Data-driven tools can now be used to scan video archives and identify every bit of that lost content. A.I. can be trained to scan for and recognize faces, themes, objects and even positive or negative sentiments — and then add metadata and subtitles to make all those things searchable.
Suddenly, it’s possible to cost-e ectively turn those archived assets into new revenue streams via clip shows, syndication to new geographies and platforms, more personalized advertising and more. Indeed, our experience shows that when content companies can nd their assets easily, they naturally use them more often and more e ciently to grow their business.
Don’t let your valuable inventory get lost in a work ow system black hole or lie buried in a content archive graveyard. Read on to learn how producers, broadcasters and media companies can harness cutting-edge media operations solutions in the cloud to re-invigorate content archives and ultimately, video investments. These solutions include the Ooyala Flex media logistics platform integrated with A.I.- driven cognitive service solutions such as Microsoft Video Indexer, part of the Microsoft Cognitive Services portfolio.
REDISCOVER THE GOLD IN YOUR ARCHIVE
Too often, assets are missing rich or accurate metadata attached to them (or possibly any metadata at all). This most certainly will be the case for assets that were originally ingested incorrectly or by a legacy linear production system that captured at most a lename or title and airdate in the days before digital work ows.
Perhaps metadata was never correctly labeled or was categorized di erently by various team members doing the work. Archives may only be accessible through slow, manual searches based on a very basic knowledge of what content is there, with vast amounts of valuable content left unreachable. In other cases, a plethora of correct metadata may have been collected, but teams may not have known how best to utilize it.
In all of these scenarios, assets may be used for a single production cycle, transferred to storage and archival systems, and then forgotten or essentially lost. The result: an untapped goldmine waiting to be re-discovered.
Companies dealing with the pressures of creating content more quickly with fewer budget resources these days are realizing the power of digital tools that can reach into their vast and idle archival reserves, and extract their riches. Ooyala Flex and Microsoft Video Indexer are two platforms, working together, that accomplish this. Microsoft Video Indexer analyzes and describes video content, and Ooyala Flex, deeply integrated with Microsoft Video Indexer, automates the indexing process of the archived assets, and manages the mass amount of metadata that is created as a result — transforming assets into productive, monetizable content.
Such an integration takes the heavy lifting out the archive discovery process by enabling creative teams to tackle many tasks: review transcriptions, nalize subtitles, con rm and teach facial recognition, and more. Once indexed and reviewed, owning a deeply and instantly searchable archive means more commercial possibilities. Ooyala Flex’s metadata orchestrations enable teams to search archives and assets easily using keywords and Ooyala Flex Query Language to nd clips and content rapidly. With Ooyala Flex and Microsoft Video Indexer, content companies can turn archives into gold.
In practice, Ooyala Flex can connect to, say, a publisher’s archive, and ingest assets into its system, automatically capturing technical details about each one. The platform then passes the assets (or a bandwidth-saving proxy version) through to Microsoft Video Indexer for analysis. Ooyala Flex then takes the metadata that is created by this analysis and associates it accurately to each respective asset — merging it with any existing metadata for that asset. At last, each asset can be properly identi ed and accessed for search, editing, repackaging, translations, audience content recommendations and much more.
As new assets are being ingested, Ooyala Flex fully automates activities including business rule application, quality control, proxy and mezzanine creation, and storage management. To ensure that new assets bene t in the same way as existing archived content, the same Microsoft Video Indexer integrations can be used to analyze and describe the growing library of content, managing the heavy work needed to create detailed metadata.
Ooyala Flex can also seamlessly combine other third-party A.I. services, handling needs such as regional speech-to- text translation, that can capture and extract key metadata automatically. With this enhanced information housed within the metadata, it’s easier to nd a video asset, determine what it contains, and take rapid action on it.
These integrations allow companies to manage and work with archived assets via attached metadata in several ways:
STRUCTURE AND DESIGN
Metadata De nitions Design: Choose your own customized metadata de nitions, including the metadata elds generated by Ooyala Flex and by Microsoft Video Indexer.
Metadata Input: Reduce librarian manual logging workload, and process much more content in less time so you can monetize it faster. Metadata archive rules can be set up so that when assets contain, for instance, a speci c topic, personality or location, an archive process is automatically triggered, including email noti cations to the production team.
Work ow Design: Design, modify and monitor your own work ows in real time: automate asset retrieval from an archive, transcode content to the preferred format for Microsoft Video Indexer, send the new le to Microsoft, and receive the new metadata. You can also add manual tasks to check what has been returned, and add information
that can be fed back to Microsoft machine learning so it becomes more and more accurate.
Resource Integration: Integrate with your HSM, online storage and other solutions that may hold assets and metadata (PAM, MAM, DAM, CMS, etc.) and enable you to search them.
MANAGE AND SEARCH
Media Asset Management: Search for archived assets using all your existing metadata types, plus metadata generated by Microsoft Video Indexer. Build collections, make basic edits and launch work ows easily – all from one user interface.
Permissions: Assign di erent metadata sets and elds
to speci c users and groups easily, so that they can view or edit only the information that is relevant to them. For example, a well-known sports league in Australia uses Ooyala Flex to expose di erent metadata sets to referees (who are the only people allowed to see certain elds), production teams, league clubs (each club can see only their own metadata, not competitors) and fans (metadata published to their VOD portal).
Review: Let authorized internal or external personnel review, comment and make decisions on archived assets before they move on in a work ow. For instance, teams can con rm that an asset meets current client requirements before sending it to that client, saving valuable time and money in the process.
They can also customize the timelines being displayed to show the metadata occurrences through the video. For example, you can have a ‘faces’ timeline.
Advanced Search with Thesaurus: Perform advanced searches which can return results that are associated with what you typed. For example, it could be spellings of a city in a di erent language (Köln versus Cologne). Ooyala Flex lets you build your own thesaurus entries so you can customize this to your speci c archive.
Subtitling: Save hours of work by turning transcribed text into subtitles that can be delivered as sidecar les to partners or clients, or syndicated to digital platforms. With Ooyala Flex Reviewer, users can edit subtitle text to ensure accuracy.
Packaging and Syndication: Automate the creation of multiple le formats and associated metadata for speci c customers who are buying re-packaged archive content. The reporting and real-time analytics in Ooyala Flex let you be con dent that it has been sent and arrived.
In the public domain, broadcasters and even national archives with whom we talk have a wealth of archive content lost in a manual, two-dimensional catalog gathering dust. They know that content is loaded with potential!
From our work in this space, we’ve seen that the use of bespoke automated video work ow combined with powerful metadata modeling and orchestration can bring this content to life when analyzed by today’s cognitive services. Our Ooyala Flex early-adopter projects with Microsoft Video Indexer are illustrating that the prohibitive barrier of manual e ort can be removed, and this content can be searched, explored and exposed for repurposing across multiple applications.
MONETIZE YOUR ARCHIVE WITH A.I.
A.I., with its machine learning application, is growing in importance each day. Teams use it not only to enhance work ow and metadata management, but to manage and monetize archived assets.
Archived assets paired with the correct metadata and
A.I. can be mined now for a host of activities that draw from images, audio and text. Ooyala recently polled top executives in several cities around the world as part of its global video forum series; results indicated that the A.I. services of most interest to them include:
- Facial detection and identi cation
- Audio transcription
- Object tagging
- Multi-language translation
Video Indexer
Along with the time and cost savings these services provide teams that are searching for assets, they o er monetization opportunities like these:
- New content creation
- International distribution
- Brand integration
- Personalized content recommendation
If a sports league or broadcaster is seeking to monetize historical content, they may want to transcribe archival footage such as voice-over from matches, and create subtitles and archive metadata for ease of search. Microsoft Video Indexer can transcribe the voice-over, and add metadata based on athlete numbers or names, screen text, etc.
This unlocks a whole new way of monetizing old content: Before VOD, years of archived content may have been gathering dust or used maybe once a year. Now, your viewers can have your full catalog at their ngertips via SVOD, AVOD or TVOD for re-living those winning goals, major news stories and other unique experiences.
