Media organisations are constantly in the process of creating new content, especially as demand from viewers has continued to increase. But what happens to content in the days, months and years after it’s been made, distributed and viewed? Is the content no longer valuable, or can media organisations find new ways of leveraging it?
These are the questions at the heart of the drive towards better asset management within the media industry. The large, traditional broadcasters and studios possess vast archives built up over many years which contain large amounts of content that can be reused to create further value. Yet their size also poses a significant challenge. Searching manually through such a collection is time consuming, meaning that simply finding a relevant piece of content for a particular project can prove to be a major stumbling block.
“Archives today can be in a pretty wide range of states,” explains Andy Beach, chief technology officer for media and entertainment at Microsoft. “The most basic version would be an archive that is just cataloguing the assets. Things may be very disorganised. You might just have basic information, such as programme titles, rather than rich, time-based metadata. That makes is hard for an organisation to know what the archive contains.”
Without knowing exactly what is inside its archive, it’s difficult for a media organisation to make meaningful use of the content it possesses. Many are therefore exploring an alternative solution made possible by artificial intelligence – an active archive. In an active archive, AI is used to analyse content and create rich pools of metadata to identify it. This allows users to quickly search through the archive for content relevant to their current task.
Microsoft is aiming to enable a new generation of media asset management tools with AI-powered capabilities (image: istock/Evgeniy Shkolenko
AI is the main foundational element of such a model, says Beach.
“In order to make an active archive, you truly need AI,” he says. “Without that, it’s just asset management. You need machines to have the ability to programmatically understand the content so you can then derive search capability from it and quickly scale that capability across a large volume of content. It’s all about taking the large pieces of data that we need to create and use alongside the content, then connecting that to the natural language processing search capabilities.”
Once in place, the search capabilities of an active archive can be used flexibly across an organisation for a wide range of purposes.
“There’s a tonne of value in using an active archive to leverage more of your content,” says Beach. “For example, you could look through a season of games for a sports league and find all the uses of a particular logo. Since you’re often paid per impression for that sponsorship, being able to report accurately on all the times that the logo appeared in a game helps you get paid faster. Likewise, when you’re creating new versions of content in a studio environment, you want to be able to rapidly go back and reference older material and possibly even pull that into the new production.”
Crucially, this process is far quicker than it ever could be in an ‘inactive’ archive without easily searchable data. This enables media companies to respond quickly to the changing interests of viewers, which are influenced by current events and trends.
“In the life cycle of the archive, you’re going to need to search for a new element at short notice,” says Beach. “For example, a topic such as solar eclipses can suddenly become very important and interesting. You might never have searched for eclipses before, but AI helps you quickly identify and train an element around what an eclipse looks like and what mentions of eclipses will look like. That allows you to scan the old archives and look for earlier references that you may not have been aware existed and leverage them as part of a new, relevant piece of content.”
Microsoft is using the foundational capabilities of the Microsoft Azure platform and its generative AI services such as those in Microsoft Data Lake and Fabric to help further develop the tools needed to build an active archive.
“The way that we’re going to help a customer in the media industry to create and maintain their active archives is by empowering a new generation of media asset management tools,” says Beach. “We’re going to be taking the tools that are already out there, then bringing new AI tools into their services and product lines, enabling organisations to leverage them inside of their environments.
He continues: “We’re also taking our first-party search, networking and computing capabilities and working directly with the organisations and internet service providers to make sure that an archive is as optimised and cost effective as possible. We’re making sure that an active archive doesn’t become costly for our customers and is instead an effective way of increasing and scaling their production environments.”
Microsoft is also working closely with its partners to enable their solutions and deliver value for their customers.
“The partners are a critical part of our ecosystem,” says Beach. “In this space, I think about the work we’re doing with partners like IPV, Avid, Adobe and Unity, with some of their asset management capabilities. You also have startups like Deep Dub who are doing localisation of assets in active archives as part of their workflows.”
Another key partner is Prime Focus Technologies, which is collaborating with Microsoft to combine its media asset management and AI technologies with Microsoft’s Azure cloud and generative AI capabilities to develop new solutions for managing media content libraries. The two companies aim to bridge the gap between on-premises and cloud-based solutions, allowing organisations to transition smoothly as they modernise their media asset management strategy and create active archives.
“A significant portion of media archives remains inaccessible or underutilised, and this partnership signifies a substantial leap towards maximising revenue streams, harnessing the power of AI as a strategic catalyst for growth and success,” says Saumya Dwivedi, executive vice president at Prime Focus Technologies.
Ultimately, Beach sees active archives as a way to empower employees across an organisation, helping facilitate new ways of working.
“It’s about putting intellectual property in the hands of everyone in the company and making it faster for them to do their jobs,” says Beach. “Once you do this, there’s an almost never-ending number of ideas and applications for them to explore.”
Analyst perspective
Paul Kosac, media analyst and director at Entropy, offers his view on the impact that active archives will have on the industry.
“Leveraging Microsoft Azure, FAST services can now harness massive libraries with personalised and targeted advertising powered by advanced analytics and AI-driven insights from Azure Cognitive Services,” he says. “The recent integration of multimodal models, such as GPT-4 from OpenAI, available through Azure OpenAI, further enhance these capabilities by providing sophisticated natural language understanding and generation.”
Partner perspectives
We asked selected Microsoft partners how they are using the latest Microsoft technology to help media organisation to make more effective use of their archives.
“Leveraging the power of Microsoft technologies, particularly the advanced capabilities of Copilot, Deepdub refines pronunciation and adapts phrases to ensure both accuracy and cultural resonance. This process guarantees that the emotional impact and authenticity of the original media are preserved, enabling creators to deliver compelling and culturally resonant content on a global scale,” says Oz Krakowski, chief business development officer at Deepdub.
“IPV’s collaboration with Microsoft transforms media stored in Azure into an easily accessible, streaming, and highly searchable active archive. The powerful search engine within Curator, IPV’s new generation of Media Asset Management, uses AI-generated metadata from Azure AI Video Indexer, to accurately surface any archived clip, driving users to their highest value content in seconds,” said Daniel Mathew, chief revenue officer at IVP.
“Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) and Microsoft have embarked on a collaboration that leverages their complementary strengths in exploring active library scenarios. With PFT’s profound expertise in AI-based media asset management, localisation and workflow optimisation solutions, and Microsoft’s robust technological infrastructure, particularly through Azure’s cloud capabilities and large language models for AI, the partnership brings innovative solutions for managing extensive libraries of multimedia content,” said Ramki Sankaranarayanan, founder, president and CEO at Prime Focus Technologies.
“Quickture is the premiere AI video editing solution for the professional market. We help build compelling unscripted stories for reality TV, documentary, news, sports, corporate and social video. We’re leveraging Azure OpenAI to analyse production companies’ footage and build a discoverable archive of story elements they can use to assemble great stories, fast,” said Irad Eyal, founder of Quickture.
Read more from these partners in the Summer 2024 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.