VSN integration with Microsoft Azure, Ross Video and Facilis convinces at NAB 2016

Once again, within the framework of NAB 2016, VSN has brought together its main partners and channel partners at the Bally's Hotel in Las Vegas to take the pulse of the industry and present its latest developments.

VSN has brought together its main partners and channel partners at the Bally's Hotel in Las Vegas to take the pulse of the industry and present its latest developments.

The person in charge of opening the event was the marketing director of VSN, Jordi Capdevila, who shared among the attending professionals, many of them representatives of the main integrated companies in Latin America, some data that makes up the current x-ray of the market.

Capdevila assured that, according to Cisco data, the consumer is “hungry for content”, and it is expected that in 2019 VoD traffic will have doubled with a strong hegemony of video. He also pointed out that growth in consumption brings with it diversification into new media.

It is in this last aspect where storytelling in a transmedia environment becomes important to deal with distribution in all types of media from comics, video games, TV series, cinema... across multiple platforms and formats.

And while linear television consumption on the television decreases, it increases on other devices by all age groups exponentially year after year.

Jordi Capdevila commented on some of the conclusions of the latest Devoncroft Big broadcast Survey. According to this market study, industry trends are marked by multiplatform distribution, IP networking, 4K/UHD, file-based workflows and the cloud.

The reasons for purchasing new solutions that respond to these challenges, according to Devoncroft, are greater efficiency (doing better with fewer resources), support and the total cost of the project.

VSN precisely responds perfectly to the demand in these three aspects. The trend is marked by the concept of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in which VSN draws from extraordinary experience helping its clients in the development of the most ambitious projects with the best partners and integrators.

At the beginning of 2015, VSN launched a customer service department. “Due to the attention received, technical knowledge, response time and resolution, our clients rate us with the highest score in the surveys that we carry out every six months,” said Capdevila.

VSN-Ross Video Collaboration

Shawn Snider, product manager for Inception and Xpression at Ross Video, has addressed aspects related to the collaboration that Ross Video and VSN have initiated.

“Este es un gran paso adelante para satisfacer la necesidades de producción y distribución de vídeo en directo de los modernos broadcasters en entornos de noticias. Con esta colaboración con VSN, somos capaces de ofrecer un flujo end-to-end que permite a los usuarios crear, distribuir y archivar su más preciado asset: su contenido. Y, por supuesto, las funcionalidades avanzadas de social media de Inception les permiten además llevar a sus audiencias a la sala de redacción”, ha reseñado.

The integration of VSN and Ross Video's advanced solutions will result in a powerful and robust news environment that improves the workflows of journalists, editors and producers. The combined capabilities of Ross Inception and XPression with VSNLivecom and VSN's VSNExplorer make it even easier for users to create, manage, broadcast and archive media content, taking news and live events production to the next level of productivity and efficiency.

Thanks to the alliance between VSN and Ross Video, the flow of news is simpler than ever and collaborative work between departments is enhanced. While journalists create their stories in Inception, video editors work in VSNExplorer MAM to consolidate new assets in their editor or to use their segments to create EDLs that will work with the NLE of their choice. Once the story and assets are ready in Inception, VSNLivecom and XPression take control of the playout, ensuring that all assets are available on the video servers, perfectly synchronized with the approved timelines that come from Inception and are ready to go to air.

What's more, thanks to MOS synchronization, every change made in Inception is reflected in VSNLivecom in real time. Also in Inception, synchronized with VSNLivecom, it is possible to keep track of what is queued or stopped, or of any asset on the video server. This two-way synchronization between tools improves communication between departments, ensuring that everyone has the most up-to-date information at all times.

Integration with Azure

Ricardo Villalobos, global director of Azure Enablers (Microsoft), addressed the paradigm changes that the use of cloud infrastructures will mean. For Villalobos, the challenge is to find a way for the solutions to be end-to-end in the cloud and not isolated from each other.

Microsoft currently has more than a hundred data centers around the world. 28 of them are enabled with Azure. For this reason, "we can grow faster than the competition since the infrastructure is already there. Each data center costs 500 million dollars and we double this infrastructure every 18 months," he assured.

Some cloud service providers force a choice between a customer data center and the cloud. This is not the case with Azure, which easily integrates with today's IT environment through the largest network of secure private connections, hybrid database and storage solutions, and also offers data residency and encryption capabilities, so assets stay right where they are needed.
For Villalobos, we cannot move all scenarios in the cloud, “the reality is that we are going to a hybrid model,” he assured. Many systems will continue to be in their own data center, and others in the cloud. This will depend on the latency of connectivity to the cloud.

Para resolver este problema, Microsoft ha lanzado un modelo de conectividad ExpressRoute para Azure, punto a punto e IPVN. El directivo de Microsoft también mantizó que otro reto será lograr una experiencia simétrica entre lo que está en la nube y en local.

Por el momento, Microsoft ha apostado por un modelo PaaS en el que la multinacional se encarga de todo, con servicios administrados por Microsoft. Se puede combinar,incluso el uso de máquinas virtuales con servicios de la empresa, en un esquema IaaS+PaaS.

And this is precisely one of the great advantages of Azure, working in a hybrid scenario. Microsoft for the media sector offers services such as multi-platform coding, CDN distribution worldwide, deployment of players in browsers... In reality, it is an ecosystem that adds services without limiting itself to the Microsoft menu. “That is why the alliance with VSN is so important,” said Ricardo Villalobos.

To get an idea of ​​the rapid growth that Microsoft's proposal is experiencing, it should be noted that the multinational is adding two servers per second to Azure, thus responding to the more than 100,000 new clients that are added every month.

You are easy

Ashu Rao, Vice President of Facilis Technology, reviewed version 6.5 of TerraBlock, which now fully integrates with VSNExplorer's media management flows and its Media Asset Management (MAM), Production Asset Management (PAM), Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) modules. This integration offers professionals a powerful, end-to-end shared editing and production solution within the reach of any company, which integrates seamlessly with the most common systems in the industry, such as Avid's Media Composer. Both companies will participate in the next IBC 2015 (VSN at stand 7.D25 and Facilis at stand 7.C10).

TerraBlock by Facilis is a highly operable multi-platform shared storage solution created for post-production and content creation environments. It offers flexible connectivity options, including 8/16Gbps Fiber Channel and 1/10Gbps Ethernet through its Shared File System. TerraBlock shared storage enables collaborative workflows with all the most popular editing platforms on the market and supports a wide range of industry applications and formats. The system proposes a user-customizable GUI and promotes powerful 4K, 6 and camera RAW playback for ARRI, F65 and RED EPIC, without forgetting its integration with 2K and 4K DPX.

The already popular VSN breakfast at Bally's concluded with the presentation of awards for the work carried out by its distributors in Latin America, receiving on this occasion Teletec from Mexico, Curacao from Colombia and SoniVision from Costa Rica.

Access to the NAB 2016 SPECIAL in Panorama