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Stacking Up On SaaS

Posted on December 31, 2018August 27, 2024 by Fiona Ashe

The digital age has introduced lots of new lingo: tweep, Instagramming, fintech, etc. SaaS is one of the fancy new words, but what does it really mean for you and your business? The acronym SaaS stands for Software as a Service, which means subscribing to a cloud-based solution.

The benefits of SaaS

In the “good old days” we all worked using software installed on computers in our offices. These could only be accessed there. Now, thanks to the digital revolution, SaaS facilitates teams to work and collaborate anywhere in the world where they have an internet connection.

While there is a subscription charge for SaaS, the cost is much lower than spending your hard-earned dollars on hardware and licences. You can also save money on tech support since the SaaS platform will take care of updates and security. Also, you won’t have to add more servers and storage when you want to scale up: your cloud storage will scale in line with your ambition.

But one piece of software has limited value on its own. Great functionality comes from many building blocks. There is an ever-growing number of technology solutions to marketing, HR, sales and customer service problems. Many of these have great potential; however, they are too complex to be agile.

Creating a tech stack

So, in order to maximise their value, they must huddle together in a stack with other technologies. A stack can include dozens of elements: both Microsoft and Cisco have more than 40 technologies in their respective marketing stacks alone!

A tech stack facilitates you to manage your digital assets by integrating technologies to give you the maximum flexibility and allowing you to use the best of breed solutions for various functions. These include applications like Salesforce for CRM, Trello for workflow and Overcast HQ for video management.

The Stackies

To underscore its importance, there’s even an award for tech stacks! It’s called the Stackies and it rewards companies who demonstrate the best marketing stack in terms of insightful concept, business alignment and clarity of purpose.

The 2019 Stackies (Marketing Tech Stack Awards) are now open for entries until March 15, 2019. All entries will be celebrated at a ceremony on the opening night of MarTech in San Jose on April 3 — and the five best entries will be awarded trophies.

So in order to elevate your business capabilities, accelerate time to value, and provide your team with ubiquitous access to projects, it’s time to get SaaSy!

The Cutting Edge Of Sports Production Technology

Posted on December 10, 2018August 27, 2024 by Fiona Ashe

SVG Summit

Are you involved in any aspect of sports production, content creation or distribution? If so, why not swing by the SVG Summit 2018 at the New York Hilton Hotel today and tomorrow (10th and 11th December). There’s so much to check out in terms of the latest in digital sports video technology such as augmented reality, machine learning, workflows, digital ad insertion and the impact of 5G.

All Hail The Cloud

As in previous years, the SVG Summit will feature a Cloud and Virtualisation Workshop. This seminar will be full of tips and tricks about cloud-based production and media asset management workflows which are being used by sports-media organisations. It will give insight into how the cloud, virtualisation and SaaS are transforming video production.

This transformation will be discussed by a panel that will include Scott Bounds of Microsoft and Rick Gilpin of Google Cloud. They’ll talk about how the entire video-production ecosystem is undergoing a makeover: from storage and editing to encoding and transcoding and beyond.

Cutting Edge Technologies

Another fascinating panel discussion will explore what’s new for digital sports content creators and distributors. 5G cellular connectivity is on the horizon; AI is putting its stamp on the clipping and enhancing of highlights and social media content; and UHD/HDR streaming has the potential to make a big difference to those live streaming to compatible Smart TVs. Experts will share what needs to happen next.

Video Workflow

Every minute counts when it comes to getting post-produced content out across social media and other digital channels. Your team’s creative vision is challenged by tight timelines. Your business obligations might not match internal resources. So what do you do? A case study at the summit will show how production teams at MLB Network have adopted an agile workflow to get both internal and external stakeholders reviewing media faster from the first version to final delivery.

Keynotes

The summit will also feature keynotes by some of the biggest names in sports TV.

Brad Boim will talk about how heading into the 2018 NFL season, NFL Media upgraded its asset management system to enhance metadata tagging with the ingestion of GSIS data, Next-Gen Stats and Speech-to-Text transcriptions into their MAM. This extra metadata has enabled producers to run deeper searches within the database.

Charlie Ebersol, who has created a new American pro football league, will give a presentation on how video production and distribution technology will play a key role in it.

Fresh off a busy year when NBC Broadcasting/NBC Sports Group broadcast the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup, its chairman Mark Lazarus will reflect on the successes and challenges of 2018 and examine issues and opportunities facing the live sports production industry.

Fan Engagement

If you’re interested in how to fill stadiums for matches, then don’t miss the panel discussion on how teams in the New York area attract fans to the stands game after game, using tech tools from larger-than-life video displays to mobile gaming.

AR, AI and Machine Learning

Other panel discussions will look at new ways to use Augmented Reality technology, camera tracking and data visualisation to give much more impact to a sports production and whether 1080p HDR sports production workflows are the sweet spot in terms of cost and performance.

There will also be a Sports Content Management Workshop exploring AI versus machine learning. It will tease out how major sports-media organisations are leveraging AI and machine learning for speech-to-text and translation; object and facial recognition; automated personalisation and content discovery.

Trends

The 2018 SVG Summit is also the go-to place for one-on-one conversations, case studies, tech showcases and insights into trends shaping the future of the sports-media business.

Overcast HQ CEO Philippe Brodeur will be at the SVG Summit 2018 and would be delighted to show you our video platform. If you would like to meet up with him and chat about all things video, please tweet him: @PhilippeBrodeur or email philippe@overcasthq.com

How Does Your Technology Stack Up?

Posted on October 26, 2018August 27, 2024 by Fiona Ashe

Tech Stack

During tech awards season in Ireland one technology award that you may not have heard of is the Stackies. The what? The Stackies! They are described by Scott Brinker, chair of the MarTech Conference (which presents the awards) as “the coolest awards programme in marketing!” It’s an accolade for companies who demonstrate the best marketing stack in terms of insightful concept, business alignment and clarity of purpose.

So what is a marketing stack? Well, it’s the collection of all the different software you use in marketing (marketing automation, social media management, content management, CRM, advertising, DAM, video, SEO, etc.)

If you were to analyse all of the different marketing technology tools that you’re using across your organisation, you might be surprised to discover just how many there are. Having this information is very useful strategically because you can then assess the purpose of each piece of the stack jigsaw and decide whether it serves the overall functionality of your stack.

How big is your stack?

The Stackies provide a very valuable opportunity to learn from market leaders. In 2017 the awarding body published 57 marketing stack illustrations, including Microsoft’s stack, which uses 44 platforms and Cisco’s, which uses 40.

^{Microsoft Marketing Technology Stack courtesy of MarTech}

If you hear companies claiming that they provide an end-to-end solution, you’d be well advised to check out their stack since very few actually do.

You’re probably familiar with CMS (content management systems) — WordPress is a good example. It’s used by companies to push out content. Within that platform, the content needs to be managed: drafted, edited, formatted, cross referenced through hyperlinks, combined (images, text and video), and published.

But how do you create the content that you wish to publish through a CMS and what kind of management does that entail? You’ll need an asset management system with a stack that’s designed with your workflow in mind. You’ll need to import media (images and video files), edit them, collaborate on them, store them, share them with stakeholders for review, get approval, export them in different formats and archive them.

How does a stack help consumers?

Stacks, if well designed, make tasks easier.

Overcast has created a comprehensive and strategic technology stack to make it effortless for you to manage your digital assets, in particular video assets. In fact, our stack makes it as easy to manage video as it is to manage a Word document.

The technology that we use in our stack includes AWS (Amazon Web Services) which features the best storage and voice-to-text functionality in the market. We also use the JW Player, which is first-class software that embeds videos into web pages.

Some other celebrity appearances in our stack include Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, AVID, Video.js and Mailchimp.

We have also combined these renowned leading technologies with our own proprietary software. For example, we use artificial intelligence to facilitate people to search their video clips for objects, settings, colours, events, words, sounds and facial recognition.

The integration of these and the other technologies in our stack create a streamlined, smart, easy-to-use video management experience for all of our clients. Want to make your work life easier?