The COVID-19 pandemic has been a pressure test for organizations of all kinds, and footage archives are no exception. How have they adapted to the exigencies of remote work? Is demand for archival content holding up? What can media companies do to fully unlock the commercial potential of their archival collections, and which technologies show the most promise in this evolution? After four-plus months of lockdown, footage companies are beginning to see what’s working and what isn’t, and where the opportunities for change lie.
We had the chance to discuss these issues with a panel of archive professionals and work-flow experts in a recent webinar called Monetizing Content Archives, sponsored by InSync Technology. To watch the full webinar, please click here.
The Monetizing Content Archives webinar consisted of two panels. The first, including Razib Chatterjee (RTE), Kathey Battrick (Asharq News) and David Seevers (Footage.net), and moderated by Noelle Pratt, focused primarily on how archives are maintaining operational continuity and accessing collections remotely, as well as the impact of the lockdown on demand for archival content. The second, which consisted of work-flow experts James Whitebread (Masstech), Matt Eaton (GrayMeta) and Paola Hobson (InSync), and moderated by Darren Whitehead (IABM), focused on the ways that technology can unlock the value of content archives by overcoming barriers in finding, accessing and repurposing archival material to meet the latest standards in terms of quality and compliance. It was an interesting cross section of panelists and perspectives.
The Archive Panel
RTE
Razib Chatterjee, Manager of Content Syndication and Licensing at RTE, brought the most direct, on-the-ground experience to the discussion of how large media archives are faring during the pandemic. With a collection dating back to 1961, the Irish Republic’s national broadcaster provides a good example of how a “hybrid archive,” containing both digital and physical content assets, is adapting to the exigencies of the lockdown.
Chatterjee credited the “immense capability” of RTE’s IT department in setting up remote working capabilities for “close to 1000 employees pretty much overnight,” as well as innovative problem solving, which meant that both RTE’s “internal and external clients received the content when they needed it.”
“The archive department had been prepared for this scenario, even though none of us thought it would last this long,” said Chatterjee. “We had designed new workflows and were able to implement them efficiently. We still operated with a skeleton crew onsite during the whole period, who were supported by our teams working remotely from home and there was no service disruption. Our employees largely embraced this change and even used their own infrastructure and in some cases devices to ensure that the jobs got done.”
As for demand for archive footage, Chatterjee has “absolutely” noticed an increase during the lockdown. “Program makers were looking towards archive to create new archive-based programs quickly and cost effectively to fill schedules,” he said. “I think the Eurovision Song Contest was a great example of how pretty much all EBU broadcasters had to quickly produce look back programs instead of broadcasting the live show from Rotterdam. In terms of licensing content, we were thankfully able to deliver, license and finish major documentaries that were already in the pipeline. A clear indication of increased archive demand is the fact that at the half year mark, our revenue was ahead of 2019 at this stage.”
Going forward, RTE is planning to begin digitizing its entire archive of TV, radio and photographs. As part of that project, they'll be looking to both future proof these collections and meet the growing demand for rapid access to the collections by both internal and external users. Enhancing the associated metadata will be crucial, and Chatterjee fully expects to draw on a range of technology solutions, including AI, facial recognition and speech to text to meet the challenge.
“Rights management is probably still the single biggest challenge facing a lot of content owners, especially broadcasters like us,” he added. “The key will be to develop a really efficient digital rights management system that can unlock the potential to monetize content without compromising on copyright and related issues.”
Asharq News
Kathey Battrick, Senior Manager of Library and Media Management at Asharq News, a new Dubai-based multi-platform news channel, is starting a fully digital archive from scratch. Utilizing cutting-edge media management technology and a robust infrastructure, and with no legacy analog media to worry about, her operation has been relatively unaffected by the pandemic lockdown. Her experience offered a glimpse of how archives may be designed and managed going forward.
“We are in a fortunate position to be launching using the latest technology and full-IP enabled infrastructure,” said Battrick. “The technical teams and our suppliers were able to react quickly and facilitate remote working for my team. Our challenges were less about the technology and archiving, but more about the team and training. I have a new team and everyone joined us shortly before or during lockdown itself.”
Once the channel launches, Battrick will oversee both the production archive and the cataloging of the content archive in a fully integrated media ecosystem. The archive area consists of an LTO8 archive system from oracle and Diva archive interfacing with Avid Media Asset Management and Production asset management (PAM).
“We're using Avid MediaCentral Asset Management at Asharq News,” she said. “The production files and archive can be accessed by the same interface so managing the assets across both is important. It means I have a good understanding of the life cycle of our files and content requirements right through from production, to archive and then ultimately back to our end users in the newsroom. As asset management technology and workflows continue to become more integrated and efficient, I think we will see more hybrid roles.”
Because content can be added to and accessed from the central archive in Dubai from anywhere around the world, remote access is fundamental to Asharq’s production and archival system.
“Although our archive is managed in Dubai, we have bureaus and users on location and overseas so it's important for us to have a hybrid of virtualized on-prem systems and cloud applications that provide us with the agility and speed to react to breaking news,” said Battrick. “For example, we're using Media Composer Cloud which enables assets to be accessed, edited and checked in from outside.”
Footage.net
David Seevers, Chief Marketing Officer at Footage.net, talked about how Footage.net is helping footage companies differentiate themselves in the global media landscape.
“Our role is to match active footage customers with footage providers who can meet their specific content needs,” he said. “By bringing together many of the world’s leading footage collections and making them discoverable through a unified footage search platform, we show our users a range of footage options for a particular search and introduce them to providers they might not have known about otherwise. This opens up new opportunities for our archive partners to differentiate themselves and acquire new customers on an ongoing basis.”
Seevers talked about the critical role of quality meta-data and cataloging in discovering relevant content, a topic that came up frequently in the second half of the panel.
“Our goal is to surface the most relevant content for a particular search, so we don’t favor any collections in the search results,” he explained. “The quality of the cataloging is very important, so the companies that give us more data to work with, like more detailed descriptions of the footage, tend to do better in our searches.”
He expressed cautious optimism about the archive industry going forward, noting that activity on the Footage.net site was up by an average of just under 20% during the lockdown, which he noted was a good sign for the industry in general.
“We did a survey of the footage industry back at the beginning of April to see how they were responding to the pandemic-related lockdowns, and the results were encouraging,” he said. “And nearly everything I’ve heard from colleagues in the footage world about their business activity over the last four months has been positive. The main take-away from our survey was that, generally speaking, footage companies have adapted their operations to the demands of the pandemic-related shutdowns. Working remotely appears to be a viable alternative for a vast majority of companies, allowing them to maintain their core operations during the global lockdown.”
He agreed that expectations for rapid turnaround and delivery had increased over the last few years, but noted that smaller, independent archives could still remain competitive, provided they pursued the right content development strategies.
“Ultimately it all comes down to the nature of the collection,” he said. “Companies with unique, highly relevant, or at least hard to duplicate footage, can endure without attempting to compete head-to-head with the larger tech-driven platforms. This is especially true of companies in the archival and editorial categories. Overall, I think footage providers have made great progress in making their collections more accessible to outside users, but the quality of the cataloging and presentation will continue to be uneven for the foreseeable future. High-quality footage research will continue to require skill and experience, and figuring out how to get new users up to speed and able to navigate and fully exploit these varied resources will be an ongoing challenge and a key business opportunity.”
The Tech/Workflow Panel
The consensus among the tech panelists, including James Whitebread (Masstech), Matt Eaton (GrayMeta) and Paola Hobson (InSync), was that the COVID lockdown has led many media companies to think more actively about the value of their archives, and to begin taking the necessary steps to prepare their archives for commercial use.
Masstech Innovations
James Whitebread, Chief Digital Officer for Masstech Innovations, a company that helps organizations optimize their video assets by automating smart asset movement and transformation across cloud and other storage tiers, has seen a renewed focus on archives during lockdown, driven primarily by their customers’ inability to generate new material and film location.
“I think it really does seem that lockdown has accelerated plans that many customers were perhaps already investigating, but have perhaps been forced or decided to push forward with as a means to mitigate the impact of the lockdown on their business,” he said. “We’ve seen a number of existing projects be prioritized by customers, new projects initiated as a response to COVID and you know we’ve been working with those customers to help them with their urgent needs.”
A key focus for Masstech is helping clients move their video assets to the cloud, based around Kumulate, their core media-management system.
“We’ve had a connector in place to multiple cloud partners such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle and many others,” he said. “And this is allowed us to help customers move their key content up to the cloud, so that their remote teams can work seamlessly while our archive tool-set Kumulate takes care of the storage management back in the office, back in the data center, whether that’s on tape, disk or up in the cloud. Meaning that our customers have been able to edit their content up in the cloud while they’re working at home, pull that content down to their house, work on that content and be able to push that content back in the archive upon completion.”
Recognizing that customers are eager to exploit older archival content during lockdown, Masstech is also focused on addressing the critical issue of meta-data creation.
“We know that customers have got large amounts of content in their archives,” he said. “And in recent years they’ve moved to adopt higher levels, or they’ve created higher levels, of meta-data, but of course some of their older content in the archive, has got very little meta-data beyond perhaps basic technical meta-data.”
Their solution, according to Whitebread, is to use machine learning and AI to create new meta-data.
“We’ve been working with AI and machine learning technologies, such as those from Amazon, Microsoft, but of course our partners at GrayMeta, to allow customers to selectively choose assets from the archive, all of the assets from the archive, and be able to create new valuable meta-data that can enhance the onward chain, such as facial recognition, locational or object detection. And we can make all of that metadata searchable, meaning that you can quickly find examples of content such as Tom Cruise, where Tom Cruise appears on the beach, and you can jump to those results or even jump into the individual video itself and see that meta-data actually visually represented on the timeline. So we make it considerably easier for customers to leverage the content they have in there archive or repurposing or for monetization.”
Masstech is also helping companies get their content out to market, offering a new product called Gallery, “aimed at allowing customers to set up a B2B content sales platform in minutes.”
“The set up creates a branded portal and allows our customers customers to be able to access, browse and search and browse all of the content within that archive portal and see all of that AI meta-data that I spoke about earlier, seeing that data represented on a timeline. So anybody who is looking to search and buy that content can use that enhanced experience using the AI data to be able to quickly narrow down the search, find a clip or even a segment of the clip they want to purchase, and they can purchase it quickly and easily from our customers within that Gallery platform.”
Masstech has also created a new visual file-based ingest tool called Gateway, aimed at “helping to reduce the overall cost of content acquisition and helping customers really move away from simple file based ingest of transferring it from one landing pad or one operations team to another, providing that validation, automatic registration into the archive as they ingest.”
GrayMeta
Matt Eaton, Managing Director EMEA for GrayMeta, a leader in transforming physical assets to digital, connecting to and accessing assets from anywhere in the world, and creating meaningful metadata using machine learning and AI services, also noted a renewed interest in archives during lockdown.
“Definitely with production and live sports coverage being disrupted, we’re seeing a lot of work being done to unlock the value of archives, make clips available to consumers and other distribution platforms,” said Eaton.
Eaton is also seeing customers restart digitization projects during lockdown. He pointed to a recent increase in interest in SAMMA, GrayMeta’s hardware/software solution for automatically or semi-automatically migrating content from videotape to digital form.
“There’s been an uptick in inquiries around our video digitization product SAMMA,” he said. “This has been used by archives to take decaying tapes that may only be played once and digitize them into multiple digital formats. And we’ve been working with a number of different clients in recent months, from collections in the Caribbean, to sports archives, to national heritage archives, looking to preserve and use their content more effectively right at the beginning of the supply chain to get them into a digital format.”
GrayMeta is also leveraging its Iris system, which enables access and playback of any video file type from the cloud or on-premise storage directly within a browser, to help “media companies and archives access their master assets remotely via home Broadband speeds.”.
“Our customers are also increasingly moving their content supply chains into the cloud, or storage hybrid models, that also require remote playback and QC,” he said. “So, at the start of 2020, GrayMeta had a plan for enhancing our Iris QC product to enable remote review and QC with visual audio scopes, but COVID has definitely accelerated that development plan for what we call ‘Iris Anywhere’.”
Eaton delved into the benefits of automating meta-data creation and content tagging using AI and machine learning, a key step in enabling the exploitation and monetization of archival content, using tools like GrayMeta’s Curio platform.
“We advocate implementing machine learning with a human in the loop,” he said. “And using this approach, we’ve found enriched metadata can save tasks that previously took months now take weeks, tasks that took weeks take days and so on. And some of those tasks that previously taken up to two days are taking a few minutes because they can find all those clips very quickly. Some of our customers have likened the search and discovery benefits of machine learning to helping them find needles in haystacks and I think this is a good analogy.”
InSync
Paola Hobson, Managing Director at InSync Technology Ltd, specialists in signal processing hardware and software for the professional broadcast and media industries, talked about the importance of repurposing existing material into multiple versions to get “the most content out in the shortest possible time.”
“Cost is one of the most important things to think about. Because content owners need to get as many versions of their material distributed as quickly as possible and keep the cost down, which means that you’re going to make more money out of it. Keeping the cost down with efficient workflows, for example parallel processing paths, you can deliver all the different versions of the content in the shortest possible time. Things like cloud base standards conversion, obviously InSynch has one, these are key enabler‘s because the content be routed through any number of software conversion instances, and then delivered to the distribution server or the play out server in the cloud. So it’s something that’s kind of there and waiting when the content is chosen.”
She also stressed the critical role of maintaining consistent quality, as well as future-proofing for long-term standards compliance.
“I think viewers are very conscious of quality. So any conversion that you might have to do on your content, for example if it’s frame rate conversion, because you’re taking material from a 50 Hz archive that needs to be broadcast at 59, or if you’re up converting, let’s say it’s HD material and you want to show it at UHD, or even in the case of some really old SD material, where are you might need to do both up conversion and an aspect ratio conversion, you really do need a good quality converter, otherwise people are going to be dissatisfied. And certainly for frame rate conversion you need a really good motion compensated converter. Now you can get a good motion compensated converter in software, which fits the workflow in the file domain. But even if you’ve got old material that’s coming off tape, you can convert it before you ingest it. For example, you can use a good hardware motion compensated converter. And I think the thing to think about really is about the quality longer-term, so you want to deliver relating to the current standards, but we’ve got to think of the future as well, whether that’s going to be more HDR variance, things like that. So getting your conversion right for all these different versions of the content that you’re going to take out of the archive and then store them as your new masters in those new formats, there you are, you’ve got them ready to go again for the future.”
Like other components of production workflow, standards conversion is also increasingly moving to the cloud.
“It’s not just about accessing the content remotely, it’s then what are you going to do with it,” she said. “Can you do, for example, standards conversions remotely. And certainly, if you have a cloud base workflow, this is definitely a place where you can then integrate a cloud-based standards convertor. So, for example, at InSync we have our Frame Former converter, that’s a cloud converter that you can also run it on premise. And the idea is that you can access it remotely, control it remotely. So if you go back to what James was talking about much earlier on, if your material is in the cloud already, so it’s in cloud storage , and then Matt’s tools are working in the cloud and you’ve found your content, and then you have your Frame Former converter in the cloud you can just pass it through and then generate all the frame rates and formats that you need and then put it back into the relevant cloud storage. So these are things which are happening now, they’re available now and they support exactly the workflows that we heard people talking about earlier on.”
Conclusion
As the COVID lockdown grinds on, media companies will continue to wrestle with any number of issues, from gaps in their programming schedules to the need to fill footage orders remotely, and will in turn look to optimize the enormous value of their content archives.
For companies with large troves of older, legacy media collections, this will mean a determined effort to digitize their analog media. Enhanced meta-data will be a fundamental factor in fully unlocking the value of existing content, and even fully digital archives like Asharq News will have to contend with ongoing cataloging issues, given that digital capture means that more footage can be generated. This is where AI and machine learning tools show enormous promise.
With work-from-home increasingly the new norm, hybrid cloud storage and workflows will be ever more essential. And in this global market, understanding and planning for standards conversions and compliance will be critical for companies that want to distribute their existing content across all available platforms and channels and maximize their ROI.
As Razib Chatterjee aptly noted, “on the main, this pandemic has fully endorsed the immense value archive brings to programming and schedules.” Going forward, it is safe to say that as workflow technologies continue to provide program makers with deeper access to archival resources, their value will only increase.
