February 2013
www.tvbeurope.com
DMT started with two people and now boasts a staff of 45
At just 12 months old Deluxe Media Technologies (DMT) is an ambitious young company, headed by Joe Trainor and partner David Patton, that has experienced rapid growth. Where did it come from and how has it grown so quickly? “We had a few venture
capitalists looking at what we were doing and they were interested. But then we also met up with a company called Deluxe – a massive 6,000 staff business, near $1bn turnover. We showed them our business plan and European CEO Ken Biggins said, ‘Everything you’re trying to do and the areas you want to focus in is exactly where we need to build efficiencies, remove cost structures and allow us to be more creative in our toolset.’ Within 40 days it was all closed out, committed and we were on board within Deluxe,” explains Trainor. So what is DMT (now a
wholly owned subsidiary of Deluxe Entertainment Services Group) bringing to the table? “We’re adapting technologies from areas that had never been thought of being applicable to the media industry, specifically from the security, surveillance and video analysis world. It requires a lot of incubation, both from a technology stand but also the space and time to develop into a mature business that Deluxe is willing to take to market. We’ve been given the space to mature as an organisation over the last 12 months to build up the right infrastructure and right people and complete the technology stack so it’s fit for market,” he adds. Trainor has a history of
working in start-ups, such as Narrowstep. “That’s where I really cut my cloth on how to grow a business, building it from zero into a going concern. What I learned there was the biggest weight of problems inside what we were doing wasn’t the cost of distributing content on the internet, it was the workflow behind the scenes to make it a reality – repackaging, repurposing and re-encoding. “Because everything going online was on-demand it needed to be more discoverable. The only way of making it discoverable was by appending metadata and that was a people- based process,” he comments. “What I recognised was that the need for metadata was vital and the need for rich, relevant, useful, complete metadata was tantamount to the success and
Insight into your assets
Melanie Dayasena-Lowe meets Joe Trainor, managing director of Deluxe Media Technologies, to hear about the company’s new software currently in beta trials -- ahead of its official launch at NAB
TVBEurope 39 The Business Case
Joe Trainor on Insight: “Is it an automated metadata tool? Yes it is. Is it an automated subtitling tool? Yes it is. Is it a workflow efficiency tool? Yes it is. It’s all these things”
future of that asset. Today people still struggle with that concept. “It’s very expensive to create
such granularity of data around an asset. What we’ve done and what I recognise is that making it a complete people-based problem does not deliver scale, does not deliver the levels of consistency you need and does not deliver the levels of discovery that consumers demand. Consumers are ever changing. How do you build a data structure or data model with all eventualities? It’s impossible,” he remarks.
Cracking open an asset DMT was built around the idea of extracting knowledge from a piece of media or an asset. “Every part of the content [concepts, information, data, relevance] of every frame and spoken word of every scene – that level of granularity – gives us a more complete understanding of the asset and helps us focus on the exploitation and creative process to do more with it,” he says. By using computer technology and IT infrastructure to build up
knowledge in this way, DMT is not relying on people. “We see people as a very important aspect to add additional data but we will be able to extract more and get a better
understanding and meaning of what goes on inside an asset in a much more granular way than any human-based process.” After 12 months, Trainor
believes the technology has been proven already. “We believe computing technology is good enough to do this and we believe we can finesse, tweak, train and educate it to get better and better. We’ve only been at it for 12 months but we’ve proven the technology already.” Insight is currently in beta trials with a number of customers. “I’ve been surprised and blown away by the results we’ve been getting. We’ve been lucky to have the relationships we have to test and evaluate in this way because it helps us to get the product right for market.”
He is quick to point out that Insight is far more than just metadata software. “Is it an automated metadata tool? Yes it is. Is it an automated subtitling tool? Yes it is. Is it a workflow
efficiency tool? Yes it is. It’s all these things. It’s intelligence and knowledge of what is happening inside the media. How you want to use that knowledge to flatten workflow, build efficiencies and remove manual processing. It’s the business behind what goes on with media.
“It has insight into what’s going on inside media and content. The value from a media company’s perspective is how do you apply that knowledge and how do you exploit it in a way that helps you build efficiencies inside your business from a workflow perspective, flattening workflow and removing manual processing – allowing the computers to do the heavy lifting. It becomes a much more simplified environment.” At NAB three applications of Insight will be revealed: subtitling and in the newsroom, with the third being kept under wraps for now. “We’re building a newsroom dashboard to give journalists a realtime view about what’s happening in the world inside their asset library systems, coming down the newswire and in the social sphere in realtime, dedicated to what they’re
interested in. You can see in realtime how trending stories are happening in the world, both from the assets, in the marketplace, satellite dishes, OB trucks and journalists – all that data coming in to a pool of knowledge and we can extract pertinent pieces of knowledge to a journalist, improving the ability to understand what is happening in the marketplace.” With a presence at BVE London and NAB Las Vegas coming up, DMT has ambitions to continue growing and evolving its software. “Our roadmap is about defining the next-generational product stacks beyond the three that we’re going to launch at NAB. The goal will be to launch more at IBC. “What we’re trying to do is
pretty bleeding edge. It’s tricky, complicated and requires people to be on the top of their game. They can’t do that if they’re not excited, enthused and driven to come rushing in to do that job. None of those things are possible without a positive working environment. It also attracts more talent and gives us the best chance to be successful.”
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