34
ROUND TABLE Content Management
of what has obvious value and start by digitising and cataloguing that, then go through the rest and decide what you want to do. There is no ‘one size fits all’ here. It depends on the content type, how you are trying to monetise it and who you are trying to monetise it with. It depends on the market you’re aiming for. There is no right or wrong answer, technically. You first need a plan of who you want to sell to. GOODY GROUP: What should our plan be in terms of storage and preservation of the original materials? Some of the crates we received today stank of vinegar. That can’t be a good sign, can it? IAN MOTTASHED: If you can make reasonable digital archive copies of your most deteriorated content, then you’ve been lucky and you can say goodbye to your originals – and, yes, that means incineration. It can be tough to lose a tangible asset, but if they are going to be unplayable in a matter of months or years it’s time to move format ASAP. Storing volatile formats – and digital formats approaching obsolescence – will cost a small fortune anyway, and will require considerable expertise and controlled environments. Even if your assets are all digitised and whirring away on a hard drive somewhere – in the cloud or on-prem – the challenge remains. You’re now in a world of long-term format migration, disaster recovery and backups. KEVIN SAVINA: No, that’s not a good sign! But preserving decaying film is outside our area of expertise! Most of the archives I’ve been involved in are historical archives of radio stations and TV stations, so most of it is on tape. And they try to digitise their material as fast as possible. GOODY GROUP: One big problem we will face is determining what we own the rights to. In some cases there is no documented chain of ownership. What are some of the best ways we can authenticate and verify our assets and clearly establish ownership in the future? IAN MOTTASHED: That’s one for the lawyers. KEVIN SAVINA: The first thing to do would be to create a well-documented ownership data model in the database
that will reference and catalogue all your material, because your knowledge of rights ownership will probably evolve over time. You’ll want to put a well-thought- out ownership metadata model into the cataloguing system, as well as a lifecycle around the rights. The second thing is to give people who believe they have ownership of the content a means of feeding data back into the system. It would be part of the presentation layer of the media and of the catalogue to allow potential rights owners of any of this material to add information to the system. If someone comes with ownership claims, it means there is a clear path to that information. GOODY GROUP: What should our plan be for storage and retrieval once elements are digitised? And how can we best make the archive accessible to our potential customers? VIVEK KHEMANI: Using custom-built AI models, one can tag various features in the content, such as characters, age, gender, brand logos, locale, luminance, or even specific moments like a red card/yellow card in football or specific colour palettes for brands. All of that can be tagged YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF RIGHTS OWNERSHIP WILL PROBABLY EVOLVE OVER TIME
and stored in content catalogues, which makes accessing them efficient. Once the content is tagged at this granularity, users can simply use filters to access and extract the desired content. For example, if one can access and extract all the goals scored by Messi all at once using a smart catalogue, it becomes much easier than picking them out manually. IAN MOTTASHED: You’ll be needing playable proxies if you want to make the archive accessible. There’s no point digitising the archive if the content isn’t unlocking value and becoming available to a new audience. Factor in workflows, storage and a platform capable of finding and playing back those proxy versions. KEVIN SAVINA: This comes back again to the question of who the potential customers are. When you start wanting to monetise content, you will have a different strategy depending on whether you want to monetise in a b2c environment, a b2b environment or both. Some of our customers will have separate portals for their b2c strategy and their b2b strategy. Right now, we’re doing work with the Bundesliga. Their back-end catalogue is all of the content from all their football games for several decades. A subset of that is made accessible through a public-facing portal, and a wider subset is made available to their b2b customers through a separate portal, where people have the ability to look through collections and themes. If you have a well-organised
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook