Ownzones Entertainment Technologies position their platform as the next generation post production system that hosts the media supply chain in the cloud. Connect is their media supply chain platform in the cloud and Discover is their customisable white label OTT app, which they promote as a monetization platform. Connect is promoted as the cost-effective, fast, safe and future-oriented solution for post production needs. It has a built-in transcoder that it claims is the world’s fastest.

ARCHITECTURE: Connect is a cloud based platform only (AWS, IBM). Ownzones had a demo area on the IBM booth at NAB 2019. Although it cannot be installed on-premise, it integrates with on-premise NLEs and uses browser-based UIs. No mention is made of the underlying technology (microservices, database) or security capabilities.

INTEGRATION: Ownzones has technology partnerships and integrations with relatively few vendors, which include AWS, Microsoft, Netflix (Post Technology Alliance) and Dolby. No mention is made of support for adding new resources using plugins or scripting, nor of real-time monitoring of resources. Ownzone has a partnership with GrayMeta (an AI services aggregator) for AI functionality.

AUTOMATION: Connect provides “component-based media workflows” aimed at post-production needs, such as Interoperable Master Format (IMF) isupport, flexible versioning (from compliance edits to localization), minimized storage cost, and a future-proof archiving. These all appear to be fixed workflows with no support for customisation, and no graphical workflow design tool.

METADATA: Very little is presented on metadata in the Ownzones marketing content reviewed. Connect claims to have its own cloud-based QC system, so presumably has QC metadata handling capabilities. Ownzones have partnered with GrayMeta to access AI generated metadata from multiple AI service providers. No mention is made of a metadata design tool, nor of more advanced metadata support (hierarchies, taxonomies, thesaurus).

USER EXPERIENCE: Connect user interfaces appear modern in style and have just the functionality that production teams need and no more. There is no mention of any UI configurability or changes by user type.

ANALYTICS: Connect provides progress bars for each step in its workflows (for example, Inspect Media, Interlace Detection, Luminance detection. Discover provides analytics and insights on media consumption. It does not mention production event metadata being used for reporting, nor graphical production analysis tools.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Ownzone announced a has a partnership with GrayMeta At NAB2019 Ownzones demonstrated FrameDNA - an artificial intelligence-driven feature focused on analyzing content and identifying similarities and redundancies, which in tandem with IMF support reduces the number of mezzanines and deliverables that need to be stored. This eliminates redundancies, frees up space, and makes sharing content to different platforms and distributors almost instantaneous.