You may be wondering why the blog has been quieter than usual lately…no, we haven’t been on an extended holiday vacation! We’ve been hard at work creating the Dalet Academy – and we couldn’t be more excited to finally share the news with you (and to see the sunlight again).

So, why exactly did we create the Dalet Academy? There is something we believe in more than anything else here at Dalet. This something is education; it is part of every single layer of our organization. Growing one’s knowledge and expertise is crucial to finding success and blossoming in the professional world. This argument is even more compelling in the media industry where the landscape evolves at a frenzied pace that is extremely hard to keep up with.

HEVC, MAM, PAM, DPP, QC, HDR, UHDTV, MXF, API, IMF, SOA… Could someone in the room raise a hand and explain to everyone those technical acronyms and their business implications?

I’m pretty sure that I could find a few candidates for this game but, overall, it’s very hard to find people who can juggle all these terms both in technical understanding and business applications. As a recent survey highlighted, the average broadcast engineer is 50 years old. In addition, we know from discussions with our customers, partners and competitors that there is difficulty in recruiting staff in all organizations across our industry. More importantly, when we do try to recruit staff and find engineers skilled in video, or skilled in IT, or aware of the business applications of the technology, it’s all too rare to find people that tie all of this together.

Based on the firm belief that sharing knowledge in the form of free, accurate, impartial and relevant educational materials for the broadcast community will not only benefit our customers, partners and employees, but also our competitors and the general public – thus the entire industry – we devised and launched the Dalet Academy at academy.dalet.com. An educational platform targeted to all media professionals, the Dalet Academy will feature a broad range of topics, from complex media manipulations to advanced, end-to-end workflows, with input from a substantial number of seasoned contributors both from Dalet and the industry at large.

But, wait… Let’s rewind! Maybe you remember that last year Dalet acquired the UK-based company AmberFin, in order to become the leader in high-end media workflows? Amongst the many reasons for this acquisition was the pool of very talented people at AmberFin, people who created and developed leading products for media manipulations. These newly acquired employees also brought to Dalet a powerful tradition of education in the organization. Indeed, AmberFin had developed the AmberFin Academy, which was extremely popular amongst broadcast professionals, especially for its two-minute, short educational videos (Bruce’s Shorts) and its frequently updated blog dealing with key industry trends and topics.

Leveraging the know-how of the key contributors of the AmberFin Academy, we looked at how we could develop an educational platform for media professionals with the same spirit as the AmberFin Academy. That’s how the Dalet Academy (naming wasn’t the hardest part…) came to life: same spirit, more content, broader reach.

Check out below what the Dalet Academy has to offer: 

• Blog: authored by many industry experts from Dalet, its partners and the wider industry, the blog gives non-product-specific insights about trends in the industry, emerging technologies and even some of the politics of standardization in the industry
• Bruce’s Shorts: the highly successful weekly video series where Dalet’s chief media scientist Bruce Devlin explains a complicated issue in a short, two-minute video to subscribers
• Case studies: help ground all the theory in real practical applications from the teams that went out and achieved the results for real
• Trainings: the ultimate in training on the topics that we cover, Academy training courses are the only content that we charge for and will be reserved, for now, to our customers, channel and technology partners
• Webinars: take an in-depth dive into hot topics around the industry; whether you need to know about MAM technology, video solutions or want a glimpse of the future in Dalet’s “crystal ball” webinar, we promise to deliver valuable content in an accessible and collaborative fashion, and on a regular schedule
• White papers and industry articles: give in-depth written explanations of complex technical and system issues in an accessible and practical style

In keeping with our mission to provide subjective, high quality educational content, we welcome contributions from any and all industry professionals. To suggest topics, educational materials, or to make a contribution of any kind, please contact us at academy@dalet.com.

We encourage everyone to subscribe to the Dalet Academy content (here) and to follow the Academy on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. For the most up-to-date information on upcoming events, please visit academy.dalet.com/events.

Contact us, follow us… Stay tuned!