By Keith Lissak,
Senior Director, Media & Entertainment Solutions Marketing, Quantum
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the extraction of data intelligence — metadata — from stored digital content offers tremendous potential for the media and entertainment industry. By accelerating the discovery of interesting moments within your digital media library, AI dramatically reduces the time, work and cost involved in realizing the potential value of that content. Identifying relevant material in your library then becomes a simpler, faster process — one that generates comprehensive results in a fraction of the time it would take a human to manually catalog video clips.
Consider a broadcaster with a production team that creates hours of video each day. After five years, the company has a massive store of content, and perhaps no single individual who knows about all of the media within that library. It would take years for someone to log each piece of stored content; simultaneously keeping up with new content as it’s created would make accurate tagging a virtually impossible task. Without applying some intelligent tools, a company simply cannot fully understand or monetize its digital media.
That’s where AI can have a huge impact. When integrated with a robust media asset management (MAM) solution, even the most basic AI processing can yield tremendously useful insight. If a cognitive engine were, for example, to listen to the soundtrack of every stored video and transcribe it into text so that all spoken words were searchable, that metadata would be of considerable value. In the past, it may have actually been less painful and less expensive to simply reshoot some content than to try to find existing footage in a library.
Text recognition is just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine linking a battery of cognitive engines to mine your audio and video assets for logos, objects, words, license plates, faces — even facial expressions. The detailed content analytics provided by this level of AI processing allows you to extend the value of your content, better engage with your audience, and provide your advertisers with near real-time performance data. A sports and entertainment venue, for example, can show a vendor every instance of its logo or product appearing during a specific event. A news or entertainment channel can identify the clips in its library that enrich current-event reporting or can be sold to other outlets at the peak of their value, such as following the passing of a famous celebrity. Video segments that previously were forgettable, or even lost, can suddenly become valuable by supplying the depth and color to make a uniquely compelling story.
Moving AI Beyond the Cloud
The value of robust data intelligence is significant, but the extraction of that data is practical and cost-effective only when performed by an automated AI engine. Fast, economical analysis of digital assets—even the massive libraries maintained today—by AI engines promises to be a game-changer for media companies. It will become a natural and normal part of any media business for one simple reason: Even the humblest AI processing today is vastly more effective in extracting useful metadata than any other current method or model.
One of the vendors leading the AI revolution is Veritone. Founded in 2014, Veritone has developed a best-in-class, cloud-based platform called aiWARE that unlocks the power of cognitive computing to allow unstructured audio and video data to be processed, transformed, correlated and analyzed in a seamless, automated manner.
While the benefits of cloud processing are by now well-documented, maintaining a large — and growing — content library off-premise can be cost-prohibitive. Content security might also be a concern. For the many digital media libraries maintained in on-premise storage, Quantum and Veritone are now working together to bring AI engines and their functionality down to the ground. The result is aiWARE for Xcellis®, a version of Veritone’s platform designed for Quantum StorNext® shared storage environments that feature Xcellis workflow storage architectures.
Situating powerful AI processing behind corporate firewalls, aiWARE for Xcellis is ideal for companies with significant investments in on-premise storage, as well as those with cost or security concerns about cloud storage. The software runs on the Xcellis Application Director server and can burst to the Veritone cloud to access hundreds of additional cognitive engines, as needed. aiWARE’s powerful capabilities allow you to:
- create more customized video-on-demand content through robust metadata tagging of existing data in the library.
- provide better ROI metrics to sponsors by identifying where and how often a logo appeared in highlight clips beyond an original broadcast.
- accelerate post-production workflows through enhanced context-based search and discovery.
The combination of Quantum’s StorNext with Veritone aiWARE lets you extract new levels of intelligence from your video and audio content without the cost and trouble of moving your library to the cloud. It’s a true differentiator that opens up new opportunities for you to monetize your content, better serve your customers, and ultimately grow your business.
Keith Lissak is Senior Director, Media & Entertainment Solutions Marketing, at Quantum. He brings more than 25 years of experience to his role as a marketer and journalist covering high-end digital media technology. He joined the company in July 2017 after nearly six years at Harmonic, leaving as Senior Director of Product Marketing, a role in which he was responsible for messaging across the company’s complete video delivery infrastructure portfolio. He previously spent four-and-a-half years managing demand-creation activities for the $500-million Broadcast Communications Division of Harris Corp., leading an international team of marcom managers, designers and web specialists. Additional career highlights include serving as Director of Marketing Communications at pioneering nonlinear editing system company Lightworks, as Director of Communications at the Motion Picture Editors Guild, and co-founding Flashpoint Media, a public relations/integrated marketing agency specializing in the Hollywood film and television production and post-production industries.
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