The rise of digital photography and the easy with that pictures are taken nowadays has resulted in enormous image archives both in your private life, and in your work life. Every company, nowadays, has hundreds or thousands of digital photos lying around on hard disks or other storage media. Product presentations, events, R&D pictures…digital images are taken everywhere.

And many companies do not realize that they represent a really valuable asset that can be used and exploited. But for that you need to consolidate the different image storage locations in one place and use some kind of digital asset management (DAM) software, so you can tag the images appropriately and retrieve them whenever you need.

Collecting and storing pictures is not the same as being able to find what you need in the pool of images. With a DAM you can do exactly that. And the process is easier than you may think.

Traditionally, sorting a picture collection is a tremendous amount of work. You have to look at the images, write down what they contain and add the metadata either to the EXIF field or to external metadata files (like XMP) if the original file format does not support EXIF. This is fine for 25 images, maybe 100, but not several thousand. Hence some help is needed.

And it comes in the form of AI, as many other things nowadays. Modern media archiving solutions, like our own Videoma Archive, use AI analyzers to open the images and “look” at them, identifying everything they contain. It can find faces, places, objects, and make general descriptions of the image content, like “trees, street, houses, bench, people” which is very much appreciated when archiving a picture collection. All of this information is stored as metadata together with the image and can be edited or completed by hand if necessary. That way, you can organize and tag your picture collection automatically in 24/7 and only change what you need, when you need it. Usually, over 90% of the info is added correctly by the system, so you don’t need to spend much time revising the keywords and tags. And, if you want to, it can also unify the picture formats into a specific one (usually JPG) but always keeping the original linked, for when you need it.

We live in the era of cloud. There is no doubt about it. And this means that your picture collection is a good candidate to end up online, simplifying access from anywhere, by any device. But that is not the only advantage. You also get geographic redundancy in the storage systems, automatic backups, and a secure access, which is always nice to have, especially when you put your image collection online, so non-authorized people cannot access it.

Therefore, having your images in the cloud is always a win-win situation and allows easy access from other branches of the same company or organization, even if in other countries.

Understanding Video Management Systems (VMS): 

At its core, a video management system is a software platform designed to manage, store, and analyze video footage from surveillance cameras or other sources. VMS provides users with centralized access to video content, allowing for easy monitoring, retrieval, and playback of recorded footage. This centralized approach streamlines video management processes, improves security, and enhances situational awareness. 

• OCR (Optical Character Recognition): Integrating OCR technology within VMS enables the automatic extraction of text from video footage, allowing for easy indexing, searching, and retrieval of relevant information. 
• Subtitling: VMS can incorporate subtitling features to enhance accessibility and comprehension of video content, particularly in multi-language environments or for individuals with hearing impairments. 
• ALPR (Automatic License Plate Recognition): ALPR technology integrated within VMS enables automatic identification and tracking of license plates, enhancing security and enabling applications such as parking management and law enforcement. 

Understanding Video Content Management Systems (VCMS): 

Video Content Management Systems (VCM) are robust platforms designed to organize, store, and facilitate the seamless retrieval and sharing of video content. As businesses increasingly rely on video for communication, marketing, training, and surveillance, the implementation of a VCM system becomes instrumental in handling the growing volume of visual assets. 

1. Efficient Workflows: By centralizing video assets and streamlining access, VCM systems significantly reduce the time employees spend searching for, downloading, or uploading video content. This results in more efficient workflows and increased productivity. 
2. Enhanced Collaboration: Teams can collaborate seamlessly on video projects with the help of a VCM system, providing a unified platform for sharing ideas, providing feedback, and ensuring that everyone is working with the latest version of the content. 
3. Cost Savings: VCM systems contribute to cost savings by eliminating the need for excessive storage space, reducing redundancy in video creation, and optimizing the utilization of existing video assets. 
4. Quick Access for Decision-Making: In scenarios where quick access to specific video content is crucial, a well-implemented VCM system ensures that decision-makers can swiftly retrieve the necessary information, aiding in timely and informed decision-making. 

In conclusion, adopting a Video Content Management System is not merely an operational choice; it’s a strategic investment in business efficiency. Organizations that prioritize the effective management of their video assets through VCM systems gain a competitive edge in the modern business landscape. 

Invest in a VCM system as VIDEOMA ARCHIVE that aligns with your business goals, enhances collaboration, and streamlines operations. As the digital era continues to evolve, leveraging the power of video content management becomes imperative for organizations seeking to thrive in a visually driven world. 

As we said in the intro, in many companies there are hundreds or thousands of videos scattered all over the different storage systems or hard disks. All of this footage comes from the most diverse sources, like presentations, advertising, internal demos, product showcases or client demos. It exists in a variety of formats and, in most cases, each department has its own small pool of video files.

But this is not effective, because there is no clear way to find a certain video, when you need it. This is why we call this a “dark video archive”. No one knows exactly what is in it, until someone opens and watches the videos.

But this also isn’t effective. And there are three main reasons for it:

1. Time required. Watching tens of hours of video in order to find a segment we know exists somewhere is not efficient. And watching hundreds of hours is just not feasible.
2. Scattered files. As we already said, usually there is no central repository of video. So if you need a certain material you may have to talk to different people, in different departments, to find out what they have and where it is. And this takes time.
3. Ephemeral results. Also, after you finish your project, the results you have obtained vanish again. The next time someone needs to find something similar to what you were looking for, he or she has to start from the beginning. All over again.

Once you have all the videos under control and the ability to search through them, the task of building your own training videos has become much easier. If you know what you want to include in the training video, you only need to search for the material in all of your new formed repository. Videoma will locate all the clips that match your search and allow you to export them with just a couple of clicks.

Once you have the base material is it just a case of stitching it together, in order to build your training unit. In fact, you can return this montage to Videoma so it will be analyzed and indexed. This way, all the employees looking to learn a specific topic do not need to watch the whole video, but can skip directly to the point where it is explained. Again, a huge time saver.

Don’t let video material pile up in your company’s storage, but put it to work importing it into an EVCM so it can be searched by its contents with ease, and reused. In this use case the main goal is to build training video from all the material already available in the company, but there are, obviously, many more uses for an EVCM we will see in future articles.

Today it is trivial to record a video. Just whip out your phone, and press “Record”. And what is true for personal use is also true for companies. Tradeshows, events, product demos, product test, research facilities or laboratories…all of them generate video for different purposes. All these files end up either in Marketing, in research or as documentation. But what happens after that? Usually the video files go to into some storage system. And are slowly forgotten.

As easy as it is to analyze the contents of a database, a spreadsheet or a text document to gain some insight of the information they contain, as difficult it is to do the same with video or audio files. Fortunately, artificial intelligence has advanced analyzers that can transcribe audio from a video to text (Speech-to-Text) or recognize faces or voices. Or look for specific sound patterns.

Once you have everything in an easily searchable EVCM you are ready to monetize these video assets. But how and where? There are four main ways:

1. Free to watch with Ads. Most known of these is naturally YouTube. This kind of monetization is based on what is called Advertising Video on Demand or AVOD. For each view and click you get a certain amount. There are other platforms like TikTok, Twitch, DailyMotion, Vimeo and others.
2. Subscription services. Depending on the type of your videos you may decide that platforms like Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime may be the way to go. These services, usually called Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) make their users pay a monthly fee, and then they can watch whatever they like.
3. Transactional services. In this case, examples are Amazon Prime o YouTube, for example. This type of service is called Transactional Video on Demand (TVOD) and they allow you to rent or buy clips for a certain price. In this category you can also opt for Stock sites like Shutter Stock, iStock, Adobe Stock and others.
4. DIY. Put your content to sale or rent on your own website. This requires more work on your part, but you don’t have to pay any fees to the platform that does the selling in the three cases aboveWhich one of the options to choose depends entirely on your material, how you want it to be monetized and what expectations you have for the gains.

Which one of the options to choose depends entirely on your material, how you want it to be monetized and what expectations you have for the gains.

Having hundreds or thousands of video clips sitting somewhere on a harddisk or company storage system is an inefficient way of using a material that could be potentially monetized in different forms. The best way to deal with an extensive company video library is to tag and categorize everything, so you can find what you need in seconds, not weeks. For that, a EVCM like Videoma Archive is an invaluable aid. Once you have everything categorized, you know exactly what you have and think of ways of monetizing or reusing the content to extract all the value that it has.