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Quantum Introduces Myriad™ Software-Defined All-Flash Storage Platform for the Enterprise

CMMA Blog

Last week, we introduced Quantum Myriad , an all-flash file and object storage platform based on a modern, cloud-native software architecture that avoids the limitations of legacy NAS storage systems. Leveraging advances in application frameworks and design that were not available even a few years ago, Myriad’s modern cloud-native architecture makes it an easy-to-use solution that overcomes the limitations of hardware-centric designs and enables customers to adapt to future storage needs while reducing the burden on over-extended IT staff. It brings new levels of simplicity and adaptability to high-performance workloads without the constraints of specialized hardware.

Myriad expands Quantum’s portfolio of solutions for unstructured data and is ideally suited for emerging high-growth use cases that require more performance and more scale, including AI and machine learning, modern data lakes, VFX and animation, and other high-bandwidth and high IOPs applications. These use cases are driving growth in the market for dedicated scale-out file and object storage, expected to grow at a 12% CAGR from 2020-2026 and be a $19.1 billion market by 2026 according to the IDC File and Object Storage Market Update and Forecast.

Key highlights include:

  • Scale-out software architecture delivers consistent, low-latency performance for high-bandwidth and high-IOPs applications.
  • A cloud-native microservices architecture orchestrated by Kubernetes provides a resilient, “always on” architecture, and delivers new features and fixes rapidly with less risk.
  • Automated storage management allows a cluster to be scaled or modified without user intervention and the need for advanced IT skills.
  • Self-healing, self-balancing software automatically rebuilds data in the background while also rebalancing data as storage clusters expand, shrink, and change.
  • Inline data deduplication and compression reduce the cost of flash storage and improve data efficiencies relative to legacy storage platforms.
  • Simplified data protection and recovery through built-in snapshots, clones, snapshot recovery tools, and rollback capabilities.

Myriad Introduction Video

Listen to Quantum’s CDO and CRO discuss how Myriad’s file and object storage software changes the game for unstructured data management, delivering simplicity, flexibility, and adaptability on-prem and in any cloud. Watch video .

To learn more about Myriad, visit the Myriad product page or request a demo .

The post Quantum Introduces Myriad™ Software-Defined All-Flash Storage Platform for the Enterprise appeared first on Quantum Blog .

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The Dawn of the Producer Economy

CMMA Blog

The internet and streaming have democratized the landscape of video creation and distribution on a broad scale.
Creators can produce and distribute video to the masses with little or no cost. Major film, TV, news, and sports producers can reach their audiences much more directly. Even brands are beginning to share their stories with their audiences through video.
But something else is emerging and defining itself adjacent to these trends: the producer economy.
The Democratization of Video
The democratization of video has been facilitated by three things.

Mobile evolution. It put a computer connected to the internet in everyone’s hands.
Connected TV explosion. It put the internet in our living rooms and has us engaging in a different, mostly passive lean-back capacity.
Social media revolution. It connected us all and made it a conversation instead of a monologue. Many-to-many, versus one-to-many.

We now have much broader access to all types of content, including content from our friends, from influencers, from creators. All on-demand, all the time, via the internet. As a result, three significant trends have coalesced over the past decade.

Creator economy. Anyone could express themselves, share it socially, have an algorithm amplify it, and make money on it via automated advertising on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and more.
Streaming wars. As new streaming platforms like Netflix were born, they stepped in between studios and networks and combined those into one. Eventually, every media company followed rather than be disintermediated.
Brand wave. Brands and companies initially jumped on board the social media train, some with video. Now they’re beginning to build robust, video-first content strategies to tell their stories.

Each of these trends began because democratization allowed them to bypass traditional middlemen and reach consumers more directly.
For example, look at the music business and independent musicians like Macklemore or Doja Cat. They honed their craft, created amazing work, released it directly, got discovered, and built a following—all through YouTube.
YouTube creates massive amounts of value for many artists and creators, but is it truly democratized? Or did the music industry trade a certain type of middleman, a label, for another one that’s based on algorithms and programmatic advertising?
The Twilight of the Creator Economy
Creators have had a good run. Millions are out there, and thousands of them are making real money.
With most major social platforms, those revenue-sharing agreements come out to roughly half for the creator. This makes sense for small upstarts building their audience. There are no technology costs, no marketing costs—they can just launch it. And if you hit the social graph and the algorithm just right, the money follows.
But not everyone can be Mr. Beast and build billion-dollar businesses. Further, it’s not clear that those large YouTube audiences can help creators do what Mr. Beast has done and launch other businesses, like his burger chain. It’s more likely that creators will need to diversify.
To insulate themselves from changing algorithms, content guidelines, monetization policies, and other fluctuations, what if creators built multi-channel businesses across multiple platforms on social media? What if they created their own direct-to-consumer channels, from apps to FAST channels?
The Future of Creating is Producing
Here’s where the producer comes in.
Producers generally supervise a production and are responsible for raising the money and hiring the artists, technicians, staff, and other resources needed to stage it. But we might expand this a little: Producers are now the creators of the creator economy.
They’re the showrunners and creators of major TV shows. They’re the film directors. They’re the CMOs deciding how to represent their brand in videos distributed broadly on social media. And they’re the production team inside your company making videos for internal and external use.
What the internet and streaming have done is create the ability for all of these producers to have a voice and real agency in the distribution of their stories.
So if you’re a producer with meaningful brand awareness and audience following, what’s holding you back? The audience is there. The technology is there too.
Streaming is a robust market, but it can also change quickly. A platform can update an algorithm any time, changing the audience. A funder of content can cancel a show and move on to the next one. (Just ask all those one- or two-season-and-out creators on Netflix). Brands need to tell their stories with video content soon, or they won’t have the customers they have today.
Producers can own their content and their distribution and monetization too. It’s not just for Hollywood anymore. Creators can do it. Companies and brands can do it. All of these producers have the opportunity to reach their audiences on multiple platforms, including directly. This is the producer economy, where producers own their own digital future.
[Watch the full episode on PlayTV.](https://www.brightcove.com/en/resources/resource-center/videos/dawn-of-producer-economy/ “Stream “The Dawn of the Producer Economy” on PlayTV”)

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Head Off Workers’ Compensation Risks at The Pass

CMMA Blog

Who needs workers’ compensation insurance? Anyone with workers, it turns out. When employees are injured in the course of employment, such insurance provides wage replacement and medical benefits to workers as well as protections for the employer. Just like any other insurance, you hope you’ll never need it. Still, if you do, it can be absolutely imperative to operations. Businesses that ensure worker safety and implement best practices before they need them are in the best position to protect employees, keep claims manageable, and maybe even keep premiums down.

Best Practices to Mitigate Workers’ Compensation Risks

1. Prevention

Chase prevention like you would chase the crisis or you’ll certainly end up chasing a crisis. Make regular safety trainings and ongoing education standard procedure (even if employees roll their eyes). If you don’t have the budget to implement every possible safety measure, you don’t have the budget for the project. The best workers’ comp claim is the one that never happens.

2. Refine your claims management process

If you’re scrambling to figure out how to handle a claim if it comes up, you’re already behind. Have a standard operating procedure on day one. Decide which role is responsible for talking to the adjuster and within what time frame. Train that person ahead of time. Lay out your processes while your brain isn’t in crisis mode and you’ll make sounder decisions. The added benefit is that it will reassure your adjuster that you’re engaged and motivated to reach a speedy resolution.

3. Implement a return to work program

Have a plan for injured workers who have been cleared for modified duty. These measures reassure insurance companies while demonstrating professionalism to employees.

4. Invest in accurate worker classification

An independent contractor filing a workers’ comp claim can easily land a well-intentioned company on IRS and DOL radar screens. This happens with surprising frequency despite the logical assumption that an independent contractor should understand the implications of a business-to-business relationship. One key aspect of a true B2B relationship is that a worker’s business activity exists independent of the employer. Preventing misclassification and communicating clearly with workers is a worthwhile preventative investment. Contact us at 303-526-4900 or by email for a free workers’ compensation risk analysis.

What’s Ahead

Workers’ compensation is always changing. Each political administration handles it differently and states have their own rules and approaches. Workers’ compensation carriers adjust costs and terms in the face of declining profits and escalating claims costs and operating expenses. Companies that address the subject proactively are in the best position to ensure minimal premium increases. Aside from cost, keeping employees safe is forever a worthwhile investment.

The post Head Off Workers’ Compensation Risks at The Pass appeared first on PayReel .

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3 Ways Transcripts Elevate Video SEO

CMMA Blog

Online video has long been a stronghold of content marketing strategies. Video accounts for 65% of internet traffic , and 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool in 2023 . As the most dynamic content medium, video allows marketers to show off their brand and products in more ways than static web content.
Not only does video content have the potential to reach new audiences, it can also drive engagement with your existing audience. By using video on landing pages and blogs or alongside products and services, marketers can delight customers, inform prospects, and drive fresh leads through the funnel.
However, for video to have the desired impact, it’s crucial that search engines can find, rank, and serve your content. Accessibility-based solutions like transcripts can promote search engine optimization (SEO) while making your content accessible to any audience.
How Video Transcripts Elevate SEO
SEO is a digital marketing practice aimed at promoting pagerank and driving overall site visits. The strategy can vary depending on keyword queries, but it’s important to recognize that video transcripts can bolster a site’s keyword density for relative search terms.
Search engines can’t “watch” a video the way we do. Instead, they crawl text associated with video files and use this information to index and rank results. Metadata and video tags are good examples of text elements commonly associated with video. But a high-quality transcript provides a more complete textual representation of all spoken content in a video.
Of course, marketers should always be wary of “keyword stuffing.” Overusing targeted keywords on site pages to manipulate pagerank has been penalized by search algorithms for many years. Fortunately, placing a transcript below a video is considered a natural way to integrate keywords or phrases throughout a page. It also layers secondary and tertiary search terms, creating a healthier and more diverse SEO strategy.
1) Video Transcripts Match Long-Form Search Queries
If you’re working with longer videos like webinar recordings, transcripts can offer the same benefits as long-form blog posts. According to HubSpot, the ideal blog post length is over 2,000 words . This is because carefully-curated long-form content is more likely to appear higher in search result rankings.
Including a transcript on the same webpage as a video increases its chances of appearing favorably in search rankings. Users may only watch the video and not read the text, but the transcript will make it much more visible to search engines.
Transcripts contribute to your keyword strategy by naturally incorporating target words or phrases into a landing page, which boosts SEO. When selecting relevant targets, consider what kind of search query a user would enter in order to find your video. Then customize your landing pages so keywords and on-page content are aligned to each specific video. For example, the page’s URL, title, H1 and H2 headers, image alt text, and anchor text should all incorporate your keyword or phrase.
2) Video Transcripts Engage Your Audience
By using video transcripts to boost SEO and build accessibility into the production process, you also harness the potential of improving engagement with your audience. Transcripts make your video searchable by end users and search engines alike, and more favorable search rankings means more eyes on your content. In fact, 85% of marketers say that video is effective at engaging their audience , with short-form and live video content being the leading formats of choice.
In Brightcove’s 2022 survey on the use of video in e-commerce, 84% of consumers are convinced to purchase after joining a livestream or virtual shopping event. Combined with the brand awareness and recall benefits offered by captions and transcripts, accessible video has the potential to boost audience engagement and influence behavioral intent.
3) Video Transcripts Can Boost Target Metrics
Searchable content served to an engaged target audience also has a positive impact on engagement metrics like view count and session time.
For example, content showcasing a product or service is one of the most engaging types of video, as well as the most likely to generate leads. From the research phase to the final purchase, video content is useful at any stage of the buying journey. When a user finds a product or service-related video, they’re probably looking for more information related to that topic. If there are reviews, support links, or suggested reading available on the same page as the video, it bodes well for average session duration and engagement.
Video Transcripts Only Count if They’re Accurate
One major condition of including video transcripts (and reaping the benefits) is accuracy. Just like high-quality transcripts have the potential for positive influence, inaccurate transcripts can negatively affect your standing with search engines.
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) engines are typically about 80% accurate, but the industry standard requires a minimum of 99% accuracy. While ASR technology has improved over the years, it’s not best practice to rely solely on automatically generated transcripts or captions .
Video has become the preferred method of content consumption by digital natives. So much so that 85% of e-commerce consumers find video essential to their online experience. When your brand provides a transcript or captions, you can ensure your content is effectively indexed and searchable to new and existing audiences. Accessibility is more than just a legal requirement. Prioritizing an equitable user experience brings SEO benefits like boosting keyword density and strategy.
Want to learn more? Read about the ROI Benefits of Transcription & Captioning .
This blog was originally written by Shannon Murphy in 2013 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

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