Make more money with your content archive and AI

Make more money with your content archive and AI
Paula Minardi from Ooyala explains how enterprises can better find, manage and monetise video assets

Caspar Herzberg |


"It was quicker for us to shoot the video again than try to find it in the archive.”

“I don’t even know what I have in my archive at this point.”

“I wish I could earn more from my videos.”

Any of these comments sound familiar?

It’s a common refrain we hear at Ooyala: Content companies today are struggling to find, manage and monetise the vast amounts of video assets that now exist in their archives. These are assets that they spent a fortune to create or acquire, yet are no longer making them any money at all. What good is good content when it’s lost in a labyrinth of formats, files and systems accumulated over the years, never to be found again?

Not much.

‘Lack of asset visibility’ was among the key pain points listed when Ooyala asked 180 global broadcast and media industry executives about the causes of their media operations inefficiencies. Many of those same executives are now realising that automated and data-driven methods for managing and enhancing archived media assets — including advanced metadata management and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies — solve this problem and bring rich rewards.

Data-driven tools can now be used to scan video archives and identify every bit of that lost content. AI can be trained to scan for and recognise 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-effectively turn those 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.

Don’t let your valuable inventory get lost in a workflow 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 AI-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 filename or title and airdate in the days before digital workflows.

Perhaps metadata was never correctly labeled or was categorised differently 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 utilise 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 realising 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 analyses 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, monetisable content.

Paula Minardi is head of content strategy at Ooyala. To read the full white paper, download it here.

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