Media content creation and consumption are rapidly evolving. As a result, the media industry is now more competitive than ever. To maintain a competitive edge and deliver optimal viewer experience, media businesses must optimize their operational efficiency, maintain flexibility to adapt to changing demands, and safeguard against potential threats. However, achieving these goals can be challenging.
To get expert opinions on how media professionals can overcome the hurdles and maximize their operational efficiency, Leanne Tomlin (Marketing Director, Perifery) hosted a webinar featuring Nicholas Llewellyn (Solutions Architect, Perifery) KC Santos (Senior Channel Director, Perifery) and Matt Tape (VP of Media Workflow & Solutions, Cinesys). Here is a brief overview of the key points discussed in the webinar.
Challenges faced by modern day media professionals
Leanne kicked off the discussion by asking the panel about the major challenges that media professionals face when it comes to ensuring operational efficiency and scalability.
Nicholas felt that there was a slowdown in the marketplace until recently, and so many businesses were reluctant to replace their legacy systems. He added that there has been a resurgence of sorts lately, and so media business leaders are more actively looking at bringing in newer, more efficient technologies.
Matt, based on the experiences from his current role in Cinesys and his past roles as a content creative in media companies, said that while the IT teams and content creatives have their own respective set of challenges, the lack of collaboration between the two teams is a key issue. He added that the content creatives need to get rid of their dependencies on IT teams for issues like finding media, expanding storage capacity, etc.
KC stated that while the media business leaders seek operational efficiency, security, and scalability, they are looking at options that can be integrated with pre-existing systems. “Having something that can help you obtain a return on yesterday's investment but leave you open to take advantage of what's coming out—I think that’s what customers are looking for,” said KC. Nicholas concurred with KC, stating that he has observed several decision-makers becoming extremely enthusiastic upon learning about Perifery storage solutions' ability to integrate with pre-existing storage, as it holds significant value for them.
Addressing the scalability needs of media organizations
Leanne then asked the panel how Perifery storage solutions can address the growing scalability demands of media businesses.
KC opined that the hardware-agnostic and interoperable nature of Perifery solutions makes them an enticing choice. Perifery solutions enable businesses to make use of their pre-existing infrastructure and expand easily when required. He added that as media businesses grow, their storage requirements grow rapidly as well, and it is important to have offline storage that can scale in parallel with other storage media like NAS, LTO, and cloud.
Matt echoed KC’s thoughts and pointed out that scaling up with Perifery solutions is as simple as just adding a rack of additional hardware to your stack. He went on to add that while scaling up is simple and easy, the icing on the cake is the value delivered by Perifery storage solutions to content creatives. “What's really cool is the new stuff you guys (Perifery) are doing and taking the next steps on what you can do with that hardware... and how they are making creative lives easier and better,” Matt said.
Nicholas added that the private storage clusters that media organizations can build with Perifery give them complete control over their data and who can access it. He also added that some of Perifery’s customers in the UK have leveraged Perifery solutions to create a shared storage space within their datacentres. This shared space is then metered out securely to their partners and third-party businesses, enabling redistribution and reception of content from different sources.
Flexibility to go the hybrid way
Matt then pointed out that Perifery offers media organizations the flexibility to choose between CapEx and OpEx models. He noted that he is witnessing an increasing number of media businesses reverse migrating from cloud to on-prem, a trend that aligns with what our experts discussed in a previous webinar regarding the selection of cloud, on-prem, or hybrid solutions.
KC agreed with Matt and added that by ensuring that the content resides on-prem, Perifery provides media businesses with complete data ownership. He went on to state that Perifery can also support businesses that are looking to go hybrid and grow both on premise and in the cloud. He stated, "We provide the flexibility to scale up either on-prem or in a hybrid approach, and we can act as a 'connector' to enable that true on-demand content mobility."
Live Demo of Perifery’s AI Capabilities
Following the discussion, Nicholas gave a live demo of the AI capabilities of Perifery solutions.
AI-generated metadata to make poker videos easily searchable and more valuable
To start with, Nicholas logged on to Vision—the user interface of Perifery storage solutions. A folder containing some videos of professionals playing poker was used for the first part of the demo. Nicholas showcased how, in addition to standard metadata like file names and modified data, Perifery adds AI-generated audio transcripts, summaries, keywords, etc. for each video. Perifery team worked with the customer and trained the AI model to comprehend the mechanics of poker and identify the contest winner's name in each video. Nicholas was also able to showcase how the object recognition model of Perifery was able to detect the poker hand of each player and provide timestamp-based metadata with the corresponding hand. Every time a customer adds a new poker video through Perifery Vision, Perifery Vision automatically adds the AI-generated metadata. Nicholas also pointed out that the entire AI capabilities are run on-prem, in the same rack as the storage where the video assets are stored, with no necessity of an internet connection.
Finding baseball players presence in archived videos through facial recognition
Nicholas focused on facial recognition in the second part of his demo. He showed how several baseball players’ faces were used to train Perifery’s AI model. After sufficient training, the confidence level of the AI model grew to be high enough to detect players’ faces in archived videos. Nicholas demonstrated how to use this facial recognition AI model to identify videos featuring a specific player, and how to utilize the timestamp in the metadata to precisely locate the player's appearance in the video. He added that this model can be trained to detect anyone’s face and not just the faces of sports players or popular people.
Object recognition to ease the creation of product-specific content libraries
Nicholas concluded his demo by showing how object recognition works. He spoke about how Perifery worked with a customer to train an AI model that is capable of not just detecting an object to be a vacuum cleaner but recognizing the exact model of the vacuum cleaner. Nicholas clarified that one can run multiple AI models on the same assets. For instance, you can combine a well-trained license plate detection model with other AI models for tasks like sentiment extraction and transcription.
Parting thoughts: The goodness of AI is better on-premises
To conclude the webinar, Matt pointed out how several cloud-based AI solutions charge by the minute or hour, which makes them unaffordable for large libraries. But Perifery solutions do not just add value to new incoming assets but can be conveniently used for petabyte-scale data that media companies already own. Nicholas added that even large unsearchable libraries with no metadata can be made very useful and valuable through the AI capabilities of Perifery storage solutions. KC opined that media businesses often have hundreds of thousands of objects and getting them all enriched with intelligent metadata through non-storage solutions would be an expensive and tedious ordeal. He emphasized the fact that Perifery solutions can enrich media assets with intelligent metadata while they continue to reside on-prem.
Learn more
To learn more about how Perifery is supporting the media industry with storage solutions that are tailored for modern-day media workflows, explore our case studies. If you missed the live webinar, you can watch on-demand now.
