IBC Learnings: How AI is transforming the media and entertainment landscape
After three years without the show, we were excited to attend IBC 2022. There is lots to digest still from such a tremendous showcase, but there are some recurring themes that particularly stood out this year. One of these is how AI is transforming the M&E space by improving efficiency and enhancing customer experience. During the show, we had the opportunity to speak to some of the companies behind this transformation and gather three of the key trends behind the revolution:
Cloud-based library management is no longer the future of media operations, it’s the present
In today’s cloud-based, file-driven world of digital media supply chains, media and entertainment professionals need an entirely new set of tools to operate at maximum efficiency. This is what led Visual Data to build VIDA Content OS, the next stage in SaaS library management.
At IBC, the company was launching the cloud-native content OS to the European market, demoing VIDA’s full solution and its latest applications.
VIDA streamlines end-to-end media workflows and gives users complete control over their content in a secure, agile and central environment. Its SaaS model flexes to fit business needs, offering a unique, next-gen suite of features and capabilities, including natural language-based clip searching and viewing, unlimited users, as-is library migration, direct distribution to more than 500 partners and a user-friendly “shopping cart” functionality to facilitate secure content purchases.
With an intuitive library interface and multi-cloud back-end, users have access to as much storage as needed with the security and searchability required to capitalise on the growing worldwide media demand. For organisations of all sizes, VIDA’s streamlined processes significantly improve ordering velocity, customer service and response times.
Cloud-based library management is a reality in today’s world and having the right partner who can deliver a flexible, scalable and agile solution will help companies move forward at a pace that fits their needs while meeting demand.
Investment continues to support the endless accumulation of content
Every two years, the volume of content produced worldwide doubles. More content produced = more content stored. Faced with the challenge of managing this endless stream of new video, photo and audio content, Broadcasters, Sports Rights-Holders and Brands must find a way to scale the indexing and archiving of their media assets, and make them accessible from anywhere at any time. Organizations also increasingly seek to tap into their valuable archives, and reduce their carbon footprint in line with corporate sustainability goals.
Newsbridge, the French AI & Cloud Media company, provides unprecedented access to content through its disruptive Multimodal AI Indexing and Cloud Media Hub. Its AI automatically identifies faces, objects, logos, written text, transcribes audio and provides semantic context. Be it for managing and accessing live recordings, clipping highlights, future-friendly archiving, content retrieval or content showcasing and monetization, Newsbridge’s scalable product solution enables smart and efficient media asset management.
At the show, Newsbridge confirmed a round of 7 million euros in Series A funding to continue its expansion to the US market, and hire top AI and Media Engineering talent to continue its R&D in Multimodal AI Indexing for media assets. The source of the investment comes from Supernova Invest, with continued support from VC Elaia Partners and angel investor Dominique Edelin.
Newsbridge has more than doubled its recurring revenue in the last 12 months and recent new customer wins including football clubs Bayer Leverkusen and Olympique de Marseille, German public broadcaster SWR and media company Brut.
The key to efficiency lies in ‘In-Video Intelligence’
It was a very pleasant surprise to come across Synchronized, one of this years’ debutants. A company to continue watching out for, Synchronized is described as the industry-leading ‘In-Video Intelligence’ service provider, and at IBC continued the momentum for a start-up that has already achieved AWS Machine Learning Competency status in Applied AI and seen the IVI platform adopted by French broadcaster TF1 and M6.
Synchronized’s IVI platform transforms linear and passive videos into interactive videos as flexible and powerful as hypertext. It does this using proprietary AI/ML tools to understand the content of a video and enrich it with immediate usable metadata. Once enriched, these videos are as interactive as a hypertext document, with search, indexing, browsing, and web capabilities.
At IBC, media professionals had the chance to see the full power of the Synchronized In-Video Intelligence suite in action. From a Smart-Thumbnails service that automates the process of high-quality video thumbnail creation to the Smart Ad-breaks feature that ensures automatic placement for ad breaks in a video, visitors can explore how their editorial workflows can be augmented and streamlined with cutting edge AI assisted automation.
