Larry Kaplan, President & CEO of SDVI, and Geoff Stedman, CMO of SDVI, spoke with Prensario before the start of NAB Show 2023. ‘At NAB this year we will be showcasing how the Rally platform optimizes across the entire media supply chain, from content ingest to delivery. We will be highlighting the latest new capabilities such as 4K, HDR, and a new asset hierarchy with support for the MovieLabs 2030 Ontology’, Stedman said.
About how is SDVI positioned worldwide in the media industry, the executive explained: ‘SDVI continues to innovate on and around its Rally platform, bringing new capabilities that further optimize every step in a media supply chain. Our platform is used by both the world’s largest media companies as well as by smaller media organizations, studios, and post production facilities. The relevance of the SDVI Rally platform to such a wide range of users is indicative of how supply chain optimization can benefit anyone’.
‘There are a number of ways in which the SDVI Rally platform differentiates from other approaches. First and foremost is the comprehensive coverage and optimization of the entire media supply chain, from content ingest through content delivery, and every step in between’.
‘There simply isn’t any other option for managing all the workflows; provisioning the resources, applications, and infrastructure when needed; guiding both automated and manual processes; and providing enterprise-wide visibility into supply chain metrics. Customers using the Rally platform also illustrate the unmatched scale and scope of usage, with the widest range of use cases being deployed and over 340 million jobs executed in 2022’.
Stedman also said: ‘We have an exciting roadmap for the Rally platform that will expand what customers can do with their supply chains and how they can interconnect them for efficient content exchange. Stay tuned’.
The creation of SDVI, ten years ago
‘Right after we started SDVI, we spent a lot of time with a couple of large media companies observing how their operations worked and analyzing the technical infrastructure underpinning those operations’, commented Larry Kaplan.
‘What we found was that most of the operational activities were fundamentally limited by rigid, on-premise infrastructure that didn’t adapt or scale efficiently. We found tremendous waste (in terms of time, resources, money, etc.) across the operational spectrum due to duplication of work and poor visibility and communication from one step to another’.
‘We knew that the cloud could usher in a better way, provided it was harnessed properly. The founding premise for SDVI was therefore to provide a cloud-based platform that could manage and provision all of the processes, applications, and infrastructure needed to support the preparation of content across all of the steps from content receipt all the way through to content distribution. Using elastic cloud resources, we knew we could provision resources and infrastructure essentially on-demand, spinning up whatever resources were required to match the workload at any given minute’.
About the term “media supply chain” ‘originally referred to all the processes and steps needed to process and prepare content from the moment it arrived at a media facility to when it was delivered to a distribution partner, platform, or service’.
‘As we looked at the way that media companies were preparing their content, we saw tremendous opportunities to apply supply chain methodologies to increase efficiency and eliminate waste. To address this, we pioneered the concept of moving M&E supply chains to a virtualized, cloud-based platform. Customers who have adopted our platform for their media supply chains have achieved significant efficiency gains along with important other benefits in terms of business and technical agility along with increased intelligence about their operations because of all the data we are now collecting at every step’, indicated Kaplan.
Finally, about the growth plans in overseas markets after the pandemic for SDVI, the CEO said: ‘We continue to add new users both in the US and outside of the US, and we are pleased with the expansion of our business in overseas markets. We also have added a number of new employees in new locations around the world. We will continue to invest as needed to support our customer growth around the world’.
And in Latin America SDVI is represented by Nahuel Villegas, ‘he is a tremendous asset to our team, and we are thrilled that he joined us last year. He has deep relationships and credibility with the region’s most important media industry leaders, and he is doing a wonderful job introducing SDVI to the LATAM market’, concluded Kaplan.
