Customers can choose to deploy the MassStore technology platform or individual components in public or private clouds, or locally on 100 per cent virtualized or physical systems. This flexibility allows companies to adopt the Cloud at their own pace, starting with the particular workflows where it can best benefit their operations, the company says.

Masstech's new CloudFlex technology enables hybrid workflows for tasks such as transcoding, processing media primarily on-premises and 'bursting' into the Cloud dynamically for additional computing capacity as varying workloads require.

Masstech is similarly expanding its storage technology support to the Cloud, including integration with Amazon S3 and services such as Delll EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) that are compatible with the industry-standard S3 API.

"The Cloud offers attractive collaboration, scalability and sustainability benefits, and the declining costs of cloud hosting and storage enable both established and startup media organizations to take advantage of those opportunities,” said Mike Palmer, vp of Business Strategy at Masstech. "We're excited to now offer the option for customers to manage, process and archive their content in the Cloud."

Two new enhancements automate the creation of metadata for MAM and newsroom users, making stored content easier to find and sort without the expense, inconsistency and time-consuming effort of manual metadata entry. New speech-to-text capabilities convert dialogue within media clips to indexed text, enabling automated tagging and categorization of the assets.

Masstech MAM solutions already include support for unstructured metadata, enabling free-form documents such as production scripts to be associated with media assets and fully searched. New functionality identifies core concepts within these unstructured attachments, automatically creating structured metadata that users can leverage to find, sort and group content in new ways.

Users of Avid MediaCentral|UX now have access to all of Masstech's MAM functionality within the MediaCentral framework. This update includes delivery of the fastest transfer speeds of any archive solution for moving content into and out of the Avid Interplay platform: three to four times faster than earlier approaches. MassStore can also now extract and store metadata such as markers from Avid assets.

Integration in news environments is likewise enhanced, with an updated, HTML5-based plug-in for popular third-party newsroom computer systems that brings the elegant interface, advanced searching and embedded video manipulation capabilities of Masstech's latest MAM solution to NRCS users. Meanwhile, deep interoperability with the SAM News Solution from Snell Advanced Media empowers SAM users with the ability to efficiently and automatically archive, restore and share content between sites.