feature automation & asset management
Rino Petricola, senior vice president and general manager of Front Porch Digital International, explains how off-the- shelf digital migration technology supports new revenue opportunities.
How to turn videotape into gold
media more often. This unprecedented market, coupled with improvements in delivery networks and platforms, means outstanding new opportunities for content owners to create new revenue streams based on repurposed assets. Typically, these assets are stored on videotape, although that poses a big problem. Not only do videotapes deteriorate over time, but the equipment required to play them back is becoming obsolete and, in some cases, hard to find. Far from creating new revenue streams, videotape-based media assets are at risk of losing their value altogether. Decision-makers in most media organisations know their content is valuable and that videotape deteriorates. On their to-do list is the task of preserving and protecting it … someday. The problem is that there are always needs that seem more pressing and take priority. Furthermore, the perception is that preserving video assets in more secure and accessible digital form will be disruptive to the enterprise as a whole, not to mention expensive and time-consuming. This perception is not baseless. In this article, I will outline the challenges associated with digitising video content then follow with a discussion of an off-the-shelf solution that meets those challenges.
A
s technology enables viewers to enjoy media more easily and more often, consumers get used to its availability, and demand just that - more
Perils of a home grown solution
Ultimately, digitisation of a media archive has the potential to yield benefits beyond security, preservation, and facilitated access. It has the potential to reveal the collection’s hidden
gems, and make them available to wide
audiences.
It’s true that there are many facets to preserving video content that is now stored on analogue tape. In fact, if a home grown solution is to be tried, the process requires multiple layers of decision making and subsequent effort. To begin with, a home grown solution requires VTRs linked to encoding devices, with the process being operated and constantly monitored by professionals with solid training. For a large archive, the professional staff time alone represents an almost impossible commitment of time and expense. Add to this an extensive up-front planning process rife with complexities, like choosing the best encoding formats, bitrates, and file wrappers, and it’s easy to see that the challenge to home grown digitisation may seem
insurmountable for all but the best capitalised operations.
Even with good decisions and good staffing, the home grown solution is rife with risks for human error. After all, even diligent eyes are unable to focus on a VTR without blinking. The result, in the worst case, could be a technical glitch introduced to the media in the digitisation process that remains undiscovered until much later, at a time when urgently needed content is unavailable. Consider the TV news producer of the future who is confident that footage
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of a political speech exists because the database says it does. When the speaker dies, the producer goes to use that speech to complete a life- and-times feature - only to discover an error has made the clip unrecoverable. Now what? The complexities of digitising content are not only on the technical side. Archiving is a discipline unto itself, requiring thorough
consideration of how files and their component parts ought to be labeled, categorised, and identified to ensure secure access by everyone who needs it. Like the proverbial tree that falls unheard in the forest, a clip that cannot be found might as well not exist.
Cost-effective off-the-shelf migration
Given the pitfalls of developing a home grown digitisation solution, an enterprise would be wise to seek a ready-made solution developed by engineers with expertise and experience in both the technical and the archiving aspects of the videotape-to-digital process. Fortunately, such solutions exist in off- the-shelf form today, and they make preserving archived video content faster, easier, and less expensive than ever.
An example is Front Porch Digital’s DIVAsolo technology. DIVAsolo is a semi-automated, end-to-end solution that speeds, simplifies, and lowers the
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