Venera Technologies Blazes A Trail With Its Latest Enhancements To Its File-Based Automated Quality Control Solutions

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Venera Technologies specializes in cutting edge Video Test & Measurement solutions. Venera’s flag ship offering, Pulsar, improves operational efficiency in file-based workflows by automating content Quality Control (QC) processes. Its innovative Pulsar Pay-Per-Use on-premise solution brings QC capability to organizations of any size. And soon its Pulsar Cloud offering will provide the same capabilities for the growing demand for the QC capabilities in the cloud. Pulsar, with its 6X real time performance and advance detection features, ensures consistent content quality throughout the workflow and is the chosen QC tool for some of the largest Media companies worldwide. Below is our interview with Fereidoon Khosravi, SVP of Business Development for Americas, at Venera Technologies.

Q: Tell us something more about Venera Technologies and your solutions?

A: Venera Technologies was founded in 2003 with the goal of providing the digital media world, which was then emerging, with a series of advanced and efficient solutions to help with the growing need for tools to deal with digital content. In fact we were one of the first companies to bring out a H.264 Analyzer. Our core team of developers has an impressive depth of knowledge in digital video and audio as well as compression technologies.

In 2009, our earlier developments and efforts culminated in introduction of what has become one of the prominent file-based automated QC tools in the digital media market worldwide, Pulsar.

And since its introduction, we have continued to enhance and expand the functionality and capabilities of Pulsar, to stay in step and ahead of the fast pace advances in digital media. Pulsar supports a wide array of video and audio codecs as well as all popular file formats.

Our add-on option to Pulsar, called Rapid, provides our customers with the unique and innovative capability to quickly check and sort their incoming media files, based on easy-to-configure user defined set of criteria. This is ideal for customers who receive hundreds of files a day and need to rapidly sort them into the right ‘buckets’ for further processing. It saves them enormous amount of time and avoids unnecessary work further down the line if the incoming files don’t meet the minimum specifications and requirements

Pulsar is now used by some of the largest media companies worldwide, such as Disney, ESPN, AMC Networks, MLB Advanced Media, Rogers Media, Adstream and Fox Sports, each with sizable Pulsar installations. We also have integrations with industry leaders such as Telestream, Aspera, Evertz and File Catalyst.

Q: What advantage does Venera Technologies have over its competitors?

A: Being focused on Quality Control, Venera Technologies pays a laser sharp attention to bringing to market the best of technologies to detect a wide range of video and audio artifacts caused by variety of factors in the increasingly complicated digital work flow. We are not distracted by product lines that deviate from our core competency and therefore remain focused on QC-related solutions and meeting our customers’ wish-list as well as staying close to the rapidly advancing digital media technologies.

With emphasis on maintaining a highly educated and skilled video/audio engineering team, and staying focused on customer needs, we pride ourselves in being a nimble company who pays close attention to supporting its customers. As a result we have a great reputation as a very technically capable company who is also quite responsive to its customers.

This has also resulted in a solution like Pulsar which our customers consider not only very advanced, but also very easy to use and operate. That is a feat that is not easy to achieve. In a side by side comparison with our competitors, many of our customers choose Pulsar due to its technical capabilities, ease of use, and of course speed!

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Furthermore, by using advanced programming techniques and without use of hardware accelerators, we have been able to create solutions that can work on dedicated servers, as well as virtual machines, with astonishing speeds, resulting in higher throughput and better performance, saving our customers cost and resources.

Providing a very rich range of features and detection parameters, and being the fastest tool in the market, allows us to provide our customers with better ROI, and ultimately a much better experience.

Q: You’ve recently announced performance upgrades to your Pulsar Automated file-based QC system, tell us something more?

A: Pulsar has been the fastest QC system in the market for many years. With speeds of up to 4 times real time analysis for HD content, we were already considered quite a “speed demon” in the QC world! We have now topped ourselves! Recently, we announced ground breaking further performance upgrades to Pulsar. Pulsar can now process a 1080p HD file up to 6 times faster than real time, meaning a 60-minute file can be analyzed in as quickly as 10 minutes. If the user processes four files at a time, then they can achieve an even higher throughput of up to 12 hours of content analyzed in every hour!

QC analysis performance is a very important criterion for organizations dealing with large content volumes. Higher performance means faster results and lesser QC software license requirements for a given content volume. With its improved performance, Pulsar allows organizations to meet their workflow requirements with a lower investment while the QC operation runs with higher efficiency.

Due to multi-screen, multi-format deliveries, content volumes have significantly increased for organizations and they realize that it’s no longer possible for them to rely on manual QC. Additionally, there are a number of video/audio quality checks which are best accomplished with file-based QC systems instead of the manual QC process. Pulsar fits nicely into the customer’s workflow due to its easy to use API as well as its integration with leading workflow solution vendors in the industry, such as Aspera Orchestrator, Telestream Vantage, or Evertz Mediator. Many of Venera’s customers have large Pulsar installations and they use Pulsar 24x7x365 to verify the media content they receive and before the content is published for the end users.

Q: What are the main benefits of using your Pulsar Pay-Per-Use?

A: As the digital media market matured, majority of the content work flow, from creation to encoding, editing, transcoding, all the way through distribution and broadcast became file-based. That meant that not only the big players in this space needed the necessary tools to handle file-based media, but all smaller players in this space also needed to handle such content and specifically needed means to do QC of file-based content.

We realized that while Pulsar was popular with larger media companies, many of the smaller post production houses, editors, or content creators, who also needed to use an automated QC tool, could not afford to own one. And that’s why we introduced Pulsar Pay-Per-Use (PPU).

Pulsar PPU provides the same comprehensive audio/video/container analysis capabilities of Pulsar but the users will only pay for what they use! They do not need to worry about the CAPEX costs or the budget to own the software!

And since the software will still run within their facilities, the customers do not have to worry about infrastructure costs and security concerns of uploading their content (usually very large files) to a cloud somewhere to perform the QC. They run Pulsar PPU on premise, taking advantage of all the analysis features of Pulsar and process their files locally. They are charged a nominal fee based on the duration of the file they process.

Pulsar PPU has been beneficial for, and very well received by, many of our boutique shops where the quality of the content they process is as critical as some bigger facilities and they can now use a similar professional tool to QC their file-based content.

It proves the power of Pulsar in not only providing value to our large broadcast customers, but also meeting the technical needs of smaller entities within their budget.

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Q: What are your plans?

A: The rapidly moving world of digital media always keeps us on our toes! We have some great announcements we will be making at NAB this year in regards to new Pulsar features and new offerings.

One of the features we are very excited about is the introduction of Pulsar Cloud, our cloud-based version of Pulsar! As more of the digital workflow moves to the cloud, many of our customers are looking to move their content processing, including QC, to the cloud as well. So, at NAB we will be revealing our cloud implementation of Pulsar, which will allow our customers to do their QC whenever they want and where ever they want! With this new offering, we will be the first QC vendor to offer QC analysis capabilities, on premise, as well as on demand, either within their facilities (Pulsar PPU) or in the cloud (Pulsar Cloud)! These are exciting times.

Furthermore, our team is already at work on even further enhancements in our performance, as we want to continue improving Pulsar’s efficiency, providing our customers with more value. And, we are also already working on some fantastic features aimed for roll out at the IBC show in Amsterdam this Fall.

Our goal is to continue staying nimble and quickly moving with the direction of the industry. As new formats and new features become prominent, you can be sure that Pulsar will remain relevant and we will add those additional capabilities at every turn.

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