“We look to using the cloud to globally connect more parts of the workflow and enable creatives to collaborate wherever they are in the world.”
An important challenge facing studios and post houses is the globalization of content production and consumption. An increasingly global audience demands that content companies reach more and more territories in order to evolve. As a result, content creators have to create hundreds of versions of content for distribution across different channels, incurring huge storage and distribution costs. Dan Goman— an industry leader in technology innovation—incorporated OWNZONES Entertainment Technologies to address these challenges. OWNZONES is helping content creators reach more audiences with its platform Connect—a content servicing and supply chain platform built in the cloud. Being cloud-native, it allows companies to leverage geographically-distributed work forces to complete their end-to-end content supply chain processes.
In addition, OWNZONES leverages IMF (Interoperable Master Format), a component-based workflow format, which gives clients greater flexibility in their versioning and archival workflows. By storing content in the form of IMF packages and leveraging OWNZONES’ proprietary tools, not only can studios and post houses save 73% on average in cloud storage costs, but they also have the ability to render localized versions of different titles on the fly. With IMF, there is significantly less mastered data to store, manage, and transfer, which drastically reduces costs and versioning headaches.
OWNZONES’ proprietary IMF transcoder slices up files and processes them in parallel in the cloud 35 times faster than traditional transcoding methods. It also makes it easier and faster to create versions because assets are stored in the form of components of IMF packages that can be swapped depending on different required localizations. FrameDNA, an AI-driven tool within Connect, scans, analyzes, deduplicates, and consolidates content into IMF packages ready for distribution. It reduces storage footprints by an average of 73% and creates localized/edited versions 5x faster than traditional tools.
In an instance, one of the company’s clients was looking to consolidate their media library in the cloud. They were storing 4 complete ProRes MOV versions-a total of 252 GB for 4 different versions of one title. “That was costing them a lot in storage for slight differences between versions, and they wanted a way to reduce that cost but still have the flexibility they needed to render and deliver on-demand the relevant versions to different platform endpoints,” explains Dan. “They ran their content through FrameDNA in order to consolidate their library into IMF packages ready for distribution and archival.” After FrameDNA, the new storage size in IMF was 117 GB. That’s a storage reduction of around 46% for just one title. Multiplied against all 500 titles, and the client was able to reduce content storage from 126TB to 58TB and monthly cloud storage fees by roughly two-thirds.
Today, OWNZONES products are focused on the encoding, packaging, and distribution stages of the digital supply chain. However, they are exploring several opportunities to continue to evolve and innovate as cloud-based workflows become more entrenched in production and post-production. “Our core technologies are equally relevant to other parts of the digital supply chain that we do not currently serve,” says Dan. “We look to using the cloud to globally connect more parts of the workflow and enable creatives to collaborate wherever they are in the world.” In addition, today, one of the most pressing challenges has been centered around the COVID-19 pandemic. With filming essentially halted worldwide, companies have had to rely on either content that’s recently been shot or their archived content in order to continue to monetize during the pandemic. The cloud has been instrumental in affording companies access to their archives because all their content is centralized there where all relevant parties can have access to the same files, regardless of physical location. “What’s unique about OWNZONES is that we give content creators/owners the keys to control their own content in the cloud at no extra cost to them. OWNZONES Connect makes it possible for companies to service their entire library of archived content from end-to-end entirely in the cloud,” adds Dan.”
