technology Archives - Overcast HQ

The Demand for Remote-Enabling Video Technology

Posted on June 1, 2022August 21, 2024 by Fiona Ashe

The democratisation of video

Practically everyone owns a smartphone these days; therefore, we all carry a mini computer with us every day. But, more than that, phones can record video clips and you can edit that footage through apps; so, effectively, we are all walking around with full video production capabilities in our pockets.

Armed with this portable video technology, it must be a piece of cake to make professional-looking videos, right?

Wrong!

Not as easy as “point and shoot”

Over the past few years, the popularity of video has exploded as the preferred communication channel for enterprises — both internally with employees and stakeholders, and externally with customers.

But, despite everyone having free access to video production tools through their smartphone, content creation remains a challenge for enterprises.

Original content is king

The first question enterprises must ask themselves is, “What do viewers want to watch?”

The streaming wars provide a valuable insight into this. When consumers sit down in front of their TV in the evening and flick on Netflix or Apple TV or Disney Plus or Prime Video or Hulu or any other streamer, the choice of programming is almost overwhelming!

Silverwood Partners’ Media Technology: Strategic Industry Analysis 2022 shows that original content is a hit with viewers! When an original show is released by a streamer, the number of subscribers goes up significantly.

This exponential demand for original content is fuelling investment in media technology, which will also benefit enterprises who are struggling to create their own content.

The move to remote working enforced by the COVID-19 pandemic generated difficulties for teams who had, up to that point, collaborated on video in the same physical space. Suddenly, they discovered that finding particular clips, accessing shared footage, exchanging feedback, getting approvals, and delivering video in different formats was slow, clunky and expensive.

The thirst among consumers for immersive, engaging, superior-quality content is elevating the demand for innovative technologies that make video collaboration, creation and delivery easy.

Such technologies will be digitally-native solutions, which OTT providers might be better positioned to support than traditional broadcasters.

When COVID-19 necessitated people en masse to work from home, the remote-enabling technology that emerged was a “quick fix”. But now, as we exit the pandemic, the accelerating demand for optimised solutions is firmly paving the road to permanent remote-forward production workflows.

Get ahead of the game

Want to know more about remote-forward workflows? Get in contact and we would be delighted to show you our platform to enable you to easily leverage video to grow your business.

When It Comes To Tech, Overcast’s Review & Approve is rated #1 by Swedish National Broadcaster

Posted on August 20, 2020August 23, 2024 by Philippe Brodeur

Overcast recently went head to head with some of the best tech companies in Europe on a tender for SVT – Sweden’s national broadcaster.

The big news is that Overcast’s tender was the only company to score 100% on the technical requirements of the tender, beating Sony and Frame.io (who came in joint second), and also ioGates, Dalet, Limecraft, Spotterfish, and Klash:

Some of the technical requirements included:

the use of speech to text;
the use different layers of metadata;
audit trails of user activity;
automatic ingest into Avid Media Composer;
automatic ingest into Adobe Premiere;
data encryption.

🙂 We lost out on price on this occasion. The silver lining — our score shows that if you’re looking for the best tech, you have to pay a little more.

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!

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?