The rise of content Lakes
The notion of ‘data lakes’ is often heard – a massive data repository that an organization can tap into for review and analysis. Object storage has been a popular choice for this application – it’s a simple-to-access architecture, available to any authorized user with internet connectivity. A variation now becoming popular is the notion of a ‘content lake.’ Media-rich companies with multiple sites, often spread across wide geographies, have long struggled with shuttling content — like video and imagery — and its metadata between locations to speed content production. Businesses will lean on asset management systems to natively index content in object-based archives and help shift and consolidate content in a shared content lake, resulting in even large global organizations gaining a ’single view’ across their entire operation.
AI/ML gets grounded
While AI is the new buzzword, using it in most content production organizations has been messy. Cool AI tools to up-res or transcribe video are scattered across web tools, custom applications or embedded in editing suites. Looking forward, beyond the ‘standard’ actions of these tools, content producers will work with data scientists and computer vision experts to customize these tools to meet their specialized content domain and needs, and to automate actions that take content loggers ages to complete. As content leaders realize they are in a critical race to develop and implement these tools, they will look to centralize this development and connect it to powerful GPU pipelines.
Serving content like code
Everyone’s familiar with the need to deliver finished content in multiple formats for different platforms, but a new and intriguing possibility is emerging. While custom workflow actions can make the creation of those formats more programmatic and repeatable, edge-web services are pointing the way to another option. Imagine if you could serve a single piece of content on the web and personalize it on the fly based on the user’s location or other preferences, then entice the user with more content influenced by their location? It’s possible with a new class of tools from content caching services. As your content moves to caching servers, you can embed simple, ‘if/then’ logic to personalize content, adapting to the users’ location to serve different audio, a different UI and more. The line between content workflow and code will keep blurring in the race to get more efficiency and productivity.
Skip Levens is Product Marketing Director for Quantum (www.quantum.com).