Automating a data-driven era

In today’s media landscape, analytics has become a critical factor to enhancing the performance of a media company. It provides the operator with insights into the entire content lifecycle and viewer’s video consumption behaviour.

Indeed, the growing trend of personalised video experience has to be supported by a set of data which every broadcaster and content service provider must collect at every opportunity or touchpoint.

Operators are keen to tap big data to effectively plan and manage their content distribution chain, thus optimising their resources to drive up revenue.

Ivan Verbesselt, senior vice-president of marketing at Nagra, identifies data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) as the keys to automating and improving customer service operations.

He points out that these elements can help in reducing churn, deliver more relevant advertising, personalise content recommendations, and help media operators to optimise the full value of their content portfolio.

“While lots of other industries have harnessed data as the new currency, pay-TV has been comparatively slow to adapt. Few have been able to properly collect and use data to gain proper insights,” he explains.

“Through sensible use of proper insight, operators can deliver better business results and free up resources for next-generation platform investments.”

To empower media companies to make better strategic decisions, Nagra developed an AI-driven data analytics platform called “Nagra Insight” that enables service providers to make better business decisions to improve their business line, take control of the data they own, and create personalised actions that drive monetisation.

The solution leverage big data and AI to drive every aspect of an operator’s business, predict the individual behaviour of TV viewers such as propensity to churn, to purchase a package or to consume specific content.

Nagra Insight supports four critical areas, namely subscriber value, content, operations and advertising.

For subscriber value, Nagra Insight is able to recommend relevant actions to acquire and retain subscribers, upsell, and offer packaged content. It provides data on service usage, on a per-subscriber basis, and enables the operator to optimise the user interface and customer experience.

In driving operation efficiency, Nagra Insight aggregates data from all networks to increase speed of diagnosis of network issues, keep content delivery network (CDN) costs under control, and manage the quality of video displayed on over-the-top (OTT) services.

Operators may also deploy Nagra Insight to increase programmatic TV advertising revenues. It delivers linear slots inventory and valuation, and enables audience qualification, advertising attributes, demographics and interests.

As a result, advertising is more precise, targeted, efficient and cost-effective, says Nagra.

Besides implementing analytics tools, it is also critical for media operators to keep their content library organised while delivering them to the widest audience possible. As such, Nagra is offering DVnor MAM solutions that provide a simplified and automated workflows for video-on-demand (VoD) content — thereby delivering video quality, advanced audio and subtitling features, secure storage and distribution, and quick-start VoD services.

One key component is the DVnor Organizer, an end-to-end MAM solution that gives operators control of their master files with automated ingestion, quality control and storage.

Within DVnor Organizer is DVnor Collaborative Player, a post-production service that allows third parties to work simultaneously on a single master file.

DVnor Organizer leverage Nagra content security with integrated conditional access multi-DRM, as well as NexGuard watermarking, providing operator-specific watermarking and forensic watermarking for 4K/Ultra HD (UHD) and early release.

For VSN, the company’s flagship VSNExplorer MAM software offers the tools necessary to manage the media once the production process has finished.

VSNExplorer is integrated via an API with the automatic metadata detection systems of IBM Watson, Google, Microsoft Azure and Etiqmedia. According to VSN, the integration of these AI tools has empowered media management to become “much more efficient, accurate and easy”, as it allows for a greater control of the available content, both in storage and being ingested.

The technology is integrated within the platform and so it enables automatic metadata detection, advanced search, automatic translation, captioning and subtitling, and even facilitate content moderation and information research.

Another new addition to VSNExplorer is NewsConnect, a web plugin for news and live production.

NewsConnect allows for the customisation of a news production work environment, bringing together third-party tools required and making them accessible through the newsroom computer system (NRCS) interface of the user’s choice.

Pateria Corral, marketing director of VSN, explains: “There are many benefits in moving from a multiple interface environment to the single interface approach that NewsConnect offers.

“Most importantly, it reduces the time spent in creating stories. Journalists and editors now have simple, fast access to the tools that enables them to write their news pieces; locate the video files needed; edit them; see how the final news piece will look in real-time; and send those news pieces to broadcast or Web, and publish to social media from almost anywhere in the world.”

NewsConnect allows the visualisation of all the assets and videos stored in the VSNExplorer MAM system – from within the interface of NRCS including Anova, ENPS from AP, Inception from Ross Video and Octopus. NewsConnect is also interoperable with iNews from Avid.

One user of VSN solutions is Imagen Televisión, a Mexican TV network. The network has installed the MAM module of the VSNExplorer platform for file location and recovery, and the VSNExplorer BPM module for automating the entire workflow up until the content is sent to the video servers.

Completing the network’s end-to-end continuity automation workflow is the installation of two VSNMulticom master control room systems that allow for segmentation of clips and distribution in a differentiated manner at a regional level to offer different programming in territorial disconnections for advertising and electoral reasons.

Another company offering solutions for media management is Grass Valley, whose GV Stratus video production and content management system can be used to support non-linear production with the addition of enhanced news orchestration capabilities, including integrated social media publishing, monitoring and tracking.

GV Stratus is further enhanced with the addition of Momentum, a media workflow engine that includes functions like metadata entry and revision, proxy file playback, and content re-versioning.

Users can map their business processes into a Momentum workflow, and modify or rearrange them accordingly to their business needs.

Momentum is also packed with analysis tools that display essential system performance data like waiting time, processing time, and peak usage.

When living and working in a data-driven era, it is indeed critical to leverage BI to gain proper insights and momentum to propel your business processes and performance.