Stephane Guez, Co-Founder and Principal, Dalet
UNLOCKING YOUR CONTENT’S VALUE
Long-established media organizations that serve up our favorite films and episodic content are often sitting on an enormous amount of valuable media that could be the key to unlocking new revenue opportunities, whether it’s repacking existing programs for new streaming opportunities or enhancing a new program with rich archival material. However, you need a cost-effective way to rescue and reuse archived content from the siloed systems and labyrinth of formats and files accumulated over the years. It has to be an accessible component of your media supply chain.
Is Your Archive Solution Obsolete?
When you consider the capabilities and functionality of your current library management solution, do you identify with any of these issues?
- Content is hard to find and, when found, difficult to access
- Expensive on-premises system is also labor-intensive to maintain
- Hardware like tape libraries are out of date and needs to be upgraded
- Content is not well documented
- Ontology and data model are not meeting business requirements
- Technology is not agile and does not support new formats or storage classes
- Poor user tools for intelligent indexing, fast search or content recommendation
- Retrieval time is long and costly
- Expensive storage needs constant expansion
- User interface is not web based and therefore not accessible to remote users
If so, it’s time to consider implementing an Intelligent Content Library in the cloud.
THE SOLUTION
WHAT IS AN INTELLIGENT CONTENT LIBRARY?
An Intelligent Content Library is a solution that provides predefined users with access to a catalog of rich digital assets, with tools to index, search and use all types of content. A cloud-native solution that can be deployed in the cloud, on premises or hybrid, it features state-of-the-art workflow orchestration, advanced metadata management and intuitive user interfaces. It can manage petabytes of content of all types – videos, pictures, audio and office documents – in any resolution or format including IMF, Image Sequences, AS-02, ProRes and camera RAW. The underlying media asset management integrates archives into the wider production workflow, ensuring objects and metadata are connected and assets can be easily found and retrieved, regardless of where they are located.
The essential capabilities of an Intelligent Content Library are:
- Centralized repository, accessible from anywhere, to organize and curate assets collaboratively, search for and update metadata, and trigger workflows.
- Capability to manage a wide range of complex assets, not just images and video, but also projects, camera cards, image sequences, IMF objects and more.
- Ability to match its data model with your business requirements and editorial search requirements: are you a production company? A national archive? Do you have a large sports or news archive or all of the above? Whatever the nature of your business, it will benefit from a customizable data model with support for numerous metadata field types, including controlled vocabularies (tags, taxonomies, thesaurus) and structured objects likes EDLs (and its raw material) and rush selections, to help you build a truly valuable and discoverable archive.
- It can handle complex migrations: an intelligent content library solution can scan metadata and make workflow decisions based on technical and editorial data points. It can match metadata to ontologies and taxonomies, process different metadata sources and map content to the desired data model.
- Orchestration: a solid workflow engine is an essential part of an Intelligent Content Library. It automates manual tasks and makes smart decisions based on technical and editorial metadata, which is critical for the initial migration process as well as day-to-day workflows. It automates workflows and minimizes manual upkeep, standardizing processes for library management.
- It supports your business-driven storage policies: where is high resolution media stored? And its corresponding proxies? Whether you’re planning to store content on-premises, in the cloud or a mixture of both, an Intelligent Content Library solution must support all options, and provide you with a clear picture of storage and egress costs, as well as retrieval times.
- It connects to the wider ecosystem: it is likely that the archive needs to be accessed from the production system, the CMS, playout system or even an existing ERP.
- Security: a platform that abides by the latest security standards and certifications, such as ISO27001, MFA authentication, fine-grained permissions management, zero trust policies and real time security monitoring.
- Broadcast and streaming format awareness: an Intelligent Content Library can recognize and manipulate broadcast formats that come with complex folder and file structures such as IMF, AS02 and data from camera cards. Users can automate more efficient archive/restore processes.
- Artificial Intelligent (AI) capabilities: delivering automated indexing of speech, object, facial and logo recognition to enrich your media library and reduce the time and effort required to locate useful content.
- Disaster Recovery: with high storage durability guaranteed by cloud vendors, deploying an archive in the cloud is often more secure than on-premises. Intelligent Content Libraries provide redundancy across different availability zones and can be configured to manage two (or more) instances of an archive, one on-premises and a copy in the cloud, ensuring business continuity.
Why going cloud-native helps.
A cloud-native architecture is key in enabling companies to future-proof their businesses, accelerating time-to-market and reducing total cost of ownership. A modern, cloud-native content library introduces:
- Distributed architecture: the solution can manage multiple storage pools, on-premises and/or in the cloud. Users can search and preview all content, no matter how distributed, from one central library.
- Content lifecycle control, per storage tier: dynamic, easy-to-deploy decision-making options that add to the benefits of operating in a cost-effective and resource-optimized working environment. Decisions can be automatically driven by metadata that pertains specifically to your business, leveraging storage tiers according to content usage.
- Scalability: expand and contract your storage volume per tier, on the fly. Only pay for the storage you are currently using, starting at a very low cost level and growing as you need. No need to pay today for what you may need in the future.
- Elasticity: cloud-native architecture means media processing services are elastic and resources are only expanded when needed. You can run multiple projects simultaneously with the highest degree of performance as required, and throttle back when not. Elastic media processing will help meet total cost of ownership requirements, with a pay-as-you-go model that adjusts based on peaks, and introduces savings of up to 90% on the average media processing bill.
Structure and Design: the Cloud and Hybrid Rule
Unlike a rigid on-premises archive, an Intelligent Content Library in the cloud is a dynamically manageable and massively scalable library, capable of efficiently orchestrating asset aging and exchanges between primary and long-term, cheaper storage. For example, if, at the beginning of a sports season, media managers know that producers will want quick access to all of the content from last year, they can create tiering rules to cost-effectively meet this need. Ahead of the new season, previous years’ content can be automatically moved from “cold” to “cool”, or even “hot” storage, then returned to “cold” storage as soon as the season is over. This maximizes access while minimizing how long content resides on more expensive storage tiers.
By combining automation and manual intervention, you can optimally balance workloads and virtualized infrastructure to achieve significant savings in costs and time.
Selecting a Partner to Help Migrate Your Archive
An Intelligent Content Library in the cloud enables media-savvy organizations to enhance their media strategy and optimize their high-value content. It empowers content owners to leverage years of archived content by offering new revenue opportunities that bring clear benefits to their businesses.
At Dalet, we have years of expertise managing content and helping organizations make the most of their long-term archive. We can provide content owners with best practices in implementing an Intelligent Content Library in the cloud, including customization, data migration, security and content protection.
Contact us to discuss how you can unlock your archives’ full potential and increase the revenue and the value of your media operations.
