Vidispine: Delivering API-based High-End Content Management

Over the past decade Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry has seen a disruptive change. It has grown from provider driven to consumer driven. With the evolution of cloud-based video streaming companies like YouTube and Netflix, and multiple distribution platforms and formats, the conventional M&E industry is striving for delivering flexibility in business models and operations. Therefore, today cost control and adopting OPEX-oriented architecture has become essential for marketers to recoup the industry. Having over a decade of experience in the M&E industry, co-founders of Vidispine Erik Ahlin (CEO) and Isak Jonsson (CTO) have pointed out, “With the growing demand for consumer video, it is becoming a dominating part of the overall internet traffic.” In addition, “today cloud hosting for videos in M&E industry is enormously in demand among the media professionals.” Addressing these evolving market trends and needs, enterprise grade Media Asset Management (MAM) software vendor Vidispine has developed REST API, a rich interface for creating custom media management solutions.

“Anyone who tried quickly realized that video is significantly harder to manage and integrate than text and images,” says Jonsson. “Sowe have developed a broadcast grade Media Asset Management (MAM) and standardized middleware platformVidispine PaaS, which works as a multiapp content repository for complete asset life cycle,” shares Ahlin.The platform is well documented with a set of RESTful APIs which transforms the video files as easily searchable and broadcast able and cloud compatible media assets.

“We componentized the videos so that existing infrastructure can be repur-posed,” says Ahlin. Unique in its own technicality, comprehensiveness and scalability, Vidispine’s MAM platform combines format management and transcoding, advanced metadata management, multi-site replication and non-linear editing integration. “The MAM platform is available for on-premise or private cloud installation from major cloud providers.”

Based on the Vidispine PaaS platform, the company has developed media content discovery tool Vi-diXplore. It is Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, providing a robust and easy-to-use graphical interface for media management system hosted in the cloud. “VidiXplore provides media professionals the ability to find, enrich and share large volume media assets from desktops, servers and cloud storage systems,” shares Ahlin. The technology automatically creates SEO-optimized tags and text for any media including video.

Vidispine has assisted a large number of companies in the media and entertainment space. To exemplify, Vidispine has helped marketing communication professionals who required a solution to identify their video content for easily repurpose and share content within a very limited time. However, very often their content was scattered in the system and was only found based on file name and folder structure. Vidispine helped the marketers with VidiXplore’s proxy and thumbnails for speedy browsing. Also the company harvested metadata to make their audio-visual content searchable. By leveraging Vidispine’s solution, marketing communication professionals could arrange all their videos in a folder, drive or mount which ultimately made the contents recoverable with minimal effort.

For the years ahead, Vidispine foresees to integrate their platform and other offerings with media popular repositories like Dropbox, AWS, Office365, YouTube, Google, Azure, and BOX.com. Also, “we are planning to make our MAM solution suitable for cross device, audience, content source and means of interactivity,” envisions Jonsson. “Ultimately, we want to become the de facto standard for innovation platform for video based storytelling,” Ahlin concludes in an optimistic note.