overcast max Archives

Overcast Supports AWS for Media & Entertainment Initiative

Posted on April 29, 2021August 28, 2024 by Philippe Brodeur

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a new AWS for Media & Entertainment initiative to simplify cloud workflows. Overcast’s Future of Work Video Platform is built on AWS and we are delighted to be a partner in this initiative!

AWS for Media & Entertainment

So, what is AWS for M&E? AWS for Media & Entertainment is an initiative featuring new and existing services and solutions from AWS and AWS Partners, built specifically for content creators, rights holders, producers, broadcasters, and distributors. AWS adds the newly announced Amazon Nimble Studio — a service that enables customers to set up creative studios in hours instead of weeks — to a portfolio of more purpose-built media and entertainment industry services than any other cloud, including AWS Elemental MediaPackage, AWS Elemental MediaConnect, AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaConvert, and Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS). AWS for Media & Entertainment also simplifies the process of building, deploying, and reinventing mission-critical industry workloads by aligning AWS and AWS Partner capabilities against five solution areas: Content Production; Media Supply Chain & Archive; Broadcast; Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming; and Data Science & Analytics. Overcast is an AWS partner in the Media Supply Chain & Archive solution.

“The big benefit of our new Overcast system based on AWS is efficiency and consistency. This feels like the start of a long relationship rather than just having bought a piece of software.”

— Neil Adcock, CPL UK.

Overcast MAX

In previous blog posts, we’ve introduced you to Overcast MAX — a cloud-based platform for media asset management (MAM) without the traditional costs associated with combining MAM, PAM (product asset management) and DAM (digital asset management). The flexible microservices approach and API connection to AWS services (like Amazon Rekognition, AWS Elemental MediaConvert and AWS Elemental MediaLive) lets you configure solutions to build workflows that truly match your needs. For example, if you produce live sport events you need to share content before and after the match with multiple different stakeholders, including analysts, players, referees, marketers, sponsors and more. Here’s how you benefit:

a collaboration portal with granular access control;
a UI that is intuitive and enhanced with on-screen messaging so even the least technical stakeholders can manage their needs; and
automated tasks like time-based transcription and image recognition allow users to reduce search time by up to 98%.

Overcast MAX is first and foremost a collaboration platform that builds access to powerful video processing tools into effective and efficient workflows. With a mission to make it as easy to manage video files as it is to manage word documents, MAX enables teams throughout your organization to work within the video supply chain. The core storage and collaboration features of MAX are enhanced by 9 proprietary modules that include everything from automated subtitle generation (powered by Amazon Transcribe) to maximizing a scalable streaming service (using Amazon CloudFront).

Overcast MAX can be deployed out-of-the box for smaller teams, or configured with a choice of 9 modules for larger volume workflows. Clients benefit from:

Fast response times and fast deployment — whether you BYO Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) storage bucket, are syncing an on-premises repository, or choose to store your content within Overcast’s virtual private cloud, you can be up and running with production workflows within a matter of minutes.
Cost budgeting — using a proprietary Simulator, Overcast can emulate your work environment over a short period of time to better forecast usage costs and how to optimize your processes.
Time efficiencies — clients report savings up to 90% of time spent on mundane tasks like transcoding due to our automation.

We have many satisfied clients in various countries, including CPL UK — a global marketing and communications firm based in London.

“It’s at least 10 times faster to find things. We have 27 users on four different continents from three different companies — and one very happy Alex.”

— Alexandra Bailey, CPL UK.

“CPL UK is an example of the increasing number of enterprise customers outside of the media and entertainment vertical that are successfully using digital media workflows on AWS to increase brand awareness. Overcast’s browser-based platform makes it easy for enterprise customers to launch in minutes without the complexity of managing hardware infrastructure.”

— Eric Iverson, Chief Technologist for M&E, AWS.

To find out more or set up a demo, please email info@overcasthq.com or click here.

Protect Digital Assets Online: Start With Single Sign On

Posted on March 18, 2021August 28, 2024 by Fiona Ashe

Overcast MAX #8: Max Identity

A ginormous amount of business is conducted online these days and most of it requires us to provide personal and corporate data. We know that our health and banking data needs to be encrypted but what about our corporate assets?

Video is one of the most commonly-used digital assets. It’s predominantly used for marketing but in recent years it’s been widely adopted for use in HR, training, tutorials, corporate communications, products and many other business functions.

Most of these functions involve teams collaborating on videos. Up until now this has been difficult with a number of shadow IT solutions creeping into the workplace. And now remote working has amplified the problem so that it is no longer possible for one employee to keep the video files on a hard drive either under or beside their desk.

Team members need to be able to share video files, review them, comment on them, and publish them in different formats; therefore, a new solution is required.

A cloud-based video asset management platform provides all of the functionality mentioned above — but it needs to be secure.

Overcast has created a suite of products built on intelligent cloud architecture to make your video collaboration quick and easy. Overcast Max includes products that lower your costs, use AI to search, future-proof your business and — as detailed below — secure your workflows.

Protect digital assets online with Max Identity

Max Identity is your ticket to keeping your digital video assets under lock and key — to which only you and your collaborators have access.

One key way to protect digital assets is Single Sign On (SSO), which gives users a single login for multiple applications. Most large organisations already have SSO so it’s often a matter of integrating it with the application.

Your identity is further protected by a number of other techniques, including two-factor authentication, multi-factor authentication and auto log off.

Benefits of Max Identity

Increased user security

The more people who are connected (departments, customers, vendors, partners), the higher the risk — but SSO makes your operation less vulnerable and provides increased security. When it comes to video, there have been exceptions made because of the file size. But when you think about it, that’s nuts — would you expect Hollywood studios to send hard drives around or use unsecured networks? Not any more…

Simplified user management

Statistics show that 480,000 passwords are stolen each day! (BreachAlarm). That’s almost half a million passwords. Every single day!

We encourage personnel to develop stronger passwords (they only need to remember one), which will reduce the workload for your IT department when there are personnel changes…and make them happier. This is really about best practice.

Increased speed

Think about sectors in which large numbers of people need immediate access to the same applications: police forces, hospitals and emergency services. SSO is vital in preventing errors, malware and providing an audit log of all activities.

Get in touch

At the end of the day, MAX Identity is all about making sure you keep your video safe just as you would any document.

If you have any questions about identity security or any of the Overcast Max solutions, please do get in touch. Philippe would be delighted to chat with you about your video workflows — you can reach him on info@overcasthq.com or you can click here to contact us.

Use AI To Transcribe Audio To Text: It’s A Game Changer

Posted on February 18, 2021August 21, 2024 by Fiona Ashe

Overcast MAX #3: Max Transcribe

Wondering how using AI to automatically transcribe audio to text could rock your world?

Remember when transcription jobs meant typing out every word in a video or audio clip by hand in order to add subtitles? Not our favourite memory of “the good old days”!!

It was a slow, laborious, mundane and uninteresting task. However, it had to be done.

Thank goodness AI transcription software has saved us from this nightmare!

Transcribe audio to text using AI

Nowadays, transcription is automated and effortless via the magic touch of artificial intelligence (AI).

Max Transcribe uses the latest AI and Machine Learning (ML) to transcribe the audio content in a video, generating subtitles on the fly.

Case studies: transcribe audio to text

Call centre

Imagine how many hundreds of millions of minutes of customer interactions each year a call centre has. Now imagine how long it would take a typist to manually transcribe those calls. Using AI and ML, you can quickly generate accurate call transcriptions while also redacting sensitive data.

Multilingual video content

It’s not just movies that need to be translated into other languages. Nowadays, most enterprises are producing vast amounts of video content — and many want to reach potential customers in other countries. By using AI and ML that can translate content into many different languages and customize speech recognition, you’ll save your team a lot of time and yourself a lot of money.

Podcasts and radio

So, you have a great podcast or radio programme and you’d like as many people as possible to benefit from the content. But many listeners want to consume it in short segments. Plus, you need it to come up in search results. You can use AI / ML transcription to convert your audio streams into text for a reasonable cost. This allows you to quickly process live talk audio into consumable segments — as a result, you’ll get higher engagement.

Benefits of Max Transcribe

Automated metadata enrichment

By automating audio transcription, your content is immediately searchable and findable using time-stamps. No need to create tags manually. More time to make cups of tea.

Auto-captioning

The auto-captioning function is compatible with lots of different formats, including VTT, SRT and Avid Subcap TXT.

Easy-to-use UI

Editing the captions on your video is as easy as editing a Word document. Therefore, even peeps who are not technically-minded can do it.

Speed to market

Regardless of which distribution channel you choose — social media, broadcast, the web or CCTV — you can get your content to market faster. You can also be confident of its accuracy, which is essential in sectors such as news and broadcast.

Get in touch

We offer a whole suite of solutions to make video collaboration easier and more cost effective: Overcast MAX. If you would like to know more, please drop Philippe a line on info@overcasthq.com or you can click here to get in touch.

Cloud Storage: How To Stop Paying Ridiculous Margins

Posted on February 15, 2021August 28, 2024 by Fiona Ashe

Overcast MAX #2: Max Storage

Why use video?

The popularity of video consumption continues to explode and not just for marketing or brand building purposes. Video can also be used in-house for employee training and dissemination of information — this is even more valid in the current era of enforced remote working.

The possibilities that video offers your business are endless: connecting with your audience through live streaming, creating interactive videos to engage your followers, explainer videos/tutorials, product demonstrations, communicating with stakeholders, promotional videos, broadcasting live events, vlogging and much more.

Size matters

Video files are large — but how big is big?

1 bit (b) = only capable of storing a single binary digit: either a 1 or 0.
1 byte (B) = 8 bits … about what you need to store a single character of text.
1 kilobyte (KB) = 1,024 bytes … it takes around 10 KB to store a single page of plain text.
1 megabyte (MB) = 1,024 KB … the equivalent of a 400-page book.
1 gigabyte (GB) = 1,024 MB … streaming Netflix Ultra HD video uses about 7 GB per hour.
1 terabyte (TB) = 1,024 GB … equivalent to 500 hours worth of movies.
1 petabyte (PB) = 1,024 TB … one year of CCTV video for an average police department amounts to 1.5 PB.
1 exabyte (EB) = 1,024 PB … 5 EB is equivalent to all the words ever spoken by humankind.

— How To Geek

So, the more videos you create, the more storage you’ll need (although you don’t need to worry about exabytes unless you are Amazon, Google or Facebook).

Max Storage

In light of these unwieldy sizes of video files, the traditional method of handling them on premise is no longer viable. So, if you want to make your teams’ video management and collaboration much more efficient, you can either manage your workflows in the cloud or use a hybrid solution that conforms to your workflows.

Benefits of Max Storage

Cost Optimisation

As we mentioned in an earlier blog post outlining Overcast MAX, Max Storage is like a BYOB (bring your own bottle) party. BYO Storage means you keep your unique account with AWS and our software will help you to manage your content!

Our hybrid solutions will sync with your on-premise servers: you can automatically upload your content to your account and be guaranteed secure cloud workflows.

Intelligent tiering also allows you optimise your costs based on your user actual activities, so you’ll save oodles of spondulicks!

Metadata Enrichment

Artificial intelligence is the new sliced bread…although you can’t put chocolate spread on it!

But you can benefit from AI functions such as Transcribe and Image Recognition to add metadata — this will ensure you can search your content quickly and accurately using time-based parameters.

Future-proofed content

Technology is changing so fast these days that it’s hard to keep up and even harder to future-proof your content. But Max Storage is on the case. We will store your originals and create proxies that can be viewed on any device.

No problem with codecs either: your content will be available over any network.

Get in touch

If you have any questions about storage, live streaming or any of the Overcast MAX solutions, please do get in touch. Philippe would be happy to chat through your video collaboration and management needs — you can reach him on info@overcasthq.com or you can click here to contact us.

No Limits To Your Live Streaming Ambitions

Posted on February 11, 2021August 21, 2024 by Fiona Ashe

Overcast MAX #1: Max Live Streaming

“The video streaming market is on track to become a $124.6 billion industry by 2025.”
— Grand View Research

There’s no doubting the burgeoning popularity of live streaming. The wide-ranging benefits to business who use it include:

access to a wider audience, unlimited by geographical or size constraints;
direct communication with customers and potential clients;
lower costs than running a real world event or traditional broadcast platforms;
viewers can access your live stream on any device, on the go;
the opportunity to grow your community;
involve viewers through live interaction;
the opportunity to cross-promote your social channels;
repurpose the content by sharing clips from the live stream afterwards;
take advantage of the SEO benefits of YouTube;
use analytics to evaluate the success of your live event.

Overcast MAX

In our previous blog post, we gave an overview of MAX, our suite of next-generation cloud applications for production, collaboration, storage and distribution that makes remote video collaboration effortless.

Max Live Streaming

You don’t need to be in the media and entertainment industries to grow your business through live streaming. It can be used for in-house trainings, public events, town hall meetings, etc. — in fact, anything you can think of. But you need a simple, high quality, secure way to do it: say hello to Max Live Streaming.

If you’ve tried live streaming before, you may have experienced low quality streaming due to limitations in the available bandwidth — it’s a common problem with free services. No such worries with Max Live Streaming!

It’s cloud-based adaptive HD streaming, so you are guaranteed a high quality result. You’ll never run out of bandwidth, which means you can be confident about being able to deliver the content to your audience the way you want to.

If you find that streaming is benefiting your business, you can easily scale up your live stream strategy — with no limits!

It’s quick and easy to set up; and once that’s done you can bring non-tech employees into the workflow and let them manage the content. If you’d like to create a channel, it’s as simple as dragging and dropping content.

We provide you with a network that has enterprise grade security. But while secure live streaming used to be prohibitively expensive, now your event can make money and you can re-invest it in your business.

Max Live Streaming is so easy that you can get up and running in seconds. What are you waiting for?

What else have we got?

In our next post, we’ll explore where to store and archive all those large video files and how to manage them effectively with Max Storage.

Get in touch

If you have any questions about live streaming, please do get in touch. Our email address is info@overcasthq.com or you can click here to get in touch. Ask for Philippe. He’s always good for a chat!

Boost Your Video Production To The MAX

Posted on February 8, 2021August 21, 2024 by Fiona Ashe

It’s been a long two years of working from home for most of us and we’ve had to grapple with the unexpected challenges of remote working.

For teams collaborating on videos, most have found that sharing/downloading video content is problematic, reviews and approvals are slow, workflows are clunky (at best), and speed to market isn’t speed at all (quite the opposite!)

For compact teams and small businesses, Overcast provides off-the-shelf SaaS solutions, but larger organisations will need a solution that includes a more complex tech stack, seamless collaborative workflows and best-in-class security

Enter Overcast MAX, a suite of next-generation cloud applications for production, collaboration, storage and distribution that makes remote video collaboration effortless.

So, how does MAX work? Well, it’s a managed SaaS solution that improves your workflow and tech stacks through nine tailored products.

Max Live Streaming

“The global video streaming market size was valued at USD 50.11 billion in 2020. It is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.0% from 2021 to 2028.”
— Grand View Research

Max Live Streaming is a simple, secure, low-cost way to live stream broadcast events, town hall meetings, training and everything else you can think of. You can get up and running in seconds and scale up to your heart’s content. Even non-techies can do it!

Max Storage

Storage is one of the top concerns in relation to video production since video files are large and complex. Not a problem. You’re no doubt familiar with parties where you BYOB (bring your own bottle) — this occasion allows you to BYO storage. Best party trick ever!

With Max Storage, you can manage your workflows in the cloud or with a hybrid solution that conforms to your workflows. Not to mention the awesome benefit of future-proofing your content.

Max Transcribe

Transcribing is a slow, laborious and mundane task. But it’s a piece of cake with Max Transcribe, which uses the latest AI and Machine Learning to transcribe the audio content in a video. This makes your content immediately searchable and findable using time-stamps, plus you get your video content to market quicker.

Max Recognition

Remember a time when you had to spend ages scrolling through tapes searching for an amazing shot you know you filmed but cannot locate? Fortunately, those days are gone. Max Recognition uses the latest AI and Machine Learning to identify people, places, objects and events in videos and images. Also useful for managing archive footage.

Max User Interface (UI)

Every sector has its own jargon. For example, the media industry would refer to “assets” and “projects”, while the security industry talks about “evidence” and “cases”. Max UI is service-designed to allow you and your business to use the terms that are relevant to your industry.

Max Orchestrate

Technology is changing so fast these days that sometimes it’s hard to keep up. Monolithic architecture and legacy technology will stymie your workflows. So, if you need to simplify complex tech stacks and add/subtract new services, Max Orchestrate is the magic pill.

Max Identity

Naturally, when choosing a technology solution, security and identity protection are key concerns. No need to worry: Max Identity includes Single Sign On (SSO) and a number of Identity Security Techniques, including two-factor authentication, multi-factor authentication and auto logoff.

Max Editor

Max Editor is designed to ensure your audio-visual and graphics editors can use their preferred platforms — like Adobe or Avid — and still benefit from optimised cloud workflows. It’s secure. It’s speeds up collaboration. And you don’t have to download any content. Yay!

Max Simulator

Whether you are planning to invest in a cloud-based asset management platform for the first time or you need to expand your existing one, you’ll need to assess the cost and ROI, right?

Throw your calculator in the bin! Max Simulator uses 20+ inputs to run an accurate simulation to help you fully understand your hosting and storage costs.

Overall benefits

With Overcast MAX Modules you can take back control of your IT infrastructure. In the following series of blog posts, we’ll delve deeper into each product to illustrate how you can reduce your costs, accelerate operational efficiencies, and aid competitiveness. First up: Max Live Streaming.

In the meantime, if you’d like to chat about your specific video asset management needs, we’d be delighted to help you to identify the ideal solution for your business. Email us on info@overcasthq.com or click here to get in touch.