SEQUOIA, an R&D project partnership between iSIZE, the BBC R&D and Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) has been awarded £700k from Innovate UK following a competitive grant submission, and a rigorous review and award process (<5% acceptance rate). Innovate UK is part of UKRI, the national funding agency investing in science and industrial research in the UK.

Actus Digital, a leading provider of compliance monitoring and QA logging solutions, today announced that Ken Rubin is joining the company as senior vice president for the Americas. Adding Rubin to the team is a testament to the rapid growth that Actus Digital is experiencing in the Americas, where major players like The Weather Channel, Fox, and many others have selected and deployed the company's solutions. Having Rubin on board will strengthen the company's ability to introduce its market-leading solutions to more organizations throughout the Americas.

Actus Digital, a leading provider of broadcast compliance and monitoring solutions, today announced Mark Barkey as the new director of sales in the Middle East, boosting the company's business growth in the region. Bringing Barkey onboard, Actus Digital is well positioned to provide future-proof media monitoring solutions, continuous local support, and after-sales services to customers in the Middle East.

The current global health crisis has given rise to rapid growth in network traffic, resulting in strain across global broadband networks. In order to address the recent surge and to support its many customers during these unprecedented times, Harmonic (NASDAQ: HLIT) today announced it will provide its EyeQ™ content-aware encoding (CAE) technology free for the next 90 days to help alleviate the current network constraints.

Harmonic's EyeQ technology leverages artificial intelligence to reduce streaming congestion on broadband networks by up to 50% without impacting quality. It serves as a highly effective tool to combat the recent surge and a step above recently utilized methods, such as resolution and bit rate reductions. EyeQ CAE is available on all Harmonic media processors, through a software license, and the VOS®360 Live Streaming Platform.

"Due to the nearly global lockdown, the demand for high-quality streaming services has exploded and as such has led to excessive constraints on broadband networks. Adding our EyeQ technology to the mix can greatly decrease bandwidth consumption for high-quality video and alleviate strain on local and national broadband networks," said Shahar Bar, senior vice president, video products and corporate development at Harmonic. "By offering free licenses for the expected lockdown timeframes, Harmonic is providing an effective tool to help both media companies and broadband networks alike."

Veritone Inc. (Nasdaq: VERI), the creator of the world's first operating system for artificial intelligence, aiWARE™, today announced the expansion of its content classification capabilities to support IAB Tech Lab Content Taxonomy-compliant metadata output via aiWARE APIs. The new offering will enable podcast distribution platforms to programmatically transcribe and tag audio streams with topical, descriptive, and time-correlated keyword metadata prior to publishing, allowing for advanced contextual ad targeting at scale. Further, greater insight into the subject matter of the podcast helps advertisers maintain brand safety by avoiding association with content that is not in alignment with their brand values.

Over 30 million podcast episodes are available today (versus 18.5 million in 2018), and consumer demand continues to increase. At the same time, consumer privacy laws are changing and severely curtailing the tracking of audience data. As a result, the ability to tag content with descriptive metadata is critical to enabling an alternative, contextual ad-targeting approach. Until now, tagging of media such as podcasts with contextual metadata has been a labor-intensive and time-consuming manual process, and it has largely been limited to program descriptions at the show and episode level, limiting a publisher's or advertiser's ability to find specific types of content for advertisement placement consideration. This manual process is not scalable to handle the ever-increasing amount of new content being produced daily and cannot support programmatic contextual ad targeting.

Veritone aiWARE's new content classification capability removes these hurdles through comprehensive and automated topic analysis, extraction, and time-coded tagging of the podcast with the applicable content category codes from the IAB Tech Lab Content Taxonomy. Podcast publishers can easily integrate the solution into their existing infrastructure and workflows.

A flexible, future-proof operating system for AI, Veritone aiWARE provides access to cognitive engines optimized for media and entertainment use cases through a single software infrastructure. Users can leverage turnkey applications built on aiWARE, such as Veritone Discovery, Veritone Attribute, or Veritone Digital Media Hub, or enhance existing enterprise systems and processes via API integrations.

A recent update to aiWARE includes the expansion of its content classification capabilities to support IAB Tech Lab Content Taxonomy-compliant metadata output via aiWARE APIs. The new offering will enable podcast distribution platforms to programmatically transcribe and tag audio streams with topical, descriptive, and time-correlated keyword metadata prior to publishing, allowing for advanced contextual ad targeting at scale. Further, greater insight into the subject matter of the podcast helps advertisers maintain brand safety.

Additionally, Veritone has integrated its aiWARE with Adobe Premiere Panel. Users can access aiWARE’s transcription and translation AI while working within an Adobe project to streamline their edits.

Veritone, Inc. (Nasdaq: VERI), the creator of the world's first operating system for artificial intelligence, aiWARE™, today announced that its Veritone Attribute AI-enabled application for radio and TV broadcasters now includes geofencing capabilities. Geofencing offers Attribute users additional data insights, enabling increased accuracy of campaign performance analysis for advertising customers.

Digital Nirvana, a provider of leading-edge media- monitoring and metadata generation services, today announced MonitorIQ 6.1, an upgrade to its compliance logging and monitoring tool that integrates with its Media Services Portal. MonitorIQ 6.1 takes the best of compliance logging and enhances it with next-generation capabilities including cloud storage, processing, and robust artificial intelligence (AI). It is the first compliance logger to combine cloud services and cloud storage with on-premises compliance recording and the first to run in on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.

Actus Digital, a leading provider of compliance and media monitoring solutions, today announced that its world-renowned media monitoring system has been enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that dramatically speed up workflows. Using Actus Digital's intelligent, data-driven platform, media companies can automatically tag, organize, and categorize video recordings to enable rapid retrieval of relevant content and clips creation for social media outlets and the web.

Over-the-top (OTT) video solutions innovator Insys Video Technologies is heading to the IBC2019 exhibition in Amsterdam in September with a powerful new cloud-based video recording solution and a two-pronged exhibit strategy. In addition to its own standalone presence in pod P03 (located in the walkway between IBC Halls 7 and 8), the company will highlight its collaborations with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in demonstrations at the AWS stand (5.C80).

Insys Video Technologies has added powerful new capabilities to its comprehensive, over-the-top (OTT) video solutions that enable automated identification of celebrities and detection of inappropriate content in catch-up TV programming and on-demand video libraries. Viewers can find clips featuring a particular celebrity and jump to the exact point in the show where that person appears, while nudity and violence can be automatically flagged and blurred.

MediaKind, a global media technology leader, today announced at the 2019 NAB Show that it has partnered with Google Cloud to enable MediaKind’s entire portfolio of solutions to operate on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). As of today, MediaKind customers can leverage and benefit from Google Cloud’s ecosystem of solutions and assets such as TensorFlow and BigTable, global networking, best-in-class Kubernetes Engine, advanced AI and ML APIs. This new offering opens up possibilities for pre-existing customers of MediaKind and Google Cloud to deliver a heightened level of personalized user experience.

Paywizard, the pay-TV subscription, billing and customer relationship management (CRM) specialist, has announced that a new study of major US broadcasters, pay-TV operators, Telcos and over-the-top (OTT) service providers reveals that none are currently making the most of their data to more effectively engage customers and prospects, and most are near the beginning of their analytics journey. Yet the research also reveals, across the board, that providers see customer experience as crucial for timely subscriber engagement and rank it as a top strategic priority for their business.

Dejero, an innovator in cloud-managed solutions that provide Emmy® award winning video transport and Internet connectivity while mobile or in remote locations, is demonstrating a cloud-based workflow layered with the very latest in artificial intelligence (AI) at NAB. The demo shows how Microsoft Azure AI capabilities—including facial recognition, metadata tagging, and speech-to-text functionality—enhance collaboration between traditional newsroom and digital teams to produce stories faster than ever before.

Paywizard, the pay-TV subscription, billing and customer relationship management (CRM) specialist, today announced the US debut of its new artificial intelligence (AI)-driven subscriber analytics platform,Paywizard Singula™ at NAB Show 2019 in Las Vegas. Built on the Microsoft Azure platform, Singula™ provides subscriber intelligence and next best actions that empower pay-TV operators and over-the-top (OTT) providers to take a more informed, data-driven approach to customer engagement. The platform leverages AI and machine learning to proactively build subscriber loyalty, grow average revenue per user and entice new customers to join TV services.