Crystal ball: Where is the industry headed?

Infrastructure changes

The data shows an understanding that an important component to enabling growth of multi-platform services are new approaches to media asset management. New workflows will require file-based solutions to help media producers orchestrate not just video and audio content, but also the media’s associated metadata. It’s this metadata that will enable a new level of workflow automation and optimization. Why is that important? Because automation will be required to achieve the scale necessary to produce the increasingly personalized content that audiences will demand. Respondents believe that such metadata-driven workflows will drive operational agility, create OPEX savings and ultimately lead to new business models.

While there are many new opportunities to monetize content, most media organizations admit that they cannot even access the programming they own.  Survey respondents estimate that on average, more than 35 percent of their archives have the potential for profit but that those programs are inaccessible today — primarily because of technological reasons.

The cloud and metadata

The ability to profitably embrace new distribution and service personalization models will require cloud technology. Yet fewer than 25 percent of broadcasters are actually using cloud today. Even so, more than 75 percent are currently exploring future cloud deployments.

By systems component, multi-screen distribution is the most commonly deployed application in the cloud today. The next most popular cloud-based task is storage. However, the applications that will see the fastest transition to the cloud are editing and production systems.

This illustrates that the cloud is not just going to be driven by cost savings. Cloud-based collaboration platforms are a major enabler of new flexible ways of working. This, of course, has implications for the design of the broadcast and production facilities. Forty-eight percent of respondents believe that the production facility will become completely virtual with five years. That share rises to 72 percent over 10 years.

So what’s next for workflow automation? The majority of respondents, 75.5 percent, said that automated metadata and title annotation will be where they look next for automation.