Digitalsmiths Launches "TV Everywhere" Version of its Flagship VideoSense Product

Multiscreen media analysis, operations and publishing technology provider, Digitalsmiths, on Wednesday launched a new version of its flagship VideoSense product that has been designed expressly to support the "TV Everywhere" content distribution model (note: the "TV Everywhere" model, which has long been championed by Time Warner and its chairman and CEO, Jeff Bewkes, seeks to make programming that pay-TV customers have already paid for through their cable, satellite or IPTV subscriptions available to those customers on multiple platforms, and thus aims to head off the threat posed to pay-TV services by the increasing availability of over-the-top programming--for more background, see the articles published on itvt.com, April 30th, May 14th, June 25th and July 15th).

According to Digitalsmiths, VideoSense for TV Everywhere, as the new version of the product is called, incorporates features for entitlement rights management, enhanced time-based metadata management, dynamic clip creation and distribution, advanced ad cue management, multi-language support, and more. The company bills the product as being designed to solve the complex rights-management, distribution and clearance issues that must be addressed in order for TV Everywhere to be viable. It claims that it provides premium content owners with a systematic, automated platform that allows them to deliver the right content to the right users in the right distribution windows, and to maximize their revenues through proactive metadata management. "The studios and networks that make up our customer base are working night and day to bring TV Everywhere online, and VideoSense for TV Everywhere gives them the ability to deliver content to users anywhere, at any time, and on any device," Digitalsmiths co-founder and CEO, Ben Weinberger, said in a prepared statement. "Ultimately, VideoSense enables a positive, 'lean-forward' viewing experience for the end-user, and the innovations we're announcing today bring our clients even closer to that goal."

According to Digitalsmiths, VideoSense for TV Everywhere features include:

• Entitlement rights management: users can create and manage all rights and clearances (e.g. distribution deal terms, actors, regions, dialogue, subject matter, music rights and licensing concerns) through VideoSense's MetaFrame metadata management framework, the company says, in order to ensure that all content is cleared for multiple platforms, regions and distribution windows.
• Time-based metadata management: users are provided with a graphical view of the time-based metadata associated with an asset, the company says, including data created by Digitalsmiths and custom tracks clients have entered. The company claims that the new display provides users with the ability to view aggregated and individual tracks of data, allowing them to see all elements of the asset.
• Advanced ad cue management: users can detect video breaks in content, the company says, allowing them to find appropriate spots for ads in the video playback. The system is designed to display ad insertion points detected by Digitalsmiths' ad break detection process, and to manage the position of ad points.
• Dynamic clip creation, management and delivery: Digitalsmiths claims that multiple enhancements enable users to create, manage and distribute clips (in a player) through VideoSense. Users generate clips with all associated MetaFrame data and manage clip transcoding and delivery, the company says.
• Manual asset creation: users can now add asset metadata and groups to VideoSense to upload video assets without the need for an XML upload, the company says.
• Multiple language track support: the company says that this new feature supports a video asset having multiple audio assets and enables support for multi-language transcodes from a single video asset.

Digitalsmiths also announced Wednesday the formation of an R&D division, called Digitalsmiths Labs, which is comprised of computer vision scientists and video application engineers. It says that the division is working on new methods for applying time-based metadata for advanced monetization and audience acquisition, as well as enhancing its existing video interpretation technologies. According to the company, Digitalsmiths Labs recently released significant enhancements to its proprietary facial recognition and scene classification technologies, that make those technologies more accurate and capable of automatically tagging information more quickly.