With TAB just around the corner, Douglas Wynn, Sales Director of the VSN team in the North America region, answers a series of questions in an exclusive interview regarding the latest industry news and the way VSN is providing companies with the most innovative media management and automation solutions.
1. If you had to name three main drivers within the Broadcast and Media industry in North America today, what would they be?
Multi-platform content delivery is one of the most important drivers in the Broadcast and M&E space. Stations are having to address a multitude of platforms to meet the needs of their audiences viewing choices. It is no longer sufficient to simply transmit a single channel as many viewers don’t watch TV in the traditional sense.
Consolidation is one of the key business drivers in the industry. Although the number of stations is North America is growing, the number of groups that own the aforementioned stations has been reduced dramatically. As such you are seeing reductions in staff in all departments as groups try to realize efficiencies and profits.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning are all the buzz right now. The promise of repurposing staff is highly attractive to the groups and falls in-line with realizing efficiencies.
2. How is VSN responding to these areas and evolving market trends?
VSN is responding to these trends in a proactive fashion. We realized the need for multi-platform content delivery several years ago and have addressed it on VSNExplorer Series of solutions. Producers and editors are able to create their stories with our MAM solution and deliver the finished piece to a playlist or to a social media platform with ease.
With regards to the business trend of consolidation VSN has responded by offering stations and groups many different ways to implement our family of solutions. VSN offers traditional one-time purchases or Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions both of which will meet the stations needs today and tomorrow.
VSNExplorer series of solutions have been integrated with the AI services of IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to enable automatic metadata detection directly from media, gathering information from both the video and audio layers by segment.
3. What can VSN offer to the industry to adapt to all these changes and overcome new challenges?
VSN’s new Media Exchange solution has been designed for environments in which media content of all types need to be exchanged, managed and available to more than one location. It acts like a content hub in the cloud or it can be hosted on-site. This solution cost effectively and securely increases content availability, enabling fast, simple sharing of resources thereby delivering increased productivity and cost savings.
VSN is a very agile company and quick to realize industry trends and end user requirements. We have a large team of in-house developers who are able to respond in a timely fashion to the requirements of the industry.
4. Do you find any of the latest VSN innovations and solutions particularly interesting for the North American market?
I believe our Media Exchange Solutions and VSNExplorer Series of solutions are ideally suited for the North American market. Our software solutions take advantage of Consumer off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and we have partnered and are integrated with most of the industry leading broadcast manufacturers which allows end users to build a best of breed solution that meets their needs. Within our Explorer series we have a BPM module that allows the end user to automate and define workflows that are unique to their facility.
5. What do you expect this year from TAB Texas show?
TAB is one of the best Regional shows in the US. I am looking forward to meeting with both National and Regional System Integrators as well as our many broadcast partners. In addition, I look forward to spending time with Chief Engineers, Producers and News Directors, etc., to reaffirm that VSN is delivering solutions that are meeting or exceeding their requirements today. I also want to get a better understanding from their standpoint of where we as a company to be going and where they think the industry in general are headed. That would be of a great help to us to keep improving day by day.
