Interra Systems’ Anantharaman Finds Passion For Next-Gen Monitoring

Technology and computers opened up a world of opportunities for Anupama Anantharaman.

In her media industry career, she has laid the path for next-generation video conferencing and created a software platform that monitors video quality through the content creation, preparation and delivery chain for traditional and OTT video.

Anantharaman, VP of product management at Interra Systems, along with Kelly Abcarian, EVP for measurement and impact at NBCUniversal, are the winners of this year’s TVNewsCheck’s Women in Technology Futurist Award (see Abcarian’s profile here). The award, which recognizes women who have pioneered new technologies in the media industry, will be presented during an April 26 ceremony at the NAB Show in Las Vegas.

Anantharaman comes from a background that prioritized gaining an education, and she pursued a career in computer science because she thought computers were key to the future.

“They’re used in every aspect of life,” she says. “I’m so excited to be a part of that.”

As a young software engineer, she worked for Compression Labs, which was a pioneer in MPEG-based digital video, where she gained familiarity with video compression and helped develop videoconferencing systems.

That experience laid the groundwork for the technologies — including the VEGA Media Analyzer — that she has been involved with since she joined Interra Systems in 2010.

“New compression formats were coming up, and we needed to understand them. These are very complicated compression formats, and it takes a lot to understand them, and the impact they create, and to come up with a product with the right set of features that will help our customers tackle this problem they have with respect to validating their videos,” she says.

What really excited her was the complex job of monitoring OTT streams, she says. She saw the need for that solution to be software-based and scalable.

Insert video #1: Interra Systems’ Anupama Anantharaman on building a quality control solution applicable to next-gen workflows.

“I created this vision for this product that would enable media companies to deal with the ABR [adaptive bitrate] technology that is used in the streaming world so that they can get an in-depth look at the content they have created, identify errors and quality issues in the media stream,” she says. “But I think more important than that was to also make it a solution that is applicable to the next-generation streaming workflows.”

At the time, most monitoring solutions relied on custom-designed hardware.

“The idea was to have a very flexible, scalable monitoring system, where you can have your software probes, which are based on off the shelf software that can be deployed on the cloud or on your premises and make it possible for content providers to get this unprecedented real-time visibility into the stream services,” Anantharaman says.

Creating that solution required a solid understanding of the ABR streaming technology, formats, compression standards and how the media is packaged and delivered.

Those things are fairly straightforward for linear delivery, she says. But ABR streaming is an entirely different means of delivery that relies on a host of technologies and devices all working together, she says.

“To get a better understanding of all this and to create a product that would address these needs, I think that was a lot of work but very exciting, and I was one of the key contributors,” she says.

At the Interra Systems booth during a trade show in Denver.

Interra Systems CFO Mark Brown says Anantharaman has served as product champion for products internally within the company throughout product development and externally with customers.

He says her approach to championing products has been team-oriented rather than divisive.

“Being a woman in an all-male environment is not an easy row to hoe,” Brown says. “There are two ways to go about doing it. You can complain all the way and fight, or you can keep your head down and continue to deliver, and by delivering results, the results speak for you, and the results provide you a winning strategy as opposed to everything being a battle. The way she did it was to say: ‘The results are the proof.’”

James Cofer, director of sales and business development for Interra Systems, calls Anantharaman a dynamic yet personable businesswoman.

“She has a combination of knowing the technology inside and out and helps direct the company on where we’re going with stream monitoring and being ahead of the curve” on competitive issues and features clients want, Cofer says.

Anantharaman says part of her success in her career has been the fact that she is willing to “put in the hard work” and is always open to gaining more knowledge and experiences. Rather than having a single mentor at any point in her career, she tries to learn from everyone and everything she does. “As you go along, you learn different things from different people,” she says.

For instance, she learned about not avoiding risks because of CEOs who took risks and went against majority opinion, and about management from someone who had “great integrity.”

She also learns from “people who are great engineers” by learning how they approached a particular problem.

But she’s also learned how to solve problems from “women who have never had a job in their lives,” she says.

She is impressed by people who can speak their mind “because it’s not easy,” she says. “All of us have great ideas, but to speak up and articulate vision and ideas is easier said than done.”

She also believes the technology industry offers a lot of opportunities for women.

“Probably many women think that high-tech is about just working in front of the computer in a corner, cubicle or little office, it’s really not that. There are so many diverse career paths that you can take. There is of course software engineering and coding, but you can also be part of program management, there is marketing,” she says.

And in the media industry, there are many new things happening around content creation and user experience, she adds. “There are many, many different opportunities. I think a lot of women out there are very creative and have great communication skills and have just so much to offer, so I highly encourage them to join high tech.”

Others who will be honored at the Women in Technology Awards include Sharri Berg of Fox Weather and Fox Television Stations, Judy Parnall of ­the BBC, Kelly Abcarian of NBCUniversal, Kylee Peňa of Netflix and Diane Strutner of Datazoom.

In a webinar on Wednesday, April 13, this year’s Women in Technology Award winners shared thoughts on everything from multi-cloud strategies to the rise of machine learning in television workflows to how NFTs, Web3 and the metaverse may affect TV production. Watch the full video here.