BOSTON (March 27, 2024) – – Global media and entertainment technology company, Backlight will return to the Las Vegas Convention Center in April to showcase its innovative and award-winning solutions at this year’s NAB Show. Since last year’s show, Backlight has made several strategic integrations and updates to its product lines to deliver efficiency, security and flexibility for its customers’ cloud-based video workflows.
Backlight’s product lineup – iconik, cineSync, ftrack, Celtx, Gem, Wildmoka Clip Studio, Live Studio and Zype – will be fully represented again this year with the team available to meet and provide demos at the Backlight booth (SL4114) located in the South Hall of the LVCC.
New Integrations and AWS Deployment for Media Management
Following iconik’s NAB Pilot Challenge win last year, Backlight’s cloud-native product for media management and collaboration has added a range of integrations including with other Backlight products—Zype and ftrack—for more powerful creative and distribution workflows.
Backlight’s new iconik + Zype Connector allows users to combine media storage, collaboration, and review with streaming and OTT workflows. When combined, a MAM + CMS solution can deliver a much more efficient and comprehensive strategy to prepare and distribute video and metadata than solely using a CMS. Iconik offers a flexible platform for managing assets across cloud and on-premise storage, accessible from anywhere, and Zype’s CMS enables content experiences out-of-the-box with embeddable players, OTT apps and Playout, and FAST channels.
An upcoming ftrack + iconik integration bridges the gap between project management, production tracking, and media management by simplifying the creation of iconik collections directly from ftrack. Ftrack users benefit from the ability to manage media associated with project tasks, including its storage locations, metadata, access permissions, and more.
Underlining Backlight’s dedication to providing solutions that integrate smoothly with existing infrastructure, Backlight is announcing support for iconik deployment on AWSin addition to its existing support for AWS S3 storage. Offering iconik’s media management on AWS will let enterprise customers keep their data, transcoding, and proxies in the AWS network, which can minimize network costs and latency. Throughout the NAB Show, AWS will be hosting demos showing how iconik and other AWS ISV partners can help streamline media supply chains
New Innovations in AI and Automation for Enhanced Video Distribution
Backlight is announcing Live Speech-to-Text and Text-Based Editing for its Wildmoka Clip Studio. With this functionality, users can browse live ingesting feeds via text search and conduct frame-accurate text-based editing to include or exclude any particular sentence in their clips. The closed-captions generated can be re-edited and published either as a closed-caption sidecar file or burned into the video. Currently, English, Spanish and French languages are supported.
Beyond video editing, the creation of engaging descriptive metadata is an important but time-consuming task for producers. Backlight’s newest innovation in metadata automation enhances this process by suggesting title, description and tags based on the contextual analysis of the closed captions (or the speech-to-text output).
At NAB Show 2024, Backlight will demonstrate several end-to-end workflows for the editing and distribution of vertical content at scale—from source acquisition (a live game, a customer’s own TV channel, or user generated content), content production (manual or automated), content reframing and publication to social media, to owned and operated platforms in the form of short clips or snackable vertical stories.
New Functionality for Cloud-Based Live Stream and Channel Creation
Backlight’s integrated live production solution, Live Studio, now supports remote guests. By simply sharing a web link, a producer can easily invite guests into a live production to contribute commentary, video or even share a screen. Backlight will demonstrate how this feature can be used in the Backlight environment for a wide variety of workflows such as adding remote commentary to a live event, inviting guests to a show for an interview and collecting the live contribution of a journalist on the field.
Backlight’s Zype Playout solution is debuting a wealth of new features which, combined, enable flexibility in the creation and execution of fully automated channels. Calendar View enables the strategic planning of channels and Playout’s new rule-based Dynamic Blocks enable automated programming of blocks of any number of assets with the ad strategy associated with them (ad frequency and durations). These innovations are particularly useful when it comes to automating the schedule of secondary channels – typically made of live blocks freshly aired and recycled from a primary channel.
About Backlight
Backlight is a global media technology company that is dramatically improving every stage of the video and entertainment content lifecycle—from creation through monetization—with its award-winning, cloud-native SaaS products. Video-forward organizations partner with Backlight to solve their mission-critical business and operational challenges. Backlight’s product lines—iconik, cineSync, ftrack, Celtx, Gem, Wildmoka Clip Studio, Live Studio and Zype—provide secure and efficient media management, narrative design, production tracking, creative collaboration, OTT, monetization and hyper-distribution. Backlight launched in 2021 and is backed by $200M in funding from growth-equity partner PSG.