In March 2024, the Vizrt Media Asset Management Business Unit (MAM BU) hosted its first Customer Advisory Board meeting since 2018, bringing together key Viz One customers, Partners, and MAM BU team members from around the world to discuss, debate, praise, critique, and network. Over 40 people joined including 25 attendees from 12 major Viz One customers.
Austrian national broadcaster, ORF, kindly hosted us in their magnificent facilities in the center of Vienna, providing a great space for the two-day event. And we squeezed a lot in! We provided insider knowledge into the future development plans for Viz One – think cloud, containers, Kubernetes, and AI – and asked for feedback on what customers love and hate about working with Viz One. We also saw customers inspiring other customers with some knowledge exchange sessions, integration partners showcasing how they can augment Viz One’s capabilities with additional products and services, and we shared our roadmap and got an insight into customer’s future plans and how Viz One can help them achieve it.
NextGen Viz One: Cloud, Containers, and Kubernetes!
James Scott (Platform and Engineering Manager for Viz One) and Marcus Bergner (Software Architect for Viz One) dove straight in with detailed discussion and demos of the future of Viz One, including plans for AI/ML, deployment options with cloud, Containers, Kubernetes, and more. A technical session that highlighted the sheer amount of work that has gone into Viz One in the last couple of years to prepare it for the future. The session culminated in a preview of the next major release, Viz One 8.
What’s great vs. what sucks?!
It’s nice to hear what everyone loves about your product, but the best way to improve it is to find out what people *don’t* like. So we got everyone to tell us what they love and hate about Viz One and then got everyone out of their seats to rate the importance of each of these things on a scale of 1-5, so we can rank them for prioritization with future releases. A fantastic interactive session that sparked loads of great conversations between us and our customers, but between customers, too!
Breakout workshop pods
To continue the interactive theme we set up “pods” around the meeting space, manned by members of Vizrt’s MAM BU team for customers to visit and discuss specific topics and to demonstrate specific functionalities and workflows. We covered live and file ingest, working with NLEs, content discovery, and what’s coming in Viz One 8.
Recent releases and upcoming roadmap plans
James gave a detailed look into recent releases and what’s planned with our roadmap, including UHD and HDR support, intelligent dashboarding, transcoding improvements, and a marketplace for Viz One modules and 3rd party add-ons.
Customers inspiring customers
Some customers are so impressed with Viz One and what it’s enabled them to do that they’re willing to stand in front of a crowd and tell them all about it
James Kimpton from Seven Networks in Australia told us all about their TWO huge Viz One archives for news and programming, and how they’ve migrated over 13 petabytes of content to the cloud (AWS). They’re also working their way through their entire archive with automated speech-to-text metadata creation, making decades of old content easily discoverable!
NISV is tasked with archiving all content produced by Holland’s broadcasters, and Philip Maher explained how they’re using Viz One to achieve this. But it gets better; they’re using it to power an interactive media museum, and are making over 60% of their content available to the general public using a web interface that connects directly to Viz One. Impressive stuff!
Byron Chapman joined us remotely and told the story of how the PGA TOUR has “hurricane-proofed” over 100 years of golf content by migrating it away from their on-premises archive to the cloud with Viz One. Over 20 PBs of content, with over 8 million human-created metadata entries and 5 million machine learning/AI-created logs.
Partner presentations
Viz One provides a platform for various integration partners to provide additional services and products to augment the user experience and functionality. This event saw presentations from Sol1, AROUND, Telefonica, and Mayam, detailing how they can help Viz One customers get even more from their systems.
It wasn’t all work and no play…
What better way to wind down, relax, and network than with delicious dinners, a museum tour, and rooftop drinks?
Will we see you at the next MAM CAB event?
Overall, it was a super successful event with great feedback all around; we hope to see you at the next MAM BU CAB meeting!
