You’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase, “time is money,” and that couldn’t be truer than in the broadcast world. Today’s broadcasters are handling a massive amount of live content and archived media assets. They need fast, efficient, and scalable solutions for the ingest, storage, management and monetization of content. Otherwise, they risk not being the first to deliver a story. 

At the recently concluded 2022 NAB Show New York, Newsbridge’s first broadcast trade show since our latest round of fundraising and North American expansion news, we spoke with broadcasters about their pain points. We look forward to bringing our disruptive technology to the U.S. market to alleviate key challenges facing local media companies.

AI & Cloud create a buzz

Conversations with broadcasters at the show confirmed what we’ve known for a while: AI-enabled, cloud-based solutions are propelling the broadcast industry forward. 

There are several reasons why.

Tapping into the value of content with AI

Most major U.S. broadcasters have been testing AI to automate parts of the production workflow. AI is commonly used today to generate subtitles via speech-to-text, and media companies see AI as the future for audiovisual production and media asset management. But using AI for indexing is a newer concept: it goes a step further, helping broadcasters with content discovery.

At NAB Show New York, a common theme that emerged from our discussions with broadcasters was that the AI they've evaluated for indexing had limitations. It did not provide tangible benefits to production workflows or make much difference to their bottom line. This is because many of the AI-based indexing products available on the market are not in-house proprietary software solutions; therefore they add costs, complexity and multiple points of failure.

Broadcasters need a reliable solution to improve content discovery, and Multimodal AI indexing and semantic search technology are the answer. With these technologies, media assets can be automatically enriched with timestamped metadata. While searching in a content archive, AI-driven metadata enables broadcasters to find exactly what they’re looking for, in a matter of minutes.

Multimodal AI indexing makes media easily searchable, findable, and resellable for broadcasters by merging detection results from face, text, objects, pattern, and transcription. What's especially unique about Newsbridge's Multimodal AI is that it uses four cognitive features compared with the other monomodal AI solutions on the market. The Multimodal AI indexing technology we demonstrated at NAB Show New York was called a “game changer” by the broadcasters we showed it to.

When content is easily searchable, it becomes reusable and unlocks new revenue streams.

Based on our experience working with broadcasters, every hour of archive is worth an estimated potential annual revenue of $100. Many media organizations are sitting on a content gold mine, and Multimodal AI Indexing is the key to cracking that open.

Generating new revenue from live and archived content

Today’s media companies spend an extensive amount of money on acquiring and producing content. But what happens to that content after it’s stored? 

Broadcasters need to make media asset collections available online to increase the value of their live and archived content. At NAB Show New York, multiple heads of archive for U.S. TV networks told us that their biggest struggle was quickly finding specific video footage and easily pushing it to potential buyers.     

Indexing content with Multimodal AI enables the creation of media asset collections in seconds. With solutions like Newsbridge’s AI-driven Media Marketplace, broadcasters give external buyers the opportunity to search, view, clip, and collect the media content they need, turning minutes of video into thousands of dollars in revenue.

Enhancing collaboration with hybrid cloud workflows

The COVID-19 global health crisis has accelerated the broadcast industry’s adoption of cloud-based production workflows. Making assets accessible to “anyone, anywhere” is a smart strategy for broadcasters. The cloud is flexible, scalable, and enables remote access to live and archived media assets. The result is easier, enhanced collaboration.     

Many larger media organizations are keeping their on-prem storage for now. We envision that hybrid workflows will play a key role in media and sports content asset management for the next five to 10 years. A hybrid approach offers the best of both worlds: unrestricted remote access for content collaboration and a deep archive with redundancy in case of an outage. In the future, we believe cloud-based solutions will dominate the broadcast production space.

Bringing innovation to content searchability

AI and cloud-based solutions provide tangible benefits to broadcasters, allowing them to create superior-quality content by simplifying media asset indexing and making archives searchable — both for producers and consumers. We’ve seen the success of the Newsbridge platform firsthand with European media companies, helping them create new revenue streams. 

While some broadcasters may already be selling their content, they’re only hitting the tip of the iceberg. There is so much untapped potential in media archives just waiting to be indexed and discovered. 

‍

Want to learn more about how Newsbridge can help your organization monetize live and archived media assets? Contact us here.