Reach Engine is a content inventory platform that enables production teams to easily organize, find, share and produce digital media, targeted at creatives primary in the post production and distribution stages of the media supply chain. Reach Engine has a suite of different application UIs (Access, Collaborate, Dynamic Clipping) and panels in other vendor products (Adobe Premiere and Prelude). The solution is more of an out-of-the-box pre-packaged one than a configurable platform.

ARCHITECTURE: Reach Engine can be deployed on the cloud (AWS mentioned, although promoted as cloud agnostic) or on-premise. Levels Beyond claim it can be deployed in 1-day. It can combine secure cloud and on-premise storage. No mention is made of underlying technologies (microservices, databases…), nor security, so its difficult to currently justify a score higher than 2/5.

INTEGRATION: Reach Engine has a portfolio of third party resource integrations covering AQC, CDNs, NLEs (including an Adobe panel), storage, data sources, transcoders, CMS and social media. Reach Engine also has Rest APIs and fully exposed interface development kits to make integrations seamless. No information is provided on the integration approach or flexibility, nor on the monitoring of those resources.

AUTOMATION: Reach Engine offers pre-build “intelligent workflows” targeted at specific industries for “quick starts”. These are exposed as Rest API calls, enabling Reach Engine to integrate with other media technologies for orchestration. The Reach Engine Distribution workflow is promoted for automating delivery based on package status. Deliveries map to complex subscription, partner and content configurations. No workflow graphical design tool is provided for media companies to build and manage their own workflows, nor real-time graphical monitoring.

METADATA: While Reach Engine is promoted as having a “Metasearch Engine” that supports metadata tagging, no mention is made of a metadata design tool. There is also no mention of more advanced metadata capabilities (thesaurus, taxonomies, user defined hierarchies etc). It offers faceted search, desktop search for Mac and PC with federated search (using a plugin that works on Mac and PC – file updating and interchange).

USER EXPERIENCE: The user interfaces seems simple and uncluttered, but maybe do not reflect the latest styles. Jobs can be assigned to internal, remote and freelance contributors. Content can be located on local machines and the on machine plugin for file updating and interchange is popular according to anecdotal evidence from systems integrators..

ANALYTICS: While marketing says that jobs can easily be assigned and tracked, there is no mention of any UI for analytics, nor automated preparation and distribution of reports, nor the ability to design charts to detect trends and bottlenecks.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Levels Beyond has partnered with the AI aggregator GrayMeta for AI extraction of metadata for search purposes.