Comprehensive Broadcast Monitoring Platform Supports a Wide Range of Important Tasks, Speeding Up Media Workflows

BOSTON — Feb. 10, 2021 — Actus Digital, a leading provider of broadcast compliance and monitoring solutions, today announced that The Weather Channel television network is using Actus Digital’s broadcast monitoring platform to perform a wide range of mission-critical tasks. Replacing an existing system, the enterprise version of Actus Digital’s platform ensures superior video and audio quality for The Weather Channel while complying with mandatory industry requirements for its linear and OTT channels.

“A thorough analysis of the different broadcast monitoring offerings available in the market today led us to Actus Digital as the solution best suited to our needs,” said Michael Smereski, Vice President of Broadcast Engineering at The Weather Channel. “Performing tasks beyond mere compliance, the Actus Digital platform serves our broadcast monitoring needs now and will support us in the future with enhanced new workflows for content repurposing and AI integration.”

Actus Digital’s platform goes beyond the capabilities of traditional broadcast monitoring systems. It supports mandatory compliance features such as SCTE-104/35, loudness, closed captions, and NAVE while providing The Weather Channel with real-time alerts on a host of A/V impairments. Using multiple load-balancing servers, the platform ensures uninterrupted, redundant, and timely response for users. The platform is also fully integrated with The Weather Channel’s automation system, expanding content search and navigation and allowing the broadcaster to accurately track the loudness of each asset. To enhance system security and user authentication, the platform is fully integrated with OKTA sign-on.

The Actus Digital system allows The Weather Channel to record content at high bitrates and resolutions, enabling the network to edit and export high-quality clips to a variety of destinations.

“The Weather Channel is the most trusted news source in the U.S., and we are thrilled to add them to our roster of customers,” said Gary Learner, Executive Vice President of Business Development at Actus Digital. “We look forward to continuing our collaboration on future enhancements to address their evolving compliance, monitoring, and content repurposing requirements, as well as adding new use cases to the deployed platform.”

Actus Digital is a global company based in the United States, with offices in Europe and Asia. The company is committed to providing 24/7 local sales support, world-class customer service, and a roadmap for future platform enhancements.

Compliance logging is a mandatory requirement; however for ActusDigital it is
one part of a much larger solution. ActusDigital media intelligence platform
provides additional workflows and is using the compliance logger to increase
revenues.

Actus Adwatch for Ads sales analysis

Actus Adwatch is a unique workflow for automatic content detection and content
matching.

One of the broadcasters’ challenges is to increase the ads sales
revenues. Actus Adwatch was designed to automatically track the aired ads, on
any given number of channels, and provide reports. While the broadcasters have
the information on the aired ads from their playout systems, the information
about the competitors’ ads is not available.

Adwatch allows to automatically track
the competitors’ ads and analyze their ads revenues versus yours. Together with
Actus rating analyzer Actus platform provides all the tools to the marketing and
ads sales teams to increase the ads revenues.

A few common use cases for Actus Adwatch:

1. Manually tracking the number of aired ads is time consuming, not accurate,
   and costly as it requires intensive manual work. Actus Adwatch offers a
   complete workflow for automatic ad detection and customized reports. A
   common report is a comparison between the number of aired ads in the
   different channels, resulting in efficient analysis and clear action items.
2. Detection of ads violations and cases where the number of aired ads in a
   specific time period exceeded the allowed time. With Actus discrepancy
   reports option you can also analyze if this was planned or a result of
   discrepancies.
3. Content rights violation: Make sure your content is not being aired by
   channels that are not authorized to do so. Adwatch will send an alert for an
   immediate action to prevent this.

Complete workflow

Actus Adwatch is using an advanced fingerprinting algorithm both for audio and
video streams. The new ads can be marked in/out from Actus UI or loaded and
integrated with third parties systems such as MAM systems. Once the ads are in
the system, they will be detected. Adwatch also offers an option to scan back the
recordings and detect the ads that have been aired prior the fingerprinting,
assuring no detection will be missed.

Alerting on new Ads – without fingerprinting

Unless you have all the ads as files it is impossible to be sure that all the ads have
been fingerprinted. One of Adwatch unique features is the ability to detect new ads, although they
have not been fingerprinted.

Actus detects these ads and provides the operator a
“suspected new ads” report. The operator only needs to approve or reject the
“suspicious” Ad. Once the Ad is approved, it will be detected.

Replacing End-of-Life Volicon System, Comprehensive Software-Based Platform Supports Compliance, Logging, Recording, Monitoring, Archiving, Clips Creation, and Audience Measurement Analysis

BOSTON — Oct. 7, 2020 — Actus Digital, a leading provider of broadcast compliance and monitoring solutions, today announced that Colombian television network Caracol has deployed the company’s broadcast monitoring platform for compliance, logging, and a wide range of other mission-critical tasks. Using Actus Digital’s monitoring platform, Caracol can ensure superior video and audio quality while complying with industry requirements — including loudness regulations — to go beyond the capabilities of traditional systems.

“The broadcast industry is evolving at a rapid pace, and we need to work faster and more efficiently,” said Jorge Pinilla, director of broadcast at Caracol. “Actus Digital’s monitoring platform provides us with extensive functionalities for compliance and beyond — from HD clips editing and exporting to advanced rating analysis. We particularly appreciate the simple and intuitive user interface that enables anyone in our facility, not just our professional video editors, to turn around clips from any workstation.”

Using Actus Digital’s broadcast monitoring platform, Caracol can record and monitor any number of audio and video streams from any input, ensuring compliance with closed caption, teletext, subtitle, audio track, and loudness requirements. Actus Digital’s monitoring system records video from various inputs in full HD, allowing Caracol to rapidly export high-resolution clips. The solution also includes Actus Clip Factory, a simple and intuitive workflow for creating, editing, and exporting clips to social media, OTT platforms, the web, FTP, or any other destination.

In addition, Caracol is using Actus Digital’s platform to optimize audience measurement analysis. Through Actus Digital Rating Analyzer, Caracol receives an interactive graphical presentation of rating data, ensuring accurate recommendations, better program planning, and superior ad placement.

“When Caracol’s previous Volicon system reached end of life, it needed a monitoring platform that would improve the efficiency of its workflow,” said Raphael Renous, chief technology officer of Actus Digital. “With Actus Digital’s solution, Caracol can now enjoy compliance, recording, monitoring, archiving, and clips creation from a single platform, drastically improving its workflow efficiencies while reducing costs and gaining long-term reliability.”

Why Isn’t the Cloud Trending for Compliance Solutions?

Traditionally, broadcast compliance and monitoring solutions have been implemented in an on-premises environment. However, recently, cloud-based solutions are controlling the IT conversation. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced most people to work from their homes on different devices, requiring the industry to evolve and reconsider the advantages of cloud-based options.

To be competitive in the current landscape, media companies need to focus more on content and monetization, and less on managing their infrastructure. Here is where cloud-based solutions truly shine: they are agile, scalable, and flexible. Cloud-based solutions are also accessible from anywhere and do not require the same level of maintenance as on-premises solutions.

While many media companies are looking into running their compliance and monitoring solution
on the cloud, such solutions are still far from being common. The question is why.

Based on more than a decade of experience and feedback from hundreds of customers, we believe the main reason is cost related. Compliance systems are responsible for recording content 24/7. Today, the inputs are mainly HD, moving to 4K and higher resolutions. Content has to be stored for a long period of time, often in high resolution, for repurposing. This requires
a significant amount of storage and CPU resources. The costs associated with implementing dedicated cloud resources are relatively high compared with on-premises and virtualized solutions for these use cases.

Media companies are not content to settle on only a recording and compliance solution; they want a solution that can also handle other functions, including post-production requirements, on one integrated platform. This requires substantial cloud resources for transcoding content into high resolutions, rapid clips creation, video and audio analysis, and more.

On-premises and Virtualized Solutions Need to be Pandemic-Proof

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many more people are working from home, including media and broadcast staff. They need to ensure that media content complies with regulations, can be monitored for quality purposes, and can quickly be turned into social media clips. It does not matter if the solution is cloud-based, virtualized, or on-premises: it must be accessible
anytime, from any location, and on any device.

Actus Digital’s compliance system is an essential tool for customers enabling media companies to monitor content while working remotely. We are one of the only vendors that offer a unified solution for compliance, monitoring, quality assurance, video analysis, advanced clips creation for social, OTT monitoring, multiviewer capabilities, automatic clipping, keywords alerts, speech-to-text, configuration changes, and ad detection — all remotely.

Here are five capabilities that every compliance platform should include and how Actus Digital is leading the charge:

1. Remote Monitoring is Essential

Remote monitoring is an important capability in a compliance system, not only in terms of enabling users to monitor content and create clips, but also for administrators to perform their job remotely and check the quality of the aired content. Compliance systems today should allow users to check content quality from any device, using any web browser, while guaranteeing network security.

Actus Digital’s platform is built on Angular 10 framework, assuring cross-browser, cross-platform compatibility with secure access and improved performance.

2. Remote Configuration Has Become Vital

As the last year has proven, agility and adaptability are now vital in a broadcast compliance system. Media companies must be able to reconfigure their systems and connect to a variety of broadcast signals (local and remote) without being physically present. In addition, all of the administrative, support, and configuration tools must be functional through a remote connection.

Actus Digital’s Angular 10-based UI guarantees remote configuration.

3. Ultra-Fast Remote Clips Creation for Social Media

Actus Digital’s all-in-one platform supports a wide range of workflows, including clips creation and export to social media and the web. These tasks can be done from anywhere, without the need for dedicated editing machines or professional video editors. Any user who has been granted permission can rapidly create and export clips from any device. This allows media
companies to focus on investing in high-quality content rather than in professional video editors.

4. Artificial Intelligence is a Must

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here, and it is here to stay. AI-based platforms can be integrated into broadcast workflows for various tasks, ranging from speech-to-text, object and facial recognition, and scene description, with the ultimate goal of helping viewers find relevant content faster and boosting engagement. Integrating these technologies into the broadcast workflow simplifies asset management and navigation.

Actus Digital’s platform is integrated with a variety of AI engines to increase the value of the compliance solution and to allow for more automation options. Hosted in the cloud, our platform is continuously learning to enable faster upgrades and advancements.

5. Compliance Without ROI and Monetization Cannot Be Justified

A monitoring solution that is only used for compliance is not sustainable. ROI and monetization are crucial in order to justify the expense of purchasing a compliance system. The platform has to serve as many departments as possible and should support workflows that will contribute to higher revenues, assure the highest content quality, strengthen brand recognition, and increase viewers’ engagement. By deploying a multi-workflow platform, media companies can save human resources and time, while responding faster to technical and content-related issues.

Actus Digital’s platform is designed to support all post-broadcast needs in one platform. Compliance is mandatory for media providers, requiring investments in hardware, software licenses, and maintenance. Actus Digital provides an unparalleled ROI by supporting innovative features such as new media content repurposing, real-time IT alerts, ratings and competitive analysis tools for research and content teams, ad sales reports for the traffic department, AI, and automation.

Pay Per Use and Grow With Actus Digital

Actus Digital’s platform offers many capabilities in addition to mandatory compliance. Sometimes our customers only need a compliance solution with future growth potential, and in other instances our customers want to take advantage of all that the platform has to offer today.

Our platform is designed to be flexible, allowing broadcasters to select capabilities as needed, and the pricing is adjusted accordingly. This pay-as-you-grow business model, combined with advanced cloud technology, remote capabilities, and AI, is the future of the industry, increasing efficiency, reducing costs, and improving ROI for broadcasters.