Categories for Blog

Congratulations to Groupe Média TFO on your IBC innovation award!

September 30, 2014 11:03 am Published by We want to congratulate our customer and partner, Groupe Média TFO (the largest producer and distributor of French-language educational and cultural media content in Canada), for winning this year’s second place award for the most innovative use of technology in content management, and for all the hard work they put into getting there.
An aerial view of clouds over Alaska.

The benefits and risk of true cloud-born software

September 25, 2014 10:21 am Published by What makes true cloud-born software different from software that is simply rebranded with the buzzword “cloud” and wrapped in a virtual machine? This blog covers the major benefits of true cloud software and the growing concern about file security.

Citizen journalism and the new technology of accountability

August 26, 2014 12:18 pm Published by Last year, Guardian Journalist Paul Lewis gave a moving TED talk on the rise of citizen journalism, explaining the power of people around the world recording their environment and telling their own story. Lewis’s talk seems all the more appropriate today with so much activism happening against a backdrop of civil unrest. “Citizen journalism and this technology has inserted a new layer of accountability into our world,” says Lewis. Through two powerful examples of murder and cover-up exposed via citizen journalism, Lewis explains both best practices and the transformative role citizen journalism is playing in 21st century news gathering.

Make Everyone a Reporter: The rise of user-generated media content

August 20, 2014 4:57 pm Published by Media companies are well aware how mobile computing has changed the end user experience. Consumers are now comfortable capturing and sending all types of content on their mobile devices, and have even become vital news sources for on-the-ground reporting. Signiant recently released a free mobile app for Media Shuttle to help media firms benefit from the trend of mobile media capture.

Streamlining the massive video archive behind Nat Geo’s “The 90s: The Last Great Decade”

August 13, 2014 9:56 am Published by Since I was born in 1992, I doubt I actually count as a member of Generation X (or, as the internet has begun to put it more casually,“90’s kids”), but there’s still a certain part of me that feels very connected to that last decade before the millennium. Whether I’m browsing online lists of the defining films or reminiscing about the few toys that I was actually old enough to appreciate, I can easily get swept up in the nostalgia. So I was fascinated by the prospect of National Geographic’s “The 90s: The Last Great Decade?” a three-part, six-hour documentary that aired in early July.

A Taste of Stardom: Signiant Wins 66th Annual Technology and Engineering Emmy!

August 5, 2014 1:50 pm Published by There is a new air about our corporate headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts, a modest building nestled between the local shopping mall and a wooded bike path you can follow for 20 miles to Cambridge. Everyone seems more polished, and I swear I’ve seen more collared shirts and heels than usual. Perhaps we’re waiting for the paparazzi to swarm since hearing the news that Signiant won an Emmy for excellence in Technology and Engineering.

Post-Production Product Placement: Extreme time pressure calls for extreme file movement

July 22, 2014 3:02 pm Published by Today, some of the most innovative TV advertisers are working with a technique known as post-production product placement, a more natural form of traditional product placement — something that once seemed like an improvement over commercials but has gotten rather ridiculous as of late. Post-production product placements are less disruptive because they are placed in TV shows after they’ve been created, allowing advertisers to carefully select a clip to implant a brand image like the billboard in this scene. They can even insert TV tickers appropriate to each market, allowing viewers to engage with a brand via social media.

IT Broadcast Workflow and the Art of Digital Asset Management

July 7, 2014 7:00 am Published by For the past five years, IT Broadcast Workflow (ITBW) has offered a daylong case study program highlighting innovations in file-based operations by European broadcasting companies. With the rate of cloud-based software adoption in media ever increasing, tomorrow’s sixth annual summit promises to be the most intriguing yet. Throughout the day, organizations will share their complex technical and business challenges, the solutions they’ve found, and how they’ve worked with their technology partners to achieve success. Of course, wine will be served in the evening — we’d expect nothing less from an event at the esteemed British Academy of Film and Television Arts in London.

The Consumerization of IT: Are illicit cloud apps risking your business security?

July 1, 2014 12:07 pm Published by There is a delicate balancing act going on in organizations between employees adopting cloud applications to help them do their job and IT’s need to secure the corporate network. This often results in employees downloading apps without approval. In fact, a report by Netskope found that there is an average of 461 cloud applications running in the enterprise — almost ten times more than IT had estimated. To change this dynamic, business groups and IT need to work together to meet the productivity requirements of the business while satisfying the security needs of the organization.

Why media companies (and everyone else) are reconsidering FTP

June 25, 2014 1:07 pm Published by FTP is still used by the large majority of media professionals as a foundation technology for custom built applications to transfer large files. At one time, this 40+ year-old technology had its place. Now it’s slow, outdated, and very difficult to update and support. This SlideShare covers traditional uses for FTP and introduces Media Shuttle: a hybrid SaaS large file movement solution.

The DPP and the Democratization of Media

June 17, 2014 2:29 pm Published by On October 1st of this year, the UK will host what is being called File Delivery Day, and on October 1st all broadcasters will begin to receive programming in digital format, no exceptions. If this seems like a sudden and drastic shift, it’s been a long time in the making. In September of 2013, a collective of UK based television companies and broadcasters called the Digital Production Partnership and championed by such giants as the BBC and ITV announced the transition, and its deadline–at which point broadcasters began to shift individually.