NAB Reflections: As Media Moves Into Industry 4.0,' TVU Networks CEO Paul Shen Relishes the Opportunity to Lead With Tech

NAB Reflections: As Media Moves Into Industry 4.0, TVU Networks CEO Paul Shen Relishes the Opportunity to Lead With Tech Launch of MediaMind and further growth of HEVC have TVU Networks at the cutting edge By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital

Friday, April 20, 2018 - 2:28 pm

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Silicon Valley-based TVU Network enjoyed a strong NAB Show last week in Las Vegas which was primarily spotlighted by the launch of its new MediaMind platform. It's a story-centric system that checked many of the boxes that were the rage at this year's show: IP, AI, big data, and the Cloud.

MediaMind brings together many of the pieces of the TVU production process, including TVU Contribution Automation, TVU AI Engine, TVU Real Time Search Engine, TVU Workflow Engine and TVU Producer Pro.

It's all part of the overall growth of the industry that company CEO Paul Shen is referring to as Industry 4.0. What he means if the move in media to the automation, digitalization and networking of design, production, information, communication and management processes. We caught up with Shen at TVU Networks' NAB booth to discuss the latest.

Paul Shen, CEO and founder, TVU Networks

What are the big highlights for you and your company at a show like NAB?

This show is not just about new products and new services. It's about seeing the industry move forward into what we are calling Media 4.0. It's the next phase of the media production process where automation and AI are going to have a significant impact.

We have introduced Media Mind.Fundamentally, we want to move into a platform where we know exactly were all of the content is and know what that content is. We have enough metadata to describe the content to the frame lab.

What we would like to see in the future is someone writing a script and the content can be produced. We have a lot of media companies supporting this and we are aggressively pushing this to the industry.

We've talked a lot about HEVC and how that's grown. Are you seeing any noted steps forward in that regard here at this show?

All of our products are HEVC-capable. We moved very fast. In fact, our HEVC-base pack has been shipping over a year-and-a-half now. Another important part of this is that we always believe in a software-based encoder. The reason is, in the mobile environment, we believe the way that a software-based encoder behaves matches the mobile environment. One example is that the bitrate constantly changes. How quickly can you adapt to the bitrate change is incredible important. Bandwidth availability is crucial. If you don't react fast you'll be less efficient or you will have packet loss. Our system can react to a bandwidth change request within a frame. So they perform very reliably.

Did any trends or themes jump out to you at this year's NAB Show?

There's been a tremendous amount of interest in our TVU Grid. One of our sports clients is the Iceland government broadcast stations and when the soccer team is playing, they go live on the TVU Grid. Any of their partners can share that content. Today we have more than 2,000 TV stations globally on the TVU Grid.

This system can be tremendous for sports teams because it makes it easy to share their content with all of the local TV stations in their market.

The media industry sports specifically is so rapidly changing to the point that it can be hard to keep up when releasing products or solutions as a tech vendor. What is about this industry that excites you?

For a company that wants to continue to lead with technology, the change is what excites us. We understand the technology. We are not in a business of contributing commodity products. We are in this industry to lead. Give the industry new technology and help them change their business, because if they don't change, they die. That excites us.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2018/04/20/nab-reflections-as-media-moves-...
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