Why Enterprises Must Step-Up Their Video Management Game
Its 2023 and video is everywhere. Broadcast TV has given way to streaming TV; Movie theatres are facing heat from VOD and OTT; Videos dominate social media across all formats — long length, shorts, live videos, Reels, TikToks, GenAI videos. Videos show higher engagement, higher sharing, and higher recall than any other content.
Yet, our largest enterprises do not have the tools to manage their video archives, convert the hundreds if not thousands of videos generated by their employees/offices daily / weekly / monthly to re-useable assets and put the technology that powers professional video and content management companies — such as broadcasters, sports franchises to use.
While enterprises have been investing in content management (ECM, DMS, Cloud CMS) since 1970s and there has been broad adoption of archival of text, images, forms, supporting docs across BFSI, Retail, Telecom, Healthcare etc, the penetration of video management is still very shallow and most enterprises treat their video archives as plain file systems with little to show in terms of metadata (save some creator tags), very little on search within video, almost negligible recognition within video and poor ability to quickly search, find, edit and reuse video for the current communication needs.
Back in 2008, we founded Movico, with the aim to build a video management system primarily for broadcasters. The need to reuse archives to create event specific news, historical documentaries, extract visuals to support current news etc and the relatively high cost of storage on SAN/NAS etc and high bandwidth requirements for editing offered the opportunity to leverage internet, frame accurate addressing on streaming (think adobe flash media server), use of low-res proxies and low-cost manual tagging of clips to power newsrooms. Sadly, it was too far ahead of its time :-)
However, with new and powerful technologies available at low cost, i.e. audio transcription for voice2text conversion, language translation, faster and more open streaming techniques, AI based object, face, location recognition and screen sharing, collaboration protocols prevalent everywhere, it is fairly simple to turn a video archive to a richly annotated (tagged) clip database with powerful search, select, edit & re-use capabilities.
Enterprise Video Management Pain Points
With video recordings having gone through the roof due to COVID impact and the new culture of video / remote meetings, enterprises are producing more video than ever. Internal meetings, customer presentations, training sessions, hiring interviews, vendor meetings, tender meetings are all being recorded for both archival and regulatory reasons. The storage needs are therefore exploding and the costs for storage are also skyrocketing. One large Bank reported a 22 TB video collection while they had budgeted for only 2 TB in a financial year.
Storage on specialised video equipment, SAN/NAS comes with a significant cost and lower cost storage on local hard disk comes with a high risk. Cloud storage at high-res recordings will also be fairly expensive and access/bandwidth costs will spiral. Converting the video recordings to low-res proxies and synchronising to the high-res version will take huge manual effort both to build the low-res proxy library as well as to maintain the relationships for possible future use.
Since Videos are used mainly in marketing, branding and advertising, there is need to share the video with agency partners, creatives and production houses. This must be done in safe, secure and auditable ways. Even for internal uses, such as training younger employees, review of meetings one may have missed, MOM generation from a critical business meeting there is a need to provide a collaborative video management solution than rely on files/folders and manual work.
However, regular content management systems were designed for documents, images and don’t handle video very well. They only have rudimentary video processing tools and functionality. And specialised video management systems are expensive as they are usually geared for the broadcast / live streaming businesses where video is a source of direct revenue.
Cloud-based New-Age Solutions to Democratise Video Management for Enterprises
The way out for enterprises looking at professional video management tools may be the new generation of cloud-friendly video asset management systems being developed for the traditional broadcast industry but that have wider applicability across enterprises given the cloud-based workflows that opens possibilities for everyone.
What are the typical features / tools that makes these suitable for enterprise use cases in BFSI, Retail, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Software services etc?
Ingestion
These software systems support a wide range of video and can ingest video archives going back many many years. For Insurance folks, Banks with archives going back 70–100 years, these are specially attractive due to the ability to work with older formats and convert everything to the current file formats.
Most of these systems can create low-res proxy videos on the fly and at multiple resolutions too. They can be scripted for automation or run under modern RPA tools so that there is minimal human intervention needed to ingest a large file library into these tools.
Storage
Widest possible storage support including support for low-cost cloud storage for the proxy low-res videos so that all collaboration can be done on the cloud copy and the high-res can be automatically fetched when needed for a production render makes these new systems very attractive to enterprises.
If you have a video library going back 10+ years, the lower cost of storage itself would pay for the cost of the new software licenses/subscription.
Powerful automated cataloging
Leveraging the power of modern technologies — NLP, AI/ML, voice recognition, speech to text etc, these systems can build context relevant tags across the video clips and create a powerful catalog nearly out of the box. If trained on your own domain (images, texts etc) they can create a personalised dictionary from your most popular keywords. Many of the uses cases will work with out-of-the-box tagging. For special needs, one can always use low-cost human resources across the world for deep tagging and cataloging.
Full transcripts, summaries, recognition of objects / people / places / brands, speakers (voice recognition) et all makes it possible to turn a library of videos into a searchable active inventory ready to be reused in multiple ways.
Search
The ability to re-use a video or a clip from within video comes from search on the video database. Modern tools will allow you to search on virtually everything related to, within and about the video asset. And bring up the relevant clip with its in/out markets instantly.
Advanced search features include AI/ML based search in natural languages, object search, people search, location search, search across saved searches and of course search across video metadata.
Select and Edit
Once the video archives are “searchable”, and in/out time-codes are marked in sync, its relatively straight-forward to have the ability to search, select and edit a new compilation that meets the search objective.
Modern video management systems allow for powerful collaborative editing using the low-res proxy on the cloud (or local storage). Previews, cuts, comments, workflows, automation, audio channels, special effects are all usually available enabling your video production team or agency to quickly reuse the video content and come up with compelling new content for your marketing, branding, sales support, training and/or personalisation needs.
Many of the modern systems also provide extensions/plugins from within powerful video editors to enable video production teams to pull in the video library, search/select into the projects with simple and fast operations.
Enterprises Have Nothing To Lose But Their Lethargy
Enterprises can unlock their video archives to take advantage of the powerful video consumption trends we are seeing across social media, digital community platforms, streaming video and others. The need of the hour is to product and distribute high quality, unique content and the treasure from old archives always gets high response on platforms such as LinkedIn, YouTube where professional audiences engage with your brand/content.
Re-use of old archives can unlock wisdom for internal trainings, customer relationship management, hiring practices and even leadership development. Paired with powerful AI/ML and GenAI techniques this can lead to rapid productivity gains and even significant cost savings on support side.
Video production, creation, recording will only increase as remote work gets woven into the fabric of work. Enterprises planning significant storage cost escalation should consider investing in latest cloud video management tools which offers enterprise grade security, user management, audit logs with the core functionality to make the archives interactive, re-useable and integrated with production workflows across all channels — broadcast quality, internet quality and mobile device quality.
About The Author
Arvind Jha is a senior software technology executive with leadership positions at Adobe India, Polaroid India, Newgen Software and over 35 years of experience in software products. He has been a founder of Movico Technologies, a startup offering video management systems that was ahead of its time. He is presently advising video management startups, SAAS/IAAS startups and is a mentor/investor to many startups.
If you need to reach out and discuss your video management needs, feel free to connect via LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jalajboy/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/jalajboy).
