PRESTOplay supports HPA’s Tech Retreat virtual production showcase

Each year the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) hosts a Tech Retreat event to highlight innovative technologies and educate members about advancements across the entertainment production industry. As part of this year’s virtual event, attendees were shown a one-day movie-making experience where we contributed our PRESTOplay player solution.

The HPA’s project involved completing a short film by bringing together companies across the content production spectrum into one workflow. The goal was to demonstrate what’s possible to create and accomplish in a single day using the latest technology.

The workflow included production elements such as shooting, editing, globalization, and VFX, among others, as well as a host of cloud-based tools for fast remote collaboration. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided storage, compute, and machine learning among other cloud services.

This year, distribution received a larger focus to fill out the project’s end-to-end technology stack. As we value sharing our expertise, we’ve taken part by providing our PRESTOplay for Web Apps software to enable the HPA project to have its own branded browser player.

Our video player itself enables consistent streaming across desktop, phone, and tablet browsers. Playing top-quality content is simple with PRESTOplay by taking advantage of a wide variety of built-in features as well as the latest industry streaming standards.

The project’s browser app enabled premium content streaming including:

• Automatic selection of Dolby Vision, HDR 10, or SDR content based on a device’s support
• Vivid visuals with Dolby Vision playback across iPhones, iPads, and desktops using Safari
• 4K/UHD, HD, and SD adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming for smooth playback
• Multi-language audio and subtitles

Our player is specifically designed to allow streaming apps to be deployed quickly by lowering development effort (and costs too!). As the HPA’s project was all about demonstrating how currently available technology can speed up workflows and get content to market fast, we felt our solution was a great fit to reinforce that story.

We also worked with Accedo, a long-time partner, to provide the custom HPA player. We supplied the underlying playback technology, including easily customizable UI tools, where Accedo created a bespoke branded app experience.

Adding a player component to the project’s scope not only reflected real-world delivery scenarios, but it ultimately expanded the technology mix to become truly end-to-end this year with a workflow all the way to end-user audiences.

We’re excited to have contributed alongside innovated firms from all corners of the content production chain to make the project a success!

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