We concluded the event with our first annual Bitmovin Innovators Network partner awards to recognize and celebrate the amazing work of our partners who embrace the fact that the industry is “Better Together”, by creating solutions with partners that are designed to simplify customers’ video workload needs and advance the viewing experience for audiences.

I am incredibly proud to share the winners of the Bitmovin Innovators Network partner awards below, and the contributions they’ve made: 

Accenture – Global Systems Integrator of the Year:

Accenture and Bitmovin exemplify the “better together” approach through their close strategic partnership, including an ongoing collaboration with the world’s largest motorsports content owners that led to joint engagements with several of the largest sports and media brands in the world.

Broadpeak – Global ISV Partner of the Year:

Broadpeak embodies the “Better Together” spirit through its unwavering strategic collaboration with Bitmovin. This powerful partnership has yielded several key benefits. Together, they have developed solutions that integrated with Bitmovin’s encoder, player, and analytics, resulting in improved workflows for customers; created a consistent two-way communication between sales teams which has resulted in successful deals with European media brands, and joint marketing and PR initiatives at local events to strengthen their joint brand presence.

MediaKind –  Global Service Provider Partner of the Year:

MediaKind and Bitmovin have developed and maintained a robust strategic partnership that has launched sports applications for world-renowned sports leagues. These applications, including launching an app with a sports league on Apple Vision Pro that garnered rave reviews at the Apple launch event, have significantly boosted market visibility for both brands.

Microsoft Azure Marketplace – Cloud Marketplace of the Year:

Bitmovin has had unprecedented success with the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, including more than 200 new customer wins since June 2023. Azure Marketplace has quickly become Bitmovin’s largest and most successful sales channel.

Nomad Media – Americas Regional Channel Partner of the Year:

Nomad Media has deployed over 30 customers on the Bitmovin Play platform in 2023 alone as part of its Nomad Media platform. Nomad Media has also innovated on the player capabilities with dynamic multi-view capabilities. These advancements were showcased to major US clients, propelling both companies forward. This collaboration not only built a strong pipeline but also significantly boosted brand recognition in the US market.

G&L Geißendörfer & Leschinsky – EMEA Regional Channel Partner of the Year:

G&L is a proactive and committed industry partner, who has worked with Bitmovin on both successful sales and marketing initiatives. The collaboration between the two companies resulted in joint revenue, a new logo, and G&L also exhibited on the Bitmovin stand at IBC 2023 where it highlighted how the two companies’ solutions work together. Bitmovin and G&L also hosted a joint CMCD webinar together, which attracted attendees from key German broadcasters and various telecoms and content providers, and it recently published an e-commerce case study with Home Shopping Europe.

Viet Communications – APAC Regional Channel Partner of the Year

Vietcoms was the first licensee for the Bitmovin Player in the Asia Pacific region. Vietcoms was selected for its hard work and efforts in securing our impressive player business in Vietnam and developing agile operational models to meet the specific customer and TelCo business needs and technical requirements.

Once again, I’d like to give huge congratulations to all the winners. A huge thank you to everyone who attended the Bitmovin Innovators Network Partner Executive Networking Event, and to every single one of our partners who continue to embrace the spirit of “Better Together.” IBC is just around the corner, and we will have some exciting initiatives and announcements coming soon to share with you ahead of the show.

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For the past few years, AI has been one of the top buzzwords at the NAB Show. While other hot topics like “web3” seem to have peaked and faded, interest in video AI has continued to grow and this year there were more practical solutions being showcased than ever before. A personal highlight for Bitmovin was winning a TV Technology Best of Show award for our AI-powered Analytics session interpreter. Keep reading to learn more about other interesting and useful applications of AI that we saw at NAB 2024.

NAB Video AI Highlights: 2024

While there was some variation in implementation and features, the majority of the AI solutions I encountered at NAB fell into one of these categories:

• Generative AI (genAI) for video creation, post-production, or summaries and descriptions
• Automatic subtitling and captioning with multi-language translations
• Object or event detection and indexing
• Video quality enhancement

This summary is definitely not exhaustive, but highlights some of the things that stood out to me on the show floor and in the conference sessions. Please let us know in the comments if you saw anything else noteworthy.

Booths and Exhibits

Adobe

Adobe has been showing AI-powered editing and post-production tools as part of their creative suite for a couple years now and they seem to be continuously improving. They teased a new Firefly video model that will be coming to Premiere Pro later this year that will enable a few new Photoshop-like tools for video. Generative Extend will allow you to extend clips with AI generated frames for perfectly timed edits and the new Firefly model will also enable object removal, addition, and replacement. They’ve also implemented content credentials into the platform that will signal when generative AI was used in the creation process and which models were used, as they prepare for supporting 3rd party genAI models like OpenAI’s Sora.  

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS had one of the busiest booths in the West hall and were showcasing several AI-powered solutions, including using genAI for creating personalized ads and Intel’s Video Super Resolution upscaling. But they also had the most eye-catching and fun application of AI in the South Hall, a genAI golf simulator where you could design and play your own course.

axle.ai

Axle.ai was sharing their face, object, and logo recognition technology that can index recognized objects and search for matching objects in other videos or clips. Their software also has automatic voice transcription and translation capabilities. It can run either on-premises or in the cloud and integrates with Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro and other editing suites. While other companies offer similar capabilities, they stood out as being particularly focused on these use cases.

BLUEDOT

BLUEDOT was showcasing a few different solutions for improving QoE in the encoding and processing stage. Their DeepField-SR video super resolution product uses a proprietary deep neural network to upscale video up to 4K resolution, leveraging FPGAs. They were also showing AI-driven perceptual quality optimized video encoding.

Twelve Labs

Twelve Labs was featuring their multimodal AI for Media & Entertainment workflows, aiming to bring human-like understanding to video content. They use both video and audio information to inform object and event detection and indexing.  This enables you to easily find moments in a video, like when a certain player scores or when a product is mentioned. They also power generative text descriptions of videos and clips. Their solution seemed more flexible than others I saw and can be integrated into media asset management systems, editing software or OTT streaming workflows.

Conference Sessions and Presentations

Beyond the Hype: A Critical look at AI in Video Streaming

In this session, as the title suggests, Jan Ozer took a close look at the current state of AI applications for video streaming workflows. He conducted several interviews with executives and product leaders ahead of NAB and shared his notes and links to the full interviews. He also called out a few times that many of the companies featured, including Bitmovin, have been researching and working on AI-powered video solutions for several years now, even before the current wave of hype. He shared Bitmovin’s new Analytics session interpreter and our Super Resolution capabilities, which you can hear more about in his interview with our VP of Product, Reinhard Grandl.

Some other things that stood out for me included Interra Systems’ BATON Captions, which uses natural language processing to break text in a more natural, human readable way. This is a small, subtle feature that can really make a big difference in improving accessibility and the viewer experience, that I haven’t heard anyone else focus on. DeepRender also caught my attention with their claims of an AI-based video codec that will have 45% better compression than VVC by the end of 2024. That’s a really bold claim and I’ll be watching to see if they live up to the hype. Video of the session is available here, thanks to Dan Rayburn and the Streaming Summit.

Running OpenAI’s Whisper Automatic Speech Recognition on a Live Video Transcoding Server

This was a joint presentation led by NETINT’s COO Alex Liu and Ampere’s Chief Evangelist Sean Varley. They presented a practical demo of real-time live transcoding and subtitling using NETINT’s T1U Video Processing Unit (VPU) together with Ampere’s Altra Max CPU running OpenAI Whisper. The NETINT VPU is capable of creating dozens of simultaneous adaptive bitrate outputs with H.264, H.265 and AV1 codecs. The Ampere processor was being positioned as a more environmentally-friendly option for AI inference workflows, consuming less power than similarly capable GPUs. While there were some hiccups with the in-room A/V system, the live captioning demo was impressive and worked very well. Video of the session is available here, again thanks to Dan Rayburn and the Streaming Summit.

Leveraging Azure AI for Media Production and Content Monetization Workflows

Microsoft’s Andy Beach and MediaKind’s Amit Tank led this discussion and showcase of using genAI in media and entertainment workflows. They discussed how AI can help with each part of the production and delivery workflow to boost monetization. This included things like brand detection, contextual ad placements, metadata automation, translations, captioning and personalization. One area they discussed that I hadn’t heard anyone else talk about was using AI for content localization, not just for language translation via captions and dubbing, but for compliance with local and regional norms and in some cases regulations. For example, some areas and countries may prefer or even require removal or censorship of things like alcohol and drug use or guns and excessive violence, so AI can help automate content preparation in different ways for a global audience. They also shared their own personal “most-used” AI applications, which included Microsoft’s Copilot and related AI add-ons to Teams and other Microsoft products.

Did you see an interesting or innovative use of AI at NAB that wasn’t mentioned here? Please let us know in the comments!

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Streaming video is . . . complicated. 

As the streaming industry continues to evolve toward early mainstream adoption, cloud-based streaming has increasingly shifted from “builder” customers with deep, long-standing video expertise to “buyer” customers. This is particularly true for streaming in non-media industry verticals, but it is equally the case for Media & Entertainment customers as well. “Buyer” customers often lack the technical expertise and internal resources to build and maintain such complex, bespoke workflows. Over the past 18 months, mounting pressure to reduce operating cost, improve subscriber retention, and generate new advertising revenue has also caused a sizable number of “builder” customers to transition from in-house development to managed services. 

In short, this means that multi-vendor solutions and technical integrations have become increasingly valuable and important for streaming customers large and small in every industry.

“Better Together” with the Bitmovin Innovators Network

The Bitmovin Innovators Network is more than just another partner program. Launched in 2022, the Bitmovin Innovators Network is a community of industry-leading technology vendors, resellers, consultants, device manufacturers, cloud providers, and academic researchers that collaborate to provide pre-integrated solutions to simplify streaming video. 

I often say, “Customers buy simplicity rather than features.” Sure, feature functionality is important, but industry maturity and in some cases commoditization have made product development, product marketing, product selling, and product support much less of a differentiator than just five years ago. Today, customers place a premium on solutions that solve challenges for a wide range of use cases. Solutions development, solutions marketing, solutions selling, and solutions support are table stakes. “Better together” rules the day.

“Better Together” at NAB

We are pleased to announce a multitude of “Better Together” solutions with our partners at NAB, each designed to simplify customers’ video workload needs. These are some of the joint solutions that Bitmovin and our partners are showcasing at this year’s NAB Show:

Joint Customer Success Stories 

Bitmovin once again hosts its exclusive semi-annual Bitmovin Innovators Network Partner Executive Networking Event on Saturday, April 13 from 3:30 – 6:00 pm. We are excited to share several customer success stories, including Quickplay presenting a “better together” customer success story regarding a large Regional Sports Network (RSN); and a fireside chat with OneFootball and Akamai. We conclude the afternoon with the first annual Bitmovin Innovators Network partner awards and the most impactful executive networking event at this year’s NAB Show!

“Better Together” on the Bitmovin Stand

We are thrilled to share that two partners will have dedicated demo stations on the Bitmovin stand (W3013):

Edgio showcases its collaboration with Bitmovin, featuring Bitmovin Playback and Edgio Uplynk‘s Live Multi-CDN Switching in an all-encompassing solution for customers to ensure seamless video delivery.

Google Ad Manager will highlight how they are building a more flexible and interoperable Ad Manager to help publishers create sustainable advertising businesses by giving publishers actionable insights, powerful optimizations, and flexible integrations all within an end to end video-first ad serving experience.

“Better Together” at Partner Stands and Meeting Suites 

Several Bitmovin partners are demonstrating “Better Together” solutions to help customers with cost optimization, subscriber retention and growth, and ad revenue generation.

“Better Together” Social Activities with Partners 

Akamai and Bitmovin co-host an exclusive launch event at the Sphere, Las Vegas newest and most iconic entertainment destination, on Sunday, April 14, 2024 at 6:00 pm. Registration for this event is already closed.

Edgio and Bitmovin are co-hosting a networking reception and happy hour on the Bitmovin stand (W3013) on Tuesday, April 16, 2024 from 5:00 – 6:00 pm. Visit Edgio or Bitmovin for an invitation!

This year’s NAB Show promises to deliver a wealth of knowledge and innovation. Schedule a meeting with us to learn more about these and other solutions to help you reduce operating costs, retain and grow subscribership, and generate new ad revenue. 

We look forward to seeing you at the show!

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What were the biggest highlights for you this year?

NAB is an intense 5 days, but it’s always worth it for the satisfaction of seeing customers, partners and prospects in person. This year’s event was also super special because it was NAB’s 100th show! It made me reflect on how much the media and entertainment industry has changed and how much video has shaped the world – from the growth of broadcasting, which delivered landmark moments such as the 

first televised coronation of a monarch to the first music video to ever be aired on TV. The media and entertainment industry was further revolutionized by the growth of video streaming which paved the way for companies such as Netflix, which fast became a cultural phenomenon by pioneering the Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) business model and still remains a tastemaker for content and technology trends today. 

100 years of NAB also led me to think about Bitmovin’s own journey at the show as we prepare to celebrate our 10th anniversary as a company on 16th June. We began exhibiting at NAB around 7 years ago with a much smaller team and booth, so it’s incredible to see how far we’ve come from those days and what we’ve built together. This year’s NAB was an outstanding show for us, with a tonne of great announcements, including our CMCD partnership with Akamai, having Nomad on our booth and also taking home an NAB Best of Show Award for Smart Chunking!

AI has gained real momentum as a trend across the technology industry. What are your thoughts on that and did you see any exciting AI innovations at NAB?

A few years ago AI was a huge topic in the media and entertainment industry and the buzz for it has definitely returned because of major advancements in AI/ML with ChatGPT (which a lot of Bitmovers have had a lot of fun with, including using it to make a rap song about video codecs!) and generative AI. Although some might use it as a buzzword, it is great to see some practical applications of AI and Machine Learning in video streaming, such as  in our Video Complexity Analyzer and Super Resolution upscaling. With the ongoing interest in the industry, I am curious and excited to see what new solutions emerge, especially when it comes to improving efficiency and sustainability. 

Sustainability has also been pretty high on the news agenda, what are your thoughts on that?

It is encouraging to see the industry embracing more and more sustainability as a core value, and I think it’s great the industry’s first-ever Excellence in Sustainability Awards were presented at the show. Becoming more sustainable is something every company should be striving for, and as an industry,  we need to do better on a corporate and technical level. At Bitmovin, we are implementing new policies and guidelines to help us reduce our carbon footprint. We’ve also partnered with the University of Klagenfurt on a research project called GAIA, which has the ultimate goal of creating a climate-friendly video streaming platform that provides complete  energy awareness and accountability, including energy consumption and GHG emissions, along the entire delivery chain.

I did also hear some cool discussions related to sustainability at the show, including the prominent advantages of cloud-native solutions over the “lift-and-shift” or “rehosting” approach, which delivers promising results in terms of performance and carbon footprint reduction.

What were some of the other biggest trends you saw at NAB?

AI and sustainability dominated discussions at NAB Show, there were also other big topics that are just as important. The first is ATSC 3.0 and 5G local networks, which represent state-of-the-art and the latest evolution within traditional broadcast television and telecommunications workflows. These technologies are enabling new possibilities for efficient content distribution, interactivity, and remote production. ATSC 3.0 had a huge presence in the convention hall this year, and there were a number of demonstrations around using private 5G pop-up networks for live contribution feeds, which is something that some of our partners in the Bitmovin Innovator Network are starting to take advantage of. 

On the other hand, WebRTC is a technology that is disrupting a lot of workflows that had traditionally been in the broadcasting or telecommunications domain. It’s been around for several years now, but we’re starting to see it evolve from being an open-source, DIY-type solution into something where there are now mature products and commercial offerings using WebRTC as the underlying technology. It’s pretty incredible that any modern web browser can now power 2-way or group video communication that used to require expensive, dedicated hardware.

Now NAB is over what are your plans?

The last few weeks have been incredibly busy for the entire team as we prepared for NAB. I also ran the Paris marathon, so I am definitely going to have a short break, but not for too long! NAB is a huge event to prepare for, but there is also a lot of work that needs to be done following the show with customers, prospects and partners.

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