With ever-tightening budgets and the explosion of content creation and distribution platforms, the media industry is under greater pressure than ever. So the need for more intelligent and economical ways of storing, finding and managing assets, as well as greater production speed and mobility are critical. By using advanced MAM and storage solutions, media organisations can unlock the value of their content and enable users to easily access and manipulate those assets, wherever they are.
Better asset management and more sophisticated storage are streamlining production and saving costs. However, these benefits aren’t necessarily the most important. The goal is to enable media organisations to optimise and extract the highest value from their most prized asset: content. Unlocking the value of content through discovery and using assets in new and often more personal ways, can bring more viewers, better experiences and greater profits.
Working smarter
Technology providers have created innovative architectures as standalone solutions have given way to end-to-end ecosystems capable of scaling and managing assets logically and flexibly. These systems are closely integrated with storage technology so media organisations can use content not just across locations and continents but also across brands. Content owners, broadcasters and rights holders can now produce and distribute content from anywhere to anywhere, and on virtually any device.
Unlocking content’s value
Highly integrated ecosystems that include sophisticated MAM systems and shared storage are bringing profound business benefits. Virtualised workflows, greater collaboration capabilities and easier access to media files are delivering resource and cost efficiencies, more productivity and higher-quality content. Functionalities like integrated metadata sharing are helping companies better leverage and expand their assets, while AI is enabling clips creation in a fraction of the time it takes to manually locate needed assets. Many of the tools that facilitate this new collaboration, speed and mobility are remarkably easy to deploy and use but feature sophisticated technologies.
App-based services
The best search mechanics allow you to find and retrieve content quickly and easily regardless of its location – in the cloud and in on-premise, archive or nearline storage. This puts a particular clip that may be archived or parked temporarily on nearline, or on online storage, all at a user’s fingertips.
Within this integrated infrastructure, accessing media functions is as simple as selecting the desired app, switching on the modules needed, and customising the workflow with the required media services and partner connectors. Apps cover everything from searching and browsing media, researching data and social media feeds, logging, editing, review and approval, publishing and more. All are accessed from a common role-based interface for a consistent and unified user experience.
New-age storage
Software-defined storage architecture is designed to accommodate the shift to the cloud while supporting on-premise and hybrid workflows. On-demand access to a shared pool of centralised storage can be quickly provisioned, repurposed and tailored to each workspace’s capacity. It’s also designed to be fluid, moving assets where they should be at a given time and saving costs by eliminating the need to purchase more production storage. A ‘media-aware’ system keeps assets close when needed, moves to nearline when appropriate, then further away to archive. Intelligent storage is also critical to support increasingly advanced functions like cognitive services.
AI-content discovery to QC
This new ecosystem is also using the power of AI, which is being used for automated metadata extraction, transcription services, and content indexing. The process of taking content, applying an algorithm to derive time-based metadata that is then registered in an asset management system is greatly enhancing content discoverability.
Content indexing can also find voice signatures and identify where a certain speaker is speaking. Additional layers or strata of time-based metadata allow even more detailed searching. AI algorithms are so advanced that they do more than identify faces – they can infer the mood of each person at any given time. More AI algorithms applied to a content library enable increasingly sophisticated searching, and can automate often prohibitively time- and cost-intensive human tasks.
Perhaps even more valuable is the ability to discover valuable content long after it has been archived. Often, we don’t know in advance what content will be significant. AI can help uncover valuable assets buried deep within a content library. With enough metadata strata you can triangulate in to find any desired content.
Better monetisation, greater growth
All of this innovation drives toward a fundamental benefit: the best use and monetisation of assets. Most intelligently and economically storing assets and enabling users to easily access and manipulate those assets, wherever they are, is at the heart of these systems. They allow more creativity and the ability to personalise content when appropriate. It’s time to use technology to help leverage content as the ultimate driver of business growth.
