Connections

LAS VEGAS — Upgrades to a wide range of collaboration tools, looking ahead to the future of entertainment identifiers, and enabling AI in all sorts of workflows. Here’s what Sohonet, EIDR and Prime Focus Technologies shared at NAB.

Sohonet

It was next to impossible to stroll up to the Sohonet booth at NAB and get a demo without a reservation. Even with a slot, you’d probably find yourself waiting for one of the company’s major studio clients to finish up.

It was ‍ClearView Flex, Sohonet’s real-time remote collaboration platform, drawing much of the attention, with the company previewing ClearView Flex’s availability on AWS, after already being available via Azure and VMWare, ensuring collaboration from any cloud environment.

Sohonet CEO Chuck Parker detailed new, enhanced collaboration features for the iPad with Audio Chat and Annotation on iPad, with Video Presence for both the web and iPad coming next.

“It’s hugely popular with our customers,” Parker said, a massive understatement for anyone who watched Sohonet’s booth traffic.

The goal with everything Sohonet brought to NAB revolved around streamlining operations and saving time with creative collaborations.

For ClearView Pivot, Sohonet’s theatrical-grade review platform, off-network capabilities are available, in a nod to today’s zero-trust security necessities, and Pivot can handle much larger payloads than before, offering off-network 4K video.

For FileRunner, Sohonet’s file transfer service, there are new UI and UX that involved “a whole lot of work earlier this year,” Parker said, with Sohonet leaning into expediting everything that goes into asset distribution.

For the dailies review platform ClearView Rush, there are enhanced executive review capabilities for dailies and cuts, and for Core, the company’s production asset management platform, enhancements to the UI and UX for both iPad and AppleTV debuted at NAB.

With that much happening with its studio-focused tools, it was no surprise Sohonet was so busy.

EIDR

EIDR managing director Hollie Choi spent her time at the 2024 NAB Show doing what she does best: “Planning for the future of EIDR. And planning for what’s next.”

With GenAI and FAST being the top buzz words of the show, Choi was spotted holding court with potential new members who could not only benefit from what EIDR offers, but also bring new technologies to the equation.

“Content authenticity and provenance are some of the big things I’ve heard people are concerned about, and that’s an area EIDR is keeping tabs on,” Choi said.

EIDR members in attendance at NAB:

Google, Gracenote, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Xperi, Sinclair, Disney, Warner Bros.-Discovery, Deluxe, Microsoft, BBC Studios, BeBanjo, FPT, Fabric, Fox, Lionsgate, MetaBroadcast, Netflix, NPD, PBS, Premiere Digital, RSG Media, Spherex, Vubiquity, and Whip Media.

Prime Focus Technologies

For T Shobhana, SVP and global head of marketing at Prime Focus Technologies, the focus for her company at NAB was both vast and simple:

“We’re unveiling GenAI innovations and product enhancements that provide our clients opportunities for revenue generation.”

That focus began with the launch announcement for CLEAR Conversational AI Co-Pilot, with the goal of revolutionising content engagement, from creation to distribution, beyond simple search capabilities.

Co-Pilot removes manual content management tasks by offering an AI-powered chat feature that understands your stated needs and delivers accurate outcomes.

Use chat to search the content library and receive suggestions for trailers, improve social media marketing around titles, create personally targeted content lists, even revisit favorite individual scenes, just by saying a few words … Prime Focus sees its new AI offering as a groundbreaking advancement in content curation.

“Key moments on screen, key pieces of dialogue, you name it, this conversational AI allows you to just chat and not only find what you’re looking for, but do tasks for you as well, analyse your entire library,” Shobhana said.

That was just the beginning of Prime Focus’s AI announcements for the show, including:

• CLEAR Clip, using AI search to find library content from inside Adobe Premiere Pro, edit clips and stories, and generate videos for faster monetisation.

AI-suggested thumbnails and AI-led subtitles are included.

• AI entertainment highlights allow users to repurpose content from their library to create GenAI-suggested highlights, bite-sized clips, scene lifts, compilations and cutdowns, posts, and stories at scale for social media and FAST/streaming platforms.

• AI-assisted review and approval provides a side-by-side view, with the AI co-pilot able to spot differences, and summarise the review comments.

• In the content management arena, Prime Focus is also offering AI metadata for content enrichment; AI-driven compliance to identify potentially objectionable content segments; AI Conform that creates ready-to-use “Serviceable, Standardised Masters” by conforming video, audio, subtitles and forced narrations to meet the fulfilment demand faster for TV distribution; and CLEAR Smart MAM, for AI-embedded MAM and AI-driven workflows for active library management.

• Speech-to-text for AI-driven subtitling, transcription, and translation, and text-to-speech, Get AI-assisted dubbing and voiceovers with realistic voices.