There are a lot of steps to take, and hoops to jump through when getting your content through the media supply chain. With the never-ending stream of media content across different systems and applications, it’s absolutely necessary to have your media assets in order.
However, It’s not enough to just have the assets and metadata stored properly. Your business also needs to be able to visualize the state of the content and act upon any validation issues there might be.
An effective validation platform provides a business with the kind of flexibility that enables a customizable and more personalized approach. However, sometimes the "Flexibility" of an off the shelf solution isn't enough.
Accurate Player SDK gives you full control of your media asset management interaction. You decide yourself how you show the information associated with the asset, or even the asset itself, literally building your own workflow to precisely meet your requirements. Although the answer to the question, what can I do with Accurate Player SDK could literally be “you can do anything”, there are a few more common use cases that spring to mind. Here is our roundup of the seven top use cases:
1. Advanced media player for Media Asset Management (MAM) and Content Supply Chain workflows
A very common problem within the media industry is how to playback content stored in the cloud in a good way. Many MAM systems, or similar solutions, often offer a very basic player with a limited feature set. This causes a challenge, especially for quality control, as you cannot get a proper idea of how it will look for your viewers. This is where Accurate Player fits in as it’s easy to integrate into any modern web framework. Facilitate the possibility to playback progressive-, MPEG-DASH and HLS content directly from your cloud storage with advanced features such as, but not limited to:
- Frame accuracy
- Support to playback multiple audio files in sync
- Support for multiple subtitle formats
This way, operators are able to validate the content based on your requirements. Combine the player with our UI components to further increase the efficiency and user experience for the operators. Visualize the content either on the timeline or using the VU-meter.
2. Content preparation for broadcast, VOD/OTT
Preparing content for an audience can mean a bunch of different things. This includes making sure it lives up to the compliance requirements for a specific region, creating artwork for a VOD-provider, and identifying suitable spots for placing ads, along with other considerations.
Whatever this means for you, the Accurate Player SDK will help you build the tools you need faster, while also improving the experience for the end users. Core of it all is our frame accurate player, but combine that with;
- Our timeline and time-based metadata from e.g. Amazon Rekognition and you have a great tool for generating binge-watch markers or ad-breaks.
- Our selection tool to preview, and generate artwork, based on aspect ratios and resolution combined with overlays such as logotypes.
- Our VU-meter to make sure that the audio volume doesn’t exceed the regulatory limits.
3. Content moderation and compliance with a little help from machine learning (Amazon Rekognition)
Making sure your content is prepared to go live in different markets can be a time consuming task given that compliance regulations differ between markets. Manually detecting and flagging potential compliance issues has been the industry standard approach for a long time, but times are changing!
With Accurate Player SDK, you can use the timeline component to visualize potential compliance issues generated from machine learning services such as AWS Rekognition and other cloud based AutoQC solutions. Whether it’s violence, nudity or smoking, the timeline can be combined with Accurate Player to build a workflow where compliance operators quickly can go through issues generated by the chosen machine learning service. To simplify the workflow even further, why not divide issues by category in the timeline so that violent scenes are displayed separate from nudity? This provides a simple visual structure to complex machine learning generated metadata, speeding up previously time-consuming compliance processes. And once the compliance check is done for an asset, verified issues can either be reported as new time-based metadata, or exported as a compliance QC report. Just like that!
4. Custom trained machine learning, for media workflows (using Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth)
Any organisation working with large content throughput understands the value of automation. This is especially true for large media organisations where a lot of time is spent on logging recurring events. Machine learning (ML) is a good way to automate and increase efficiency for such time consuming processes, e.g. tagging content for quicker archive recovery or logging new footage during production to speed up the editing process. There are several available pre-trained ML models for face detection, celebrity detection, scene detection, inappropriate or offensive content etc. But ML models for specific purposes such as detecting different types of plants, or an animated character requires training a new model.
With Accurate Player SDK, you can use Accurate Player combined with the timeline component to playback your content and label features you need for training your custom ML model. When your training data set is ready, it can be used as input to creating a new custom ML model. And what’s even better, you can also use the same components to verify the output of the model by visualizing ML generated labels as markers in the timeline. And while you’re at it, why not also use the components to help accept or reject the model output and feedback the results to the custom model to increase its accuracy even further?
5. Clipping tool for promos, sports, news and social media distribution.
Getting content ready and published quickly is crucial in the world of marketing. But refining the content before exporting and publishing to websites and social media platforms can be challenging, especially when using professional editing software that requires years of training.
Accurate Player SDK provides a simple solution to this problem, in which anyone in your marketing department can use Accurate Player to view the content in a standard web browser and use the timeline component to create segments from the content by simply defining start and end points. This empowers marketing personnel to find and extract their own promotional material, allowing them to avoid the hassle of back-and-forth communication with senior editors to get the clips they are looking for. Use another instance of the Accurate Player to play and preview the result before exporting to the export location of choice.
6. News, sports & events logger
Good metadata is critical in the Media & Entertainment business. It describes your content and helps you find, access, understand, and preserve it over time. Having a simple yet powerful logging tool ready in the cloud can really speed up this process, whether the end goal is archive retrieval, transcribing speech to text, or logging sports events for the highlight reel.
Accurate Player SDK has the building blocks to help you achieve this! Use Accurate Player to view the content and the timeline component to visualize the logging events as you are creating them with simple in- and out-points. Oh, and did we mention that it’s super easy to organize the logging events in the timeline by using groups and rows (tracks)? This means that you can set up the timeline in a way that supports whatever type of logging task you want to get done. A sports logger for example could use separate timeline tracks for goal, highlight, offside, penalty etc.
7. Review/approval & collaboration tool
Augment your project tools with our player to manage, share and comment on assets to collaborate efficiently.
As the industry is shifting towards storing and accessing all content in the cloud, the process of reviewing, collaborating, and improving the content is made a lot easier. Historically, producers and directors had to physically be in the same room as the editor to provide feedback and request changes. Luckily, today there are many cloud based options available. But if you want the freedom and flexibility that comes with building your own software for reviewing content, we’ve got some good news for you!
Accurate Player SDK gives you access to Accurate Player, our browser based, frame accurate professional video, audio, and subtitle player. Use it to play through your content and use frame stepping to spot the exact moment where you want to make a comment. Build a simple web form and use our timeline component to visualize the comments. Whether they are referring to a single frame or a longer time span, comments can be visualized in the timeline where you can use the zooming functionality to really get into the details!
If you actually want to create a mythical beast, check out this awesome blog. If you want to create a media supply chain workflow that perfectly matches your unique needs, find out more about Accurate Player SDK or get in touch to discuss.