By Dave Colantuoni, senior director of product management, Avid.
SCREEN AFRICA EXCLUSIVE: The way we tell stories has itself become the story. It’s a well-known fact that media consumption has changed dramatically. But storytelling is also undergoing a radical transformation. Alongside the proliferation of content platforms, including OTT channels, has come an explosion of content creation. Literally.
Late last year, Netflix predicted it would spend between US$7 billion and US$8 billion on content in 2018. Now it’s estimated that the streaming giant will spend US$12 to US$13 billion on its programming this year. And mainstream players are jumping into the market. HBO and CBS were among the first major networks to make digital forays with HBO Go and CBS All Access. ESPN Plus is now up and running and Disney is slated to debut its own streaming service in 2019. The speed at which content is created and its quality will be critical in differentiating streaming media companies from one another.
The sheer amount of content being created and the multitude of ways that media is being experienced creates production and distribution pressures—from the need for greater production speed and mobility to more intelligent ways of finding and managing assets. Further, media organisations must accommodate international versioning issues, including language captioning.
NEW CAPABILITIES AND ALTERED WORKFLOWS
As these forces exert pressure, technology providers are rushing to keep pace, innovating to deliver scalable, flexible and intelligent architectures to meet the new demands. Ecosystems capable of scaling and managing assets logically and flexibly, together with sophisticated storage technology are addressing the challenges of our ubiquitous ‘always-on’ live environment, enabling content production and distribution from anywhere to anywhere, and on virtually any device.
Perhaps nowhere are the needs—and the strides made to meet them—more evident than in the 24/7 news environment. For journalists, it’s about making workflows faster and easier and removing bottlenecks. Journalists can now be more autonomous and productive in the field, able to search, access and create content, send packages where needed, and get video on air and online faster—all from their laptops. News workflows must also integrate with web, mobile, and social platforms, while enabling all stakeholders to view footage in a browser, and comment on it or log it as needed. Quantum leaps for broadcast workflows.
There are also profound business benefits. For media companies of all kinds, highly integrated ecosystems that include sophisticated MAM systems and shared storage deliver tangible advantages. In addition to resource and cost efficiencies, increased productivity, and higher-quality content, functionalities like integrated metadata sharing help companies expand their assets and leverage content across brands, critical to staying competitive in today’s cost-driven broadcast environment.
Many of the tools that facilitate this new collaboration, speed and mobility are remarkably easy to deploy and use but underneath the hood lie some sophisticated technologies.
A COMMON INTERFACE
A common, easy-to-use interface built on a web browser is needed to enable necessary stakeholders to easily access, view and even contribute to content. It must be an extremely lightweight and quick-to-launch client that can be used in a web browser anywhere with very little training. It should also seamlessly connect to a data center housing storage and the servers that run the infrastructure or to cloud or hybrid environments. The ability to move from on-premise to hybrid to cloud provides the portable capability so critical to today’s speed-driven, remote and highly integrated workflows.
Users can share content easily and communicate with each other about stories from anywhere in real time. Aggregating social media feeds, logging as content is being acquired, or cutting together a story based on assets on shared virtualised storage or a MAM system can all be achieved on the same interface. And news producers, for example, can log on to see content available and push or pull content to and from production systems within their station group.
RULES AND ROLES
It’s also critical for the interface to be applicable to roles in an organisation. An administrator should be able to assign user interfaces based on their tasks. A logger, for example, will see only the log functionality, or an editor only the clips they need. That sort of flexible interface is crucial. It’s not helpful for a logger to see social media feeds or have the ability to send content out to social media on a finished news story. So, an interface must have ease of use, flexibility and scalability built in.
APPS AS SERVICES
The ability to quickly and efficiently search all different storage mechanisms, both in the cloud and in on-premise, archive or nearline storage, is essential to retrieve assets quickly. A particular clip may be archived or parked temporarily on nearline, or on your online storage. The best search mechanics allow you to find and retrieve content quickly and easily regardless of its location.
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 that cover everything from searching and browsing media, researching data and social media feeds, logging, editing, review and approval, publishing and more—all accessed from the common interface for a consistent and unified user experience.
NEW SEARCH FRONTIERS
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.
With storage, the faster it goes, the more expensive it is. An integrated ecosystem with a sophisticated MAM system can move assets where they should be at a given time, so you can avoid purchasing more production storage. A ‘‘media-aware’ system keeps assets close when needed, nearline when appropriate then further away to archive. It’s also a game changer amid increasingly sophisticated services and workflows like cognitive services.
If you have millions of assets, you’ll need to do some very sophisticated searching, which is possible by linking together all storage. But that’s just the beginning. Through services like phonetic indexing, indexing the spoken word of ingested content, you can search on phenomes, or just the voice of what was being said. Or use it to complement a metadata search. There are a wide range of services that can be tied together as your infrastructure gets more sophisticated.
It’s possible, for example, to upload content to a cloud computing platform like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services and use AI-driven cognitive service capabilities to create metadata that’s searchable within your ecosystem. Functions like speech-to-text, facial recognition and character or image recognition become searchable metadata.
BETTER ASSET MONETISATION
All of this technology really 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, lies at the heart of these systems. More advanced AI-driven metadata search can uncover content you might not even know you have, opening up new media and revenue opportunities.
The way we tell stories is evolving but the content is always the star. We need to make the most of it – knowing how to find it, where to store it, and how it can work for us.
