HITS

LAS VEGAS — Making the most of your content library, doing more with less thanks to AI, meeting the stringent restrictions some countries may have for content, and debuting an entirely new content division. Here’s what Vistex, Veritone, Spherex, and IDC brought to NAB.

Vistex

For Vistex’s Robert Ward, industry marketing manager, and Tom McDonough, director of media client service, NAB for Vistex has always been about maximizing the company’s clients’ revenue, helping them make the most of rights and royalties management.

That’s become a lot easier with the company’s Smart Avails tool, which saw a soft launch just a year ago, but has already proven a must-have for content companies looking for that single source of truth in determining how to monetize the rights they control.

“It’s a natural language avails tool that’s system agnostic and pulls together not only your rights information, but also external metadata sources, pulling together a more rounded picture,” Ward said. “It answers not only ‘what can I sell?’ but ‘what should I sell?’”

Broadcasters and digital platforms alike are constantly fighting for the best content for their audiences, and its Vistex’s Smart Avails that’s proving to be one of the best-suited tools for rights holders to plumb the depths of their libraries, with fast, target search, an easy-to-use natural language interface, and the ability to tie in external data sets to extend avails queries. And, of course, it’s platform agnostic.

Finding the right content to service each licensee’s unique needs, by upgrading the legacy solutions companies have long relied on to determine rights, is what Vistex’s solution helps companies accomplish.

“Our solutions, the things we do, exist to get our clients where they need to be,” McDonough said.

Veritone

Another year, another NAB Product of the Year Award for Veritone.

For the fifth time overall, the AI solutions firm took top honors home from Las Vegas, this time around for the conversational intelligence tool Ask Veri in the AI and Machine Learning category.

A GenAI-enabled, chat-based tool, Ask Veri helps users of Veritone Digital Media Hub (the company’s media asset management and monetization platform) extract insights and execute workflows from their media archive data, eliminating the need for multiple data analyst resources or reporting tools. Ask Veri will be available in the second half of 2024, across Veritone’s entire product suite.

“Ask Veri is for media professionals who are being asked to do more with less,” said Jennifer Goode, director of product marketing for Veritone. “Twenty-four-seven we’re working on providing tools and resources that provide people the ability to do more with less. This is deep data exploration at your fingertips.”

In announcing the award, Eric Trabb, SVP and chief customer success officer for NAB, added: “Congratulations to Veritone for winning the prestigious 2024 NAB Show Product of the Year Award, a testament to the groundbreaking innovation embodied by Ask Veri. Its profound impact on the content lifecycle underscores its pivotal role in empowering storytellers to navigate present challenges and embrace the opportunities of tomorrow.”

That was just the beginning of what Veritone brought to the show floor:
• For Veritone Digital Media Hub Veritone showed off an enhanced user interface and navigation.

• Veritone touted its Attribute and Discovery an application suite providing real-time advertising ROI for both traditional and linear broadcasting, with new industry and category benchmarking data. “Linear advertising works,” said Sergey Kuznetsov, senior director of data products for Veritone. “This shows our clients how.”

• Demos of the award-winning aiWARE platform were front and center at the Veritone booth, as were demonstrations of Veritone integrations with the Dalet Flex system and Grabyo Sports and Editor solutions.

Spherex

For Davinder Luthra, global digital leader, and the rest of the team at Spherex, it was all SpherexAI, all the time. The AI-powered platform for content compliance and analysis is the perfect tool for content owners looking to make absolutely sure their content meets all the standards for international audiences, wherever that may be.

SpherexAI takes away the headaches associated with jumping through regulatory restrictions and helps all content meet the censorship requirements of even the most strict governments. The platform removes the risk of cultural insensitivity or noncompliance and does so with far less time and resources that a manual lookover would require.

The platform scans video content — longform, shortform, event advertising — and Spherex’s AI technology can quickly determine its suitability for any global market and the audiences of more than 100 countries, covering a combination of laws, regulations, and content classifications.

“Today, content providers and streaming platforms must navigate complex regulations and cultural norms to operate successfully in different markets,” said Teresa Phillips, co-founder and CEO of Spherex, prior to NAB. “By seamlessly integrating sophisticated AI with cultural and regulatory insights, Spherex helps content creators, studios, distributors, and platforms unlock new markets, broaden their audiences, and increase revenue.”

Spherex’s technology doesn’t just identify potentially objectionable content. Instead, it interprets the cultural context around classifiable elements (think sex, violence, drug use, profanity). Taking context in mind, and understanding the settings and characters involved, allows the content to be massaged to meet local age ratings and cultural suitability.

IDC

In the midst of NAB, International Digital Centre (IDC) announced the debut of a new podcast division, and launched with the scripted comedy “FUNYC,” an adaptation of the novel by Emily Eden. IDC will debut new episodes each Tuesday in May, with “FUNYC” following the exploits of one Holly Hudson, who leaves London’s West End for New York’s Broadway (with $60 in her pocket and not much else … other than her dreams).

“What if Bridget Jones joined the cast of ‘Sex and the City’?” Eden said in a statement announcing the series. “The love interest, ‘will they won’t they’ … dead bodies, con artists, champagne, pigeons … it is a story, somewhat, very loosely, based off of my life.”

Co-creator, producer, and director Eric Wickstrom added: “I can’t explain how proud I am to have my name attached to this scripted podcast project. I’m completely in awe of everything [Fisher] has accomplished with these episodes of Emily’s great novel.”

In addition to scripted episodes, IDC has released a companion podcast, “FUNYC Unscripted,” with Wickstrom and Eden sitting down each week with an influential New Yorker to talk about life in the city.

“I couldn’t think of a better project to introduce our podcast division to the world,” said Marcy Gilbert, founder, president and CEO of IDC.

FUNYC is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more.