Managing the explosion in global video

Every minute, of every hour, of every day, of every week, bil­lions of giga­bytes of online video are streamed around the globe. Accord­ing to Cis­co, in the next two years video-on-demand traf­fic will near­ly dou­ble, that’s equiv­a­lent to ten bil­lion DVDs a month uploaded and streamed on the inter­net. Video now rep­re­sents 60 per cent of glob­al data and the impli­ca­tions of its growth are dif­fi­cult to over­state.

“Any­one can pro­duce high-qual­i­ty video con­tent eas­i­ly, cheap­ly and quick­ly using their smart­phone and share it instant­ly with oth­ers around the globe. It’s utter­ly ubiq­ui­tous. In the last decade there’s been an explo­sion of video and it looks set to con­tin­ue unabat­ed,” explains Char­lie Hor­rell, chief exec­u­tive of Ima­gen, a video man­age­ment plat­form.

This expo­nen­tial rise in video con­tent isn’t just com­ing from user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent, known as UGC, from a glob­alised, smart­phone-wield­ing gen­er­al pub­lic, pumped up on social media. Pro­fes­sion­al media broad­cast­ers, includ­ing enter­tain­ment, movie and sports providers, are also pro­duc­ing a lot more con­tent and at a much high­er res­o­lu­tion. Then there’s the rise of the cor­po­rate stu­dio.

“Every organ­i­sa­tion is now pro­duc­ing stream­ing con­tent with their own mes­sag­ing, whether it’s explain­er or staff train­ing videos, pro­mo­tion­al or infor­ma­tive con­tent. You no longer need to be an expert. Today, any non-pro­fes­sion­al broad­cast organ­i­sa­tion can pro­duce qual­i­ty video with lit­tle cap­i­tal out­lay, which you couldn’t do a few years ago,” says Mr Hor­rell.

“It’s not just com­mer­cial out­fits that are at it either, but char­i­ties, gov­ern­ments, edu­ca­tion, health­care and reli­gious groups as well. They’re all pro­duc­ing huge vol­umes of video. Most of the con­tent peo­ple con­sume now is video. View­ing habits are also chang­ing. Con­sumers expect imme­di­ate short-form, on-demand con­tent any­where and every­where, as well as on every type of device and plat­form imag­in­able.”

The direct-to-con­sumer (DTC) mar­ket is going great guns. No longer are con­sumers going to broad­cast­ers that hold and pay for rights, they’re going direct to organ­i­sa­tions which pro­duce the con­tent, espe­cial­ly in sports and enter­tain­ment. This is also true of muse­ums and tourism attrac­tions. Every eco­nom­ic sec­tor has exam­ples of DTC con­tent.

In fact, almost half of sports indus­try exec­u­tives polled by Ima­gen said they’re invest­ing or plan­ning to invest in the launch of a DTC stream­ing prod­uct in the near future. As faster home and mobile inter­net rolls out, and ultra-high-def­i­n­i­tion capa­ble devices become more wide­ly avail­able, the expec­ta­tion that video con­tent will be deliv­ered imme­di­ate­ly will only increase.

Mr Hor­rell says: “One gauge of this is the growth of our busi­ness. Pret­ty much every met­ric we have is twice as big now as this time last year; this includes staff num­bers, clients and turnover. We have had an expo­nen­tial growth in the num­ber of peo­ple talk­ing to us.” Also, late last year, Ima­gen secured £6.5 mil­lion in series‑B fund­ing.

Man­ag­ing the sheer vol­ume of expand­ing video assets is becom­ing an increas­ing chal­lenge. This comes at a time when organ­i­sa­tions are real­is­ing how impor­tant online visu­al con­tent is for their suc­cess. Keep­ing it stored on a phys­i­cal serv­er in a base­ment some­where cre­ates not only secu­ri­ty and safe­ty con­cerns, but it is also very hard to dis­trib­ute to an end-view­er effi­cient­ly. At the same time, serv­ing data-heavy media assets clogs up cor­po­rate net­works and band­width. Luck­i­ly, cloud stor­age is becom­ing more afford­able and smarter over time.

“The fact is peo­ple need to increas­ing­ly access these valu­able videos. Organ­i­sa­tions need to work with them, realise their poten­tial, effec­tive­ly con­trol them and treat them like the assets they real­ly are,” says Mr Hor­rell, whose com­pa­ny works with the BBC, ATP Media (Asso­ci­a­tion of Ten­nis Pro­fes­sion­als), IMG, Reuters, LAD­bible and Ende­mol Shine, man­ag­ing their video assets, as well as pre­serv­ing archives from the Impe­r­i­al War Muse­ums, the British Library and the BFI (British Film Insti­tute).

Video is only valu­able if you can store, find, view, dis­trib­ute and man­age it eas­i­ly

Ima­gen also man­ages 20,000 hours of con­tent from BP with var­ied footage rang­ing from Per­sian oil­fields in the 1920s to chief exec­u­tive inter­views and share­hold­er meet­ings. In addi­tion, the Lon­don and New York-based com­pa­ny is the cen­tral depos­i­to­ry for the Eng­lish Pre­mier League, hold­ing 5,000 games, every one since 1992, in high-def­i­n­i­tion video, ready to serve them up in any for­mat glob­al­ly.

“All these organ­i­sa­tions want to man­age media assets effort­less­ly. But they don’t want to own the hard­ware or soft­ware. Video is only valu­able if you can store, find, view, dis­trib­ute and man­age it eas­i­ly. Our secret sauce is that we do one fair­ly nar­row thing very well: intel­li­gent video asset man­age­ment,” says Mr Hor­rell.

“We do the heavy lift­ing for clients, man­ag­ing petabytes of data. This is only pos­si­ble using the dig­i­tal mus­cle of cloud com­put­ing. Pow­er­ful search and meta-tag­ging fea­tures are cru­cial, enabling peo­ple to locate con­tent far more quick­ly than they would be able to do with tra­di­tion­al media library plat­forms. Speech to text and machine-learn­ing also enable intel­li­gent search­es.”

The glob­al mar­ket for video is on a spe­cif­ic tra­jec­to­ry and that’s up. Research by Ima­gen on more than 1,800 North Amer­i­can sports fans is a good indi­ca­tion of things to come. Younger gen­er­a­tions were four times more like­ly to be heavy con­sumers of non-game sports con­tent than baby boomers and four out of five con­sume con­tent on their mobile device while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly watch­ing live games.

“The direc­tion of trav­el is that the younger you are, the more you expect to see video. With younger peo­ple, if it doesn’t exist on video, it doesn’t exist full stop. Look­ing to the future, it’s on a one-way curve of explo­sion. And organ­i­sa­tions are increas­ing­ly real­is­ing that video asset man­age­ment is there­fore a very nec­es­sary, if not an essen­tial, tool going for­wards,” says Mr Hor­rell.

“This is also a gen­uine world­wide phe­nom­e­non that needs a glob­al solu­tion. It doesn’t mat­ter whether you are in São Paulo or San Fran­cis­co, Lon­don or Lis­bon, it makes no dif­fer­ence, every­one wants video; it’s lan­guage agnos­tic, it’s uni­ver­sal. The rate of growth is scary and organ­i­sa­tions need to be pre­pared.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it www.imagen.io