What have been the biggest changes?

After a solid start to the year we kept the ball rolling and launched 2 big new improvements we know you’re going to love: ARMing our cost savings and DRM image grab!

We know everyone is always looking for ways to save so we took a look at the biggest cost drivers for public and private cloud customers and determined we could save a bundle with the switch to ARM instances. With only a few more services to migrate before the full benefits are achieved, we hope to continue to optimize our architecture and workflows to support the operational effeciency and OpEx our customers are looking for.

While we greatly improved the image grab functionality that lets you take main, thumbnail, portrait and landscape images directly from the player, snapshots of DRM (Digital Rights Management) protected assets were harder to solve. Depending on your license server (Widevine, Fairplay ro PlayReady for example), sometimes its already tricky to determine where and how those assets can play compatibly in varius browsers and consoles, let alone trying to grab images from the playout. The end result is effortlessly user-friendly, but it required some behind-the-scenes work. We prioritized developing not only a mechanism to retrieve the images our customers needed but also laying the groundwork for implementing the additional requested features. This approach facilitates smoother implementation of these requests when they align with our roadmap.

Additional Improvements to Welcome Spring in Style

If you thought those improvements were great, wait until you see what else we have added in releases 4-6:

Vimond VIA

Content Manager:

• NEW: Added functionality to allow editing of both date and time on all DATE metadata definitions.
• NEW: We extended Cascade Publishing (ability to publish either an active category, the active category and its assets, or the active category, subcategory and all contained assets) to be available as part of the batch publishing flow. This increases the efficiency and flexibility of the publishing workflows instead of editors publishing categories one by one. This is also reflected in the UI immediately without a refresh.
• Improved: We expanded our regression test coverage for several features so pesky bugs can’t slip through the cracks
• Split view operations
• Autocomplete metadata fields
• Chapters Tab
• Read-only roles
• Non-latin characters
• Snapshot functionality
• Search functionality

Admin Search:

• NEW: Added support for dynamic filtering on dropdown fields so you can find your metadata values faster

VIA Orchestrate

• Improved: Orchestrate feedback loops now react to unhandled errors and ensures the ingest process reflects appropriately so you don’t think retrieval is in progress “forever” when in reality, it failed.

VIA Monetise

• NEW: Recurring Trial Periods which gives more flexibilty when billing subscribers that are going through paid trails/progressive trials (for example, you can create a trial where a user’s 1st three months are discounted 50% and then billed the normal rate thereafter)
• NEW: Added support for Read Only access so read-only users can check if the Monetisation products are properly defined with the right content assigned.
• Improved: Trial conversion configurations for calculating the current remaining value of a subscription updated to include free trial considerations.

VIA Services

• NEW: Added support for prefix queries in Content Discovery where the search will execute after the first 3 characters to improve results
• Improved: Synchronizer efficiency

Maintenance

From security patches and library updates to our deployment pipeline, we are always looking through our systems to keep them running like a well-oiled machine.

Bug Fixes

We've given our code a much-needed spa day and have buffed out several rough patches. You can now enjoy a smoother, more refreshing experience using our software.

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Congratulations, you have finished this roundup! Your reward is a joke from ChatGPT:

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Why did the DevOps engineer keep getting lost?

Because they kept following the “deployment pipeline” instead of using Google Maps

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I’ll see myself out  

✌️

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Sky Knippa

Agile Coach

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