Speculate to a Kumulate: Masstech’s George Kilpatrick discusses new products for sports video production
In lieu of its usual NAB announcements, George Kilpatrick, Masstech chief executive tells SVG Europe all about his company’s latest products including the Kumulate Adobe Panel which provides editors with visibility over all of their assets, regardless of where they are stored or what format they are in.
What sports broadcasting-focused technology or service has been released?
We recently released the Adobe Panel for Kumulate, the intelligent content storage and lifecycle management platform. The Adobe Panel enables editors to archive and restore media and projects directly to their craft editing workstation. It runs within Premiere Pro so that editors have access to all of their assets across any storage systems, including deep storage such as cloud, LTO, and optical disk libraries.
This supplements our existing toolset for editors and media managers, which includes the Kumulate Portal for Avid and the Kumulate Web App.
What is the benefit of this technology or service for those in sports video content production?
By integrating directly into the craft editing workstations, Masstech provides these editors with visibility over all of their assets, regardless of where they are stored or what formats they may be in.
Editors can browse proxies and restore complete files or partial files, ensuring that they get the right content as quickly as possible. Kumulate’s embedded software transcode engine will automatically transcode and/or rewap the content if it’s being stored in a different format than the one that the editor needs.
How will this technology or service be developed further?
In addition to browsing, archiving and restoring the video asset, the system also provides customizable mapping so that structured metadata and time-based markers can move between the editors and Kumulate. The metadata and markers can be input manually, but the Kumulate Orchestrator can also be used to integrate AI and machine learning services.
This is especially critical for legacy archived content, that often has little to no metadata attached to it. By enriching these assets using automated processes and machine learning, we can make it much easier for editors to discover and repurpose their organization’s content.
What else are we likely to see coming out from your company over the next six months, and why is it of interest to the sports video production community?
We have several releases coming up in the next few months. The Kumulate Orchestrator is getting a completely new user interface, which will enable customers to create and modify their own workflows with easy-to-use templates.
We will be releasing Gateway and Gallery, two new additions to the Kumulate product suite. Gateway is a content acquisition portal, providing a browser-based location into which content can be delivered by suppliers, content creators, and other providers of original material.
The portal performs compliance checks, delivering approved content forward into the Kumulate workspace, and automatically rejecting non-compliant content with appropriate user notifications. Gateway represents an end to manual file delivery, resource-intensive operator checks, and endless back and forth with suppliers of incorrectly delivered content.
The second module, Gallery, provides Kumulate users with a digital showroom from which they can display, sell and distribute their content. Gallery gives Kumulate users a customizable shop window and integrated point-of-sale, enabling them to showcase content to a designated audience with the ease and security of a flexible, customizable internet store.
Gallery drives significant increases in the volume of content sales without adding operational resources.