B+C and Next TV have named the winners for the Best of Show Awards for this year’s NAB Show in Las Vegas. A panel of industry experts judged these exhibited products on the criteria of innovation, feature set, cost efficiency and performance in serving the industry. Winners were chosen from companies that exhibited at the 2023 NAB Show and submitted nominations.
Backlight
Wildmoka Digital Media Platform
wildmoka.com
Wildmoka’s Digital Media Platform allows leading sports broadcasters and rightsholders to create and distribute unlimited amounts of content such as near-live clips, highlight reels, and live streams across web, mobile, OTT, and social networks (including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and TikTok). It enables content creation and distribution from any source to any destination, in any format, at speed and scale. The cloud-native platform offers a set of easy-to-use, web-based tools for fast and efficient creation and repurposing of near-live clips, highlight reels and live streams. It is ideal for working with live sports and breaking news content that has a higher value now than it will five minutes later.
Homatics and THX Ltd.
Homatics X THX Home Click Smart-Home Theater Speaker System
thx.com/blog/thx-homatics-sei-robotics-speakers
The Homatics X THX Home Click Smart-Home Theater instantly turns your TV into a cinematic experience that is “tuned by THX.” Users will access clear images with Dolby Vision and immersive panoramic surround sound through the powerful Dolby Atmos 5.1.4 channels surround sound AI (Artificial Intelligence) enhancement technology. The easy-to-use design is plug-in and play through seamless wireless connections so users can enjoy theater-quality entertainment in a snap, all through voice or RCU control. Additionally, the Homatics’ Humming EQ feature adds to a personalized audio-visual experience that is truly one of a kind.
Matrox Video
Matrox Origin
video.matrox.com/en/products/broadcast-media/origin-series
Tier-1 live production in the cloud requires frame-accurate, deterministic, low-latency, redundant and responsive interconnected systems at large scale. So far, there have been no cloud solutions that satisfy those requirements without compromising quality, latency and reliability. Instead of simply shifting on-premises workflows to the cloud — thereby giving up some quality and latency — Matrox ORIGIN tackles the problem at the infrastructure level. This disruptive technology is a software-only, vendor-neutral, asynchronous framework that runs on IT infrastructure. It can achieve highly scalable, responsive, low-latency, easy-to-control and frame-accurate broadcast media facilities for both on-premises and cloud deployments.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS Studio in the Cloud
aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/studio-in-the-cloud
The AWS Studio-in-the-Cloud solution includes media applications running on virtual machines for creative production workflows. The pipeline can run at 12 bits with color-accurate monitoring. Content providers can employ various creative applications and partner solutions. The cloud is already widely used for storage of media files, file transfers, lightweight proxy editorial, and for large compute jobs. However, AWS is filling gaps to create more effective, efficient cloud-based workflows. With new cloud-enabled tools, open APIs and an expanded ISV partner ecosystem, a holistic production workflow with shared storage is now a reality.
Cobalt Digital
SafeLink-8TS-VM (Virtual Machine)
cobaltdigital.com/products/4966/safelink-gateway
The Cobalt Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST) product line includes the SafeLink Gateway, an openGear card that can provide eight channels of conversion between RIST and plain UDP/RTP. SafeLink is compression-agnostic and can protect any type of transport stream. Each input channel can support independent/unrelated primary/backup streams, or SMPTE ST 2022-7 seamless switching or bonding. The SafeLink Gateway is designed to provide RIST functionality to legacy devices.
Zixi
Software Defined Video Platform 5G
zixi.com/zixi-for-5g-delivery
Zixi is the architect of the Software-Defined Video Platform (SDVP), the industry’s most complete live IP video-workflow solution. Zixi has integrated support for managing 4K video streams on 5G networks within multi-access edge compute (MEC) infrastructure. 5G networks and MEC infrastructure unlock exciting new opportunities, including ultra-low latency live remote production, satellite rationalization for distribution and new fan experiences both in and outside the venue.
Backlight
Zype Playout
zype.com/product/playout
Zype Playout enables content owners to transform live and on-demand video into digital linear channels for millions of viewers. Built for broadcasters, digital publishers, consumer brands and developers, Zype Playout’s intuitive tools make operating playout a breeze. The user-friendly interface features drag-and-drop scheduling, dynamic ad-break setup and insertion capabilities, and flexible distribution to FAST or owned-and-operated destinations.
Evertz
Reflektor On-Premise & Cloud Signal Processor
evertz.com/resources/press/NAB2023%20100%20Celebrations.pdf
Reflektor, Evertz’s SaaS IP distribution platform, is ideal for providers of live/linear services, cloud applications or OTT. Reflektor is a microservice-based signal processor for onboarding and normalizing video transport streams, transcoding and replication. It addresses the challenges of today’s cloud workflows: handling multiple transport formats and codecs while delivering incoming feeds to different software instances.
Quickplay and VionLabs
Quickplay-VionLabs Preview Clips
vionlabs.com/visual-discovery
Quickplay and VionLabs are bringing together Quickplay’s cloud- native CMS and VionLabs’s AINAR Visual Discovery solution to create AI Automated Thumbnails and Preview Clips. AI-derived metadata for content moods, micro-genres, story descriptors, keywords and more are leveraged by advanced personalization algorithms from Quickplay to find all the main characters through presence and importance to story, pinpoint exactly where in the frame to feature main characters for thumbnails and find the best scenes using energy and emotion tracking across the story arc.
Vizrt Group
Viz Vectar Plus
vizrt.com/products/viz-vectar-plus
Viz Vectar Plus, a software-based live production system, enables broadcast and media organizations to quickly adopt an IT- and IP-friendly solution as a software plan, it’s a system that can be deployed in different ways depending on organizational needs. Viz Vectar Plus provides multisource live video mixing of up 44 source channels, each supporting key and fill and multidestination delivery including eight high-definition mix outputs over internet protocol.
QUANTEEC
QUANTEEC
quanteec.com
QUANTEEC is a French startup offering the streaming sector an innovative technology capable of solving video-streaming scaling issues, while enabling users to significantly save costs and reduce their energy footprint. The QUANTEEC motto is “more with less,” and to achieve that, the technology relies on three core fundamental optimization principles: performance, costs savings and energy reduction. Its Web3-inspired technology shifts the current generalized paradigm and turns each single viewer into a “smart and virtuous re-streamer.” In doing so, it allows the audience to scale up almost infinitely without the need to rely on deployment of additional servers.
