Written by Open, visual programming system offers powerful capabilities to smaller teams, freelancers, and solution vendors
Boston, September 4th – Axle AI, the leader in bringing radical simplicity to video search and collaboration, announced immediate availability of Axle AI Connectr™, revolutionary new software which lets media teams automate workflows via a drag-and-drop graphical user interface; no programming skills required. These teams are typically at broadcasters, postproduction houses, corporate settings, universities and houses of worship. Typically, they have a need to automate a combination of ingest, transcode, web publishing and archiving steps to reduce the amount of manual labor required in the face of increasing amounts of media being handled.
The software is available for MacOS and Linux, and is shipping immediately. Pricing is $1,195/€995 for a MacOS version aimed at editors, DITs (digital intermediate technicians), and others seeking power to automate media workflows; $2,995/€2,495 for MacOS and Linux VM versions for workgroups, and an enterprise version for $11,995/€9,995. The workgroup and enterprise versions can be deployed either on-premise (as a virtual machine running on Windows or Linux hardware), or in the cloud. The company will be demoing the software on its stand at IBC, Hall 7 (7.D33) and meeting with integrators and press at a pre-IBC breakfast on September 14th (signup link at https://tinyurl.com/14thbreakfast )
“Our goal is to create a common industrywide capability to build and deploy media workflows” said Sam Bogoch, Axle AI’s CEO. “Our industry has lacked a truly open, cross-platform workflow tool priced affordably enough to be broadly adopted.” Instead, customers have had to either hire programmers to write custom code, or buy more expensive and proprietary solutions tied to a specific application such as Telestream’s Vantage (transcoding) or IBM’s Aspera Orchestrator (file transfer). “With Connectr, Axle AI is putting a powerful workflow solution into the market at an affordable price, and opening it up to resellers and integrators as well as end users. We’re even offering it to OEM partners to license and relabel under their own brands,” Bogoch said.
The video industry has dozens, even hundreds of highly capable specialist vendors and a handful of larger companies with vertically integrated product lines. Typically, integrating an automated workflow involving two or more of these vendors is beyond reach for most customers, blocking access to greater efficiencies across the entire media creation process. Connectr is intended to break this deadlock, allowing multi-way connectivity and integration to propagate over time, well beyond the footprint of single-vendor solutions.
The software includes a graphical front end, Connectr Designer, which makes constructing a workflow a simple drag-and-drop process. Software and hardware vendors, integrators and other technically advanced customers are able to build their own Modules that can be plugged into Connectr and become part of larger workflows. Modules can either be shared for free on open source code repositories, or compiled and sold commercially by vendors. Axle AI hopes to offer an “App Store” style business model for Connectr partners in 2019.
Axle AI is encouraging development of Connectr Modules from companies who offer the following:
- Ingest software and hardware
- Playout servers
- NAS and SAN storage
- QC software
- Artificial intelligence/Machine learning tools
- Transcoding software
- OTT streaming solutions
- Archiving solutions
- Newsroom systems
- Web publishing/CMS systems
At launch, Connectr Modules are available for Archiware’s P5 archiving software and ToolsOnAir’s ingest applications, as well as Axle AI’s own Axle 2018 lightweight media management solution. These Modules are priced at $1,995 (for Archiware P5) and $995 (ToolsOnAir and Axle AI).
Axle AI will be demonstrating Connectr at IBC 2018, in its booth in Hall 7 (stand 7.D33, September 14-18 in Amsterdam), as well as at MWC Americas (September 11-12) Adobe MAX (October 15-17) and SMPTE (October 23-25) in Los Angeles. The company is also inviting interested customers, integrators and vendor partners to join it online for webinars on September 6th. These webinars will cover technology and pricing for Connectr, and demonstrate applications the product as well as discussing how to build new Modules. The webinar sign-up links are at https://axle.webinarninja.com/webinars/50466/register (9AM EDT session) and https://axle.webinarninja.com/webinars/50467/register (2PM EDT session)
Finally, Axle AI is co-hosting a breakfast on the first day of IBC at the Roast Room, conveniently located on the front corner of the IBC exhibit halls, from 8-11AM (the show opens at 10:30). Integrators, broadcasters and the press are invited to attend – the signup link is at https://tinyurl.com/14thbreakfast.