Rather than having to go to every channel individually to set up a recording, technicians can schedule it on different channels and in different zones instantly and simultaneously. For example, it’s possible to record, say, Bloomberg Television at 2 p.m. in a few locations on the West Coast and a few more in the Midwest and on the East Coast — all with one click.

In doing so, Digital Nirvana was able to lower the cost of MonitorIQ RM units to a price that works for this application. Cable operators can afford to deploy hundreds of units to headends throughout their network with the same high scalability and highly secure, Linux-based operating system they’d get with the traditional MonitorIQ solution

The benefits for video distributors and their technicians include:

  • •Fewer physical trips to hubs or headends to correct problems.

  • •More efficient operations because technicians no longer have to log in to multiple different systems to monitor or record different individual channels in different areas.

  • •Greater flexibility — Any person, no matter where they are, can monitor any zone at any time, which is especially helpful when people are absent due to illness, vacations, etc.

“We designed MonitorIQ RM only for remote monitoring, taking away the things people don’t need and simplifying the user interface to make it extremely easy to do the job with as few clicks as possible. Then we found a price and functionality point that makes it a smart solution to both purchase and deploy,” said Russell Wise, senior vice president at Digital Nirvana. “It’s especially pertinent in Volicon RPM and Slingbox remote monitoring-type situations, where we can bring access to live and recorded video at the touch of a fingertip from any place in the world.”

MonitorIQ RM will be available in two options: a software-only solution and a turnkey appliance with server and hardware included.

More information about Digital Nirvana and its products and services is available at www.digital-nirvana.com

Digital Nirvana Announces Updates to MetadataIQ Metadata-Automation Tool for Avid Ecosystem

MetadataIQ Metadata-Automation Tool for Avid Ecosystem

FREMONT, Calif. — April 5, 2022 — Digital Nirvana, a provider of leading-edge media monitoring and metadata generation services, today announced an upgrade to MetadataIQ, its SaaS-based tool that automatically generates speech-to-text and video intelligence metadata, increasing the efficiency of production, preproduction, and live content creation services for Avid PAM/MAM users. The new version, which the company will preview at the 2022 NAB Show, makes beta-tested video intelligence capabilities commercially available and integrates directly with Avid MediaCentral.

MetadataIQ 4.0 relies on advanced machine learning and high-performance AI capabilities in the cloud (speech to text, facial recognition, object identification, content classification, etc.) to create highly accurate metadata more quickly and less expensively than traditional methods. Crucially, MetadataIQ is the only tool that not only automatically generates speech-to-text transcripts on incoming feeds (or on stored content) in real time, but then takes the transcript, parses it by time, and indexes it back to the media in the Avid environment. No other such product integrates with Avid today.

Since Digital Nirvana introduced MetadataIQ about a year ago, the primary use case has been generating speech to text in real time as massive amounts of live streams are being ingested, then sending that STT transcript into the Avid Interplay PAM system with time inputs. Two major news organizations — one in the United States and another in the Middle East — have been testing these capabilities in their live news workflows, and the results from real-time transcript metadata alone have transformed their operations. The application’s unique ability to marry real-time transcript generation with real-time indexing in Avid means producers and editors can quickly find relevant media assets for their news stories, thereby accelerating the entire production process.

In the new version, MetadataIQ’s transcription and other video intelligence capabilities will emerge from the proof-of-concept stage and be commercially available based on the overwhelming success of the beta testing.

Also, instead of sending metadata only to Avid Interplay on-prem implementations, MetadataIQ 4.0 will integrate with Avid’s cloud-based MediaCentral hub, where editors access multiple Avid applications to do their work. Thanks to cloud integration, instead of being able to search only one type of metadata at once as they’ve been doing in Avid Interplay, editors will be able to combine searches in MediaCentral based on multiple forms of metadata. For example, if MetadataIQ generates metadata using OCR, facial recognition, and speech to text, when an editor enters search terms, MediaCentral will search all three of those types of metadata simultaneously. This means editors will get more precise results even faster.

“Combined search makes the entire video machine-readable, not just the words. An STT search might yield 50 results, which still makes for significant time savings when you’ve got hundreds of hours of video to search through. But with combined search, you could narrow it down to perhaps only four or five results. That’s even better,” said Russell Wise, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Digital Nirvana. “These new developments will allow producers and editors to pinpoint the right clips and create content even faster, which is especially crucial when it comes to news, sports, and other time-sensitive broadcast applications.”

Digital Nirvana will demonstrate MetadataIQ’s capabilities at the 2022 NAB Show in Booth W3509.

More information about Digital Nirvana and its products and services is available at www.digital-nirvana.com.

Digital Nirvana adds Tom Moniak as Director of Sales

USA. — 14 January, 2022 – Digital Nirvana has announced that it has hired Tom Moniak as Director of Sales . Digital Nirvana created the position in response to the company’s growth and expansion. Moniak is responsible for sales to media and entertainment clients in the United States.

“Tom has served clients in every aspect of production and delivery in the M&E space and has strong relationships across the localization, media production services, advertising, gaming, and software development communities and with Fortune 500 companies,” said Russell Wise, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Digital Nirvana. “That mix of experience makes us better able to serve customers and prospects in postproduction environments and lays the groundwork for our continued growth in the U.S.”

Moniak is an accomplished sales leader who has held several senior sales, marketing, and business development roles throughout his career. Prior to joining Digital Nirvana, he was the U.S. Director of Business Development for brand localization solution provider Blend, where he managed all aspects of customer business relationships.

Before that, Moniak spent three years at Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, first working directly with media producers and content owners as an account manager, global client strategy, and then as an account director, global strategic partnerships. During that time, he sold Deluxe’s new SaaS solution to the media and entertainment industry.

Among his other roles, Moniak has served as a sales and marketing strategy consultant for a tech startup, USA Director of Business Development for app marketing agency and mobile ad network Appromoters, and Director of Sales for app monetization network AppTap.

“I’m here to help clients better navigate change for sustainable development and growth,” said Moniak. “I’m ready to dig in and collaborate with U.S. media and entertainment companies to help improve operational efficiencies, ensure compliance, reduce costs, and expand revenue streams with Digital Nirvana’s comprehensive and flexible solutions.”