Get more from your content archive with AI

Get more from your content archive with AI
Ooyala's Paula Minardi says that many companies struggle to manage and monetise their video assets

Caspar Herzberg |


This article first appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of The Record.

There’s a common refrain we hear at Ooyala: “I don’t even know what I have in my archive at this point.”

Content companies dealing with the pressures of creating content more quickly with fewer budget resources are struggling to find, manage and monetise the vast amounts of video assets that now exist in their archives.

Ooyala’s new white paper ‘Make more money with your content archive and AI’ aims to help companies solve these issues. It discusses how Ooyala Flex works with Microsoft Video Indexer to bring advanced metadata management and artificial intelligence to archived content.

Too often, assets are missing rich or accurate metadata attached to them (or possibly any metadata at all). Perhaps metadata was never correctly labeled or was categorised differently by various team members doing the work. In other cases, a plethora of correct metadata may have been collected, but teams may not have known how best to use 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.

Ooyala Flex and Microsoft Video Indexer are integrated, data-driven digital tools that can reach into large and idle video reserves to extract their riches. Together, they help companies: find and identify lost archived content; add metadata and subtitles automatically; sort by themes, objects, facial recognition, visual text and even emotional sentiment; and reuse and monetise video for greater returns.

Microsoft Video Indexer analyses and describes video content and Ooyala Flex, deeply integrated with it, 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, monetisable content.

Such an integration takes the heavy lifting out of the archive discovery process by enabling creative teams to tackle many tasks: review transcriptions, finalise subtitles, confirm and teach facial recognition and more. Owning a deeply and instantly searchable archive means more commercial possibilities. Ooyala Flex enables teams to search archives easily using keywords and Ooyala Flex Query Language finds clips and content rapidly. With Ooyala Flex and Microsoft Video Indexer, content companies can turn archives into gold.

Suddenly, it’s possible to cost-effectively turn archived assets into new revenue streams via clip shows, syndication to new geographies and platforms, more personalised advertising and more. Indeed, our experience shows that when content companies can find their assets easily, they naturally use them more often and more efficiently to grow their business.

Paula Minardi is head of content strategy at Ooyala

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