Central Canada Broadcast Engineers (CCBE) is gauging interest in holding a virtual event after moving to cancel its annual September conference for 2020 in King City, ON. Sponsors are being contacted. CCBE says it’s hopeful this year’s cancellation will be a singular occurrence.
The Globe and Mail’s automation and predictive paywall engine, Sophi.io, has won WAN-IFRA’s North American Digital Media Award in the category of Best Digital News Start-Up. The awards honour news publishers from Canada and the U.S. that have created unique and original digital media projects. Sophi also took second place in the awards’ Best Paid Content Strategy category, in recognition of Sophi for Paywalls, its natural-language processing and user behaviour-based predictive paywalling technology. The artificial intelligence system is also a finalist in the International News Media Association’s Global Media Awards, recognizing innovation in growing audience, brand, and revenue, in the Best New Technology or Digital Product category. Additionally, Sophi is a finalist in the Digiday Media Awards, recognizing companies working to modernize digital media, in two categories: Best Digital Product Innovation and Best Revenue Diversification Strategy. Sophi was developed by The Globe and Mail to help the newsroom make strategic and tactical decisions. Its suite of tools includes Sophi Automation, Sophi for Paywalls as well as Sophi Analytics, a newsroom decision-support system. Sophi Automation autonomously places 99% of the content on all of The Globe and Mail’s digital pages, including its homepage and section pages, allowing the newsroom to focus on producing journalism. It’s now being used for print laydown as well.
The Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS) is partnering with Video Services Forum (VSF) to offer “Summer Sessions — Media Over IP Education” presentations, which will run from May 29 through Sept. 4. Designed to meet the need for ongoing education in the absence of major trade shows, the series will focus on media over IP workflows, with a strong emphasis on use cases, and exploration of technologies supporting the migration to IP. Joined by their IP Showcase partners, AES, AMWA, EBU, SMPTE, and the Ultra HD Forum, AIMS and VSF are creating over a dozen sessions, with plans to release one presentation each week. AIMS chair Mike Cronk says many of the presentations are being drawn from submissions for the IP Showcase at the 2020 NAB Show, including case studies and tutorials on SMPTE ST 2110, NMOS, and the recently-announced IPMX (IP Media Experience) for the ProAV market. Find more info here.
