NAB 2024: Backlight to showcase enhancements to iconik, ftrack, Wildmoka and Zype

Backlight will use NAB 2024 to showcase strategic integrations and updates to its product lines to deliver efficiency, security and flexibility for its customers’ cloud-based video workflows.

Backlight’s product lineup – iconik, cineSync, ftrack, Celtx, Gem, Wildmoka Clip Studio, Live Studio and Zype – will be fully represented at the show.

iconik, Backlight’s cloud-native product for media management and collaboration has added a range of integrations including with other Backlight products – Zype and ftrack – for more powerful creative and distribution workflows.

Backlight’s new iconik + Zype Connector allows users to combine media storage, collaboration and review with streaming and OTT workflows. When combined, a MAM + CMS solution can deliver a much more efficient and comprehensive strategy to prepare and distribute video and metadata than solely using a CMS. Iconik offers a flexible platform for managing assets across cloud and on-premise storage, accessible from anywhere, and Zype’s CMS enables content experiences out-of-the-box with embeddable players, OTT apps and playout, and FAST channels.

An upcoming ftrack + iconik integration bridges the gap between project management, production tracking and media management by simplifying the creation of iconik collections directly from ftrack. ftrack users benefit from the ability to manage media associated with project tasks, including its storage locations, metadata, access permissions and more.

Underlining Backlight’s dedication to providing solutions that integrate smoothly with existing infrastructure, Backlight is announcing support for iconik deployment on AWS in addition to its existing support for AWS S3 storage. Offering iconik’s media management on AWS will let enterprise customers keep their data, transcoding and proxies in the AWS network, which can minimise network costs and latency. Throughout the NAB Show, AWS will be hosting demos showing how iconik and other AWS ISV partners can help streamline media supply chains.

Backlight is also unveiling live speech-to-text and text-based editing for its Wildmoka Clip Studio. With this functionality, users can browse live ingesting feeds via text search and conduct frame-accurate text-based editing to include or exclude any particular sentence in their clips. The closed-captions generated can be re-edited and published either as a closed-caption sidecar file or burned into the video. Currently, English, Spanish and French languages are supported.

Beyond video editing, the creation of engaging descriptive metadata is an important but time-consuming task for producers. Backlight’s newest innovation in metadata automation enhances this process by suggesting title, description and tags based on the contextual analysis of the closed captions (or the speech-to-text output).

At NAB Show 2024, Backlight will demonstrate several end-to-end workflows for the editing and distribution of vertical content at scale – from source acquisition (a live game, a customer’s own TV channel, or user generated content), content production (manual or automated), content reframing and publication to social media, to owned and operated platforms in the form of short clips or snackable vertical stories.

Backlight’s integrated live production solution, Live Studio, now supports remote guests. By simply sharing a web link, a producer can easily invite guests into a live production to contribute commentary, video or even share a screen. The company will demonstrate how this feature can be used in the Backlight environment for a wide variety of workflows such as adding remote commentary to a live event, inviting guests to a show for an interview and collecting the live contribution of a journalist on the field.

Backlight’s Zype Playout solution is debuting a wealth of new features which, combined, enable flexibility in the creation and execution of fully automated channels. Calendar View enables the strategic planning of channels and Playout’s new rule-based Dynamic Blocks enable automated programming of blocks of any number of assets with the ad strategy associated with them (ad frequency and durations).  These innovations are particularly useful when it comes to automating the schedule of secondary channels – typically made of live blocks freshly aired and recycled from a primary channel.