We’ve been living in a “digital age” long enough to see our entire virtual ecosystem change, compound, and evolve – not just once, but over and over and over again. And it adds up.
A recent study by market intelligence firm IDC estimates that the sum of data generated globally by 2025 will exceed 175 zettabytes (175 trillion gigabytes). That’s a lot of ones and zeros, in the form of photos, videos, websites, music, audio files, documents, and so much more. And that number will just keep growing, each and every year.
The digital universe has evolved beyond the fringes of our lives. For many living and working in the modern age, the digital world is our life. We work, play, socialize, date, create, and share in a virtual space. It is our primary place for connection.
And not only for connection, but accumulation. Think about it: our events are captured online, our media is created online, our work projects are stored online. We rely so heavily on the storage of the virtual world to hold our most critical assets, to continually add more and more of them, and to recall them for us whenever we need them.
The IDC estimates that more than two-thirds of digital stored data is not readily searchable or available for access after initial use.
Online data asks the ultimate existential question: if you created a digital asset (be it video, photo, text, document, song, email, or otherwise) but you can’t find it, does it really exist at all?
Sadly, this is not a trick question — as the IDC estimates that more than two-thirds of digital stored data is not readily searchable or available for access after initial use.
Gone in a Flash
Imagine if two-thirds of the books on your shelves — *poof* — simply disappeared, or two-thirds of the photos from a lifetime of summer vacations vanished as soon as you put them away. You’d consider that an unacceptable amount of data loss. And it’s not because the items no longer exist – but simply because you don’t know how to find them again.
And that’s why storage is only half of the conversation. You don’t need something right this instant, so you put it away. But storage is only as good as its retrieval system. Otherwise, what’s the point of storage at all?
New Generation of Organization
There are two major schools of thought when it comes to digital asset management, structure, and retrieval — and these schools fall very squarely along organizational lines.
People who are accustomed to traditional operating systems often follow the folder hierarchy model. You put a file inside a folder, stick that folder into another folder, label it properly, and save it in the right drive. Want to find that file again? All you have to do is connect to the drive, navigate to the folder in a few clicks, and open the file. It’s easy! This group views asset retrieval as a logical path rather than a magic button.
But what about people who never were indoctrinated into files and folders (electronic or physical)? For these generations, the ability to search for something and simply find it is a basic expectation. There is no folder, no subfolder, no drive — the file just exists. Where? It doesn’t matter. It’s somewhere. And how do you find it? The same way you find anything else in the digital world, you search for it.
For the younger group, the question of somewhere wasn’t even relevant. The assets exist, period. You should be able to find anything with a few simple keystrokes.
This divergence has led to a great deal of frustration between college professors and their young students. The students didn’t understand the concept of folder structures because they never had to use them – but professors didn’t understand any other way to talk about it, because navigating to a file stored somewhere made logical sense to them. For the younger group, the question of somewhere wasn’t even relevant. The assets exist, period. You should be able to find anything with a few simple keystrokes.
We’ve all been in the unfortunate situation of interacting with a digital platform where the search functions simply do not work, and few things are more frustrating. Digital giants like Reddit and Slack have worked tirelessly in the past year to improve their search engines, and turn around their negative image as unsearchable platforms. Bad search can quickly kill a user experience, no matter how amazing the rest of the tool may be.
Just find it
For MediaSilo, finding the media assets you are looking for is one of the most important tasks a video team needs to tackle, and we take it seriously. Our professional cloud platform is designed with robust tools and settings that give you total control over the search process, ensuring that it’s effortless for your users – wherever on the search spectrum they may fall.
For folder navigators
Are you more of a traditional thinker? Manage and organize your assets with ease within our standard Projects and Folders, where everything you are looking for is exactly where you left it. The project tree gives a visual representation of your organizational structure in one simple place, and allows you to move or copy individual assets or entire folders into new locations using basic drag-and-drop controls.
For freeform finders
The latest updates in MediaSilo now streamline the search process even further to fulfill any query, with just a few keystrokes:
- The search bar defaults to “Starts With” queries, to better deliver the files you are looking for.
- Looking for something else? You can easily change this option to “Contains”, “Ends With”, or “Exact Match”
- When searching for tags, toggle between “matches all” to see a specific set of criteria or “matches any” for a broader search field
- Multi-select search parameters using an easy check-box list, or select “only” to hone in on one field
- Toggle between “is” and “is not” queries to narrow your focus, for example “is in Project A” or “was not uploaded by Bob”
We’ve seen that search functions optimally when it’s an extension of the way people intuitively think and communicate, and have built our tools to make that process as streamlined as possible.
We’ve seen that search functions optimally when it’s an extension of the way people intuitively think and communicate, and have built our tools to make that process as streamlined as possible. Working on video projects with other collaborators in your group? MediaSilo is the all-in-one place to not only manage your important content, but also keep it secure, share it with your collaborators, and of course easily find all the assets you need without any hassle.
Keep them close
In this ever more complex digital world, don’t risk losing track of two-thirds of your important assets – especially if those are the foundation of your business, as it is for our customers. Whether you navigate to them logically, or find them intuitively, it’s time to embrace better searches as the next phase of digital organization.
Interested in giving our asset storage and search features a try? Sign up for a free 14-day trial of MediaSilo today!
In March, 2020, as COVID-19 hit, most game industry employees were sent home from the office. Companies scrambled to compensate for the loss of their central office spaces where workers could interact, ideate, and create together.
As the pandemic begins to diminish, it’s become clear that many workers – and even some employers – appreciate the benefits of working from home (WFH), while at the same time, still grappling with its challenges. A core challenge is the ability to maintain the culture and productivity altered by a remote or hybrid workforce.
Tools that seek to bridge physical and temporal distances between workers make remote work possible. But they also bring their own problems. According to Asana’s recent Anatomy of Work report, 60 percent of a person’s time at work is spent on “work about work” and not on skilled work. In other words, people are spending huge amounts of time on communications apps that don’t directly contribute to the worker’s actual function.
The report found that the average knowledge worker spends “103 hours in unnecessary meetings, 209 hours on duplicative work, and 352 hours talking about work.”
The games companies we spoke to invariably reported the same issues, with a tension growing between individual preferences for certain apps, how those apps were being used, and how much time and energy is going into unnecessary communications. Many reported confusion about which apps were best for the constant back-and-fro of creation and approval, as assets are shared, modified, and reshared.
In this report, we’ll dive into what the game industry has done to bridge this gap, some of the remaining issues leaders in the gaming industry face to balance productivity and culture, and tips on how to excel in the new hybrid world.
Disclaimer — We are grateful for the participation of the companies we spoke to, and their candid observations and insights. Their participation does not reflect any endorsement of MediaSilo.
Introduction
The game industry’s technical prowess and culture of innovation proved to be advantageous when the world faced lockdowns and other consequences of the pandemic. Mainly staffed by computer-sophisticates, game companies were able to continue their operations.
But video game companies also found many unexpected problems during COVID, often rooted in the game business’s cultural history, as well as the unique nature of video games as extremely complex artifacts of creation. A rising consumer demand for video game entertainment during the pandemic added pressure to unexpected pain points, as game companies failed to hit milestone targets, and release dates were shifted out of the most lucrative times of the year.
Gaming’s Cultural Singularity
All industries, including creative industries, were forced to cope with lockdowns. Many are now working their way into a future in which many workers are likely to opt for WFH, rather than attending an office every day, if practical and if offered the opportunity.
So why do the experiences of game companies differ from other similar businesses in the entertainment industry?
While it is certainly true that some games in the early years were made by individuals working from home, gaming’s creative culture rapidly morphed into an intensely in-person collaborative endeavor. In fact, game creation and promotion has traditionally relied heavily on multiple in-person teamwork.
Most game companies – whether developers, publishers or service providers – are formed by small teams of friends or colleagues who work closely together, constantly sharing each other’s work. Over-the-shoulder collaboration is central to how games are made.
When you read about the early days of a successful games company, the founders will almost always speak about how much time they spent together, bouncing ideas off one another, and critiquing each other’s work. They will invariably credit this approach to their success. Invariably, they seek to scale this dynamic as their employee base grows.
Any part of a game can be changed at any time during its development, right up to the game’s release, and even beyond (in the form of additional content, patches, modes etc). These alterations might range from a tiny, single sound effect, to the entirety of the lead character, to the very nature of the game itself. Sometimes, alterations can be made after feedback from early reviews to ensure the game delivers against massive expectations.
Venture capitalist Matthew Ball recently noted how much more content games companies offer compared with competitors in other entertainment industries. “Video games are a platform for multiplayer storytelling, rather than a linear narrative. Fortnite has only marginal changes each multi-month season, but the reliance on ‘your friends’ and unscripted narratives means that a player can spend dozens of hours satisfied. The Office is highly rewatchable, but over its nine-year run, it produced less than 75 hours of unique content. Game of Thrones ran for eight years and produced the same. ”
Late in their creation, mystery novels do not suddenly become comedies. Movies that make drastic late changes are assumed to be suffering from creative challenges, and expectations for commercial success are downgraded accordingly. But in games, radical and constant iteration is necessary to the process, and is viewed as financially advantageous.
Games are tactile. Their creators must touch them, in much the same way that a chef tastes a new dish.
Big changes must also be reflected in a game’s marketing, as emphases move from one innovation to another.
Games are tactile. Their creators must touch them, in much the same way that a chef tastes a new dish. Games are complicated amalgamations of processes and assets. But each ingredient can only be added by a specialist. All the other specialists are expected to ensure that any change works with their particular ingredient to the advantage of the whole. One change must necessarily lead to many other alterations.
In game development, iterations are a constant, and involve the agreement and participation of different people. From producers to gameplay designers, to artists and writers, to musicians and programmers, down to testers, this is often done in the moment, collaboratively.
Limitations of generic communications tools
Matt Casamassina is CEO of Rogue Games, a California-based publisher which employs around 20 people, most of whom he speaks to on a daily basis. His normal office routine is to do the rounds and check in on his team members, discussing the wide variety of development clients that the company handles. But when lockdown hit, he found himself having to use Slack as his primary conduit between himself and his staff.
While Slack is a useful tool, it is not a substitute for in-person communication. Many of the companies we spoke to said that its usefulness can be undermined when multiple channels are being created without much oversight, nested within one another, making navigation problematic.
Interested in seeing MediaSilo in action? Contact us to get started on a free 14-day trial today.
It is best understood as an asynchronous conversation. Casamassina learned this after fellow team members gently suggested to him that he was trying to use it as a live-chat device, and that he was too impatient and insistent for immediate responses.
“When you’re at home, sending an email or a slack out into the digital ether, I want a response right away. But sometimes I might not hear back for hours and I start to wonder, ‘hey, where’s my response?’.
“I learned that’s not good behavior from a leader. I’d worked in offices for a long time, and I was programmed for that environment. But those expectations don’t fit when you’re remote. I really had to address something that came across as me being unreasonable, while making sure that our workflow improved.
“So we talked with the team about how to create optimal communication practices, without too much rigidity. We put practices in place that allowed me to loosen up and unlearn those bad habits that I had to really grow out of. At the same time employees stepped up. We built a system together that everyone understands, and that has helped our workflow and our culture.”
Most of the companies we spoke to reported that their Slack usage has become more sophisticated and organized since lockdown, with a larger number of channels, generally serving hyper-specific purposes.
The future of feedback, approvals, and comments is likely to move away from generic solutions like Slack toward specific tools, like MediaSilo, which allows for on-screen annotations, frame-accurate comments, and one-click approvals for video and animated assets.
Most industries now make regular use of video meeting tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Skype, and Discord to gather ad hoc input throughout the creative process according to a company’s needs.
“I might sometimes be in a [virtual] meeting and I’ll take a screencap from Discord and transfer it into Slack,” said one. “We’re mixing and matching according to the needs of the moment.”
Zhenghua “Z” Yang is founder of Serenity Forge, a Colorado-based developer and publisher. “Our Discord server is a digital office space,” he explained. “Each person on our team has their own voice channel and when you’re working, it’s assumed that you’re on your channel, but if you’re not, that’s okay, it’s just like someone not being at their desk because they went out to get a sandwich or something.
“You can mute Discord, but if you’re there, anyone can pop into your channel and say ‘hey, what’s up … you know like … did you finish that one thing?’ And Kevin can quickly unmute and say ‘oh yeah I just finished it’, and then ‘okay, all right, cool. I’ll see you later’.
While these collaboration tools fill in some of the gaps, they are not without issues. Different functional teams have different needs and levels of adoption for collaboration tools, leading to a disjointed collaborative workflow.
“I might sometimes be in a [virtual] meeting and I’ll take a screencap from Discord and transfer it into Slack,” said one. “We’re mixing and matching according to the needs of the moment.”
Security Protocol Changes
Game companies are notoriously secretive, and for good reason. Releases are highly visible, competition is fierce, ideas are premium, and assets are valuable. Partnerships rely on discretion. Most of the companies we spoke to talked about how they invested a great deal of time and energy into making sure their security was able to withstand entire teams suddenly logging in from home. For some, it took months to get to a situation where they felt comfortable.
Christina Seelye is founder and CEO of California-based publisher Maximum Games, which employs around 50 people. “Making sure that everyone can get into the VPN [Virtual Private Network] properly was an early priority,” she said. “Cybersecurity issues are really important for us. When people are working from home, they all have their own challenges, and it’s essential to talk those over, individually.
MediaSilo works with some of the most sensitive pre-release content on Earth, so security is paramount. We emphasize security from content protection to protecting our client’s Personal Identifiable Information.
“Sometimes it’s just little stuff like people who might let their kids play on the computer, or who have roommates. What is the right thing to do when you’re in a Zoom call and talking about something that isn’t publicly disclosed? So we had to make sure that we were being really careful about understanding that confidentiality and security practices, which work fine in the office, work differently at home. Security has become a major priority over the past year.”
MediaSilo security director, Simon Lamprell, believes that security is crucial internally and externally. “We work with some of the most sensitive pre-release content on Earth, so security is paramount. We emphasize security from content protection to protecting our client’s Personal Identifiable Information (PII). Also, whenever we engage with a new vendor or third party we perform a full security assessment and review their protocols and practices around PII to ensure they meet our security standards.”
Protect and Share the Build
Part of game company security is managing the latest build, or version of a game, or of the various assets that make up the game. Allowing employees to access the most recent version of the game means they need very fast internet connections, while the company must ensure that the build is both easily accessible by the right people and protected from the wrong people.
Many companies use their own servers, or version-control cloud depository services like Perforce. Some use online retail portals like Steam, where they can upload new builds every day which are easily downloaded by team-members. Many use a combination of resources that make sure that every version of the build is protected.
“As a producer I can look at all the graphs and all the data points in the world, but the real progress is the game itself,” said Kerry Whalen, production manager at Piranha Games, which is best known for its Mechwarrior action games.
“We spend a lot of our time looking at the game and playing the game and talking about the version of the game that we’re working with. When lockdown hit, we tried to [play the game] via remote desktop, but that’s no good if you’re at home with a laptop on the kitchen table and a terrible internet connection.
“So we resolved that problem by putting our games on Steam. We set up all kinds of different beta branches and delivery systems so people can access anything securely, play it, and give their feedback.”
Control Meeting Madness
When they were forced into social separation, many companies overcompensated by instigating too many video meetings. Partly, this was driven by a well-meaning anxiety that employees might not be coping with isolation. Another reason cited by interviewees was a concern that, outside the milieu of the office, people might not all be on the same page. Information gaps might start to appear, hampering progress.
“We believe in the creative energy and the synergy of being physically together,” said EA Motive’s Patrik Klaus. “When we’re apart, we message each other when it’s needed. We’ve come a long way in getting better at that, but it remains a challenge to find the right cadence of meetings. Having a tool like Zoom is awesome, but Zoom fatigue is a real thing.”
Having a tool like Zoom is awesome, but Zoom fatigue is a real thing.
Zach Truscott at ArenaNet said: “We’re very used to having hallway conversations in the office, instead of meetings. But when you’re remote, they’re gone. So we set up meetings instead, and what we found is we went from a moderate amount of meetings to so many meetings that nobody was getting any work done. We were overbooking ourselves with meetings.”
Truscott said that the company is resolving the problem by creating working pods which have a responsibility to keep stakeholders informed, while minimizing the amount of time spent in meetings. This is leading to more efficient means of noting and disseminating action points.
“Communication is an important part of game development,” said Farah Coculuzzi, producer at Capy Games, a Canadian developer, currently enjoying success with mobile hit Grindstone. “We want to make sure that everyone has the capacity to do what they need to do [for work] and also to take care of their home life.”
“A big thing for us is the realization that stand-ups don’t always have to be at the same time every day. A few days of the week they’re in the mornings and a few days they’re in the afternoons. If someone regularly misses one or two because of other commitments, that’s just part of how we do things.”
Respect Camera Anxiety
On-screen meetings are now a normal part of office life, but some people dislike being on camera. This can cause friction between managers who want to literally see how their people are doing, and employees who are either naturally shy, or who wish to protect their own privacy.
Joel Burgees at Capy Games said: “One of the great things about Capy is we don’t have a lot of braggadocio and peacock energy in the studio. But we do have some really soft-spoken folks on the team who are introverted. They are mega-talented, big-brains-big-hearts types of people and it’s very rare that they will put their cameras on [during meetings].
“The people who are comfortable having their cameras on are more likely to be social and outgoing and it’s very easy to hear their ideas because they are broadcasting it.
I have to give people space to be heard, especially if they don’t want to be seen.
I have to be more proactive about making sure that the quiet people whose faces we can’t see are encouraged to speak, without feeling like they have to turn on their camera. I have to give people space to be heard, especially if they don’t want to be seen.”
Respecting each employee’s camera sensitivities while still wanting and respecting their feedback during creative sessions is something that can be solved asynchronously through shared collaboration platforms.
MediaSilo provides a simple review and approval process letting stakeholders provide feedback without the hustle and anxiety of live, camera-on sessions.
Meeting in the Middle
A constant refrain from our interviews was the sense that the last 18 months have been a sharp learning curve for everyone, and that business leaders were no more prepared for the shock of the pandemic than anyone else.
The lessons that have been learned did not come from managerial theorists, or from super-bosses, but from trial and error. Most important of all is that physical isolation has only intensified a growing sense in the game industry that companies that try to dictate policy to employees will likely find it difficult to maintain a healthy working culture, and will struggle to retain and to hire talent.
The lessons that have been learned did not come from managerial theorists, or from super-bosses, but from trial and error.
EA Motive’s Patrick Klaus summed up this thinking: “Our evolution during this time has been relatively organic, and I think we’ve succeeded because it was always super important for us to be listening to our teams, and being flexible in our approach.
“The situation needed a bottom-up approach and not a top-down approach. We talked. We listened and we figured the best way forward by meeting in the middle. One of the biggest things that I’ve seen is just an intense level of collaboration and communication at all levels.”
Electronic Arts employs more than 10,000 people around the world, while the Motive studio is around one hundred strong. Klaus said that this presents a challenge, but that a local approach is essential.
“We had some great support coming from the head office but we’ve also been empowered to make our own decisions and to create our own destiny in terms of how we do things. We have found guiding principles that are applied to the whole company but then there is a flexibility built in at a local level.”
Conclusions
In some industries, WFH is leading to anxiety that workers might take advantage of the situation, and decrease their commitment to work. In a competitive, passionate, creative industry like gaming, that is not an issue.
Those leaders we spoke to who are looking forward to “getting back to the office” are all working on plans to allow employees to work from home for either part, or all of the week. Creativity is at its peak in a person-to-person setting and it’s a simple fact that some people prefer to work in a social environment.
There is also a common notion that when a game is in its conceptual, brainstorming stage, stakeholders work better in-person. On the other hand, the specific productivity of content creation – art assets, programming, music, level design, trailers – can just as easily be done from home, if that’s the worker’s preference.
All that explains why gaming is likely to move to a hybrid model in the years ahead. How that happens will be a continuing evolution of best practices, and of useful tools.
Every interview in the report mentioned multiple tools that they were using more extensively when they were away from the office, than when they were in the office. Most of these are familiar to us all, such as Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Trello, Asana, and Google Docs. But there are plenty of other tools that are either especially suitable for the game industry, or are coming to the fore as particularly good for specific, essential tasks.
We at MediaSilo work with some of the biggest names in gaming to bring the power of visual feedback to life. MediaSilo brings together assets and minds for in-progress creative projects. For example, concept artists use MediaSilo as a place to manage and share files, and marketing teams collaborate and approve campaign assets on their way to promoting highly anticipated titles.
As evidenced in the feedback and insights provided throughout this report, bringing collaboration out of non-stop meetings and chat clients allows for a cleaner feedback loop where everyone can participate. Please contact us to see how MediaSilo can take your workflow to the next level.
Latest Improvements:
The newest release makes some of the most common functions you perform in Shift even faster and more streamlined than before, from typing-ahead recipients’ names to sorting your projects.
- You can quickly add auto-suggested users to a Recipients field by hitting the comma, enter, space, or tab keys. This applies to the Distribution List and Share windows.
- When you open an options menu by clicking the three dots on a project or asset tile, no need to carefully move your cursor to stay inside the box – the menu will stay open until you either select an option or click outside the menu.
- Find what you’re looking for faster. You can now sort your projects according to size. On the Projects landing page, click the filter icon in the top right, and select Sort by > Size. Or, if you’re using list view, just click “Size” in the Size column.
- The search menu has been updated to display your newly created asset tags.
Love it or hate it, one of the most inescapable software tools in all of TV, film and video production is the ubiquitous spreadsheet. Studios, crews, agencies and teams of all types and sizes track their schedules, gear, assignments, call sheets, and locations using the infinite rows, columns and cells of a trusty pivot table.
But when it comes to the media assets that are vital to delivering productions for your business, it’s time to lift the spell of the spreadsheet and shine the light on real insights instead.
Fact #1: Spreadsheets are notorious for errors
From the age-old report that 88% of spreadsheets contain errors, to more recent studies showing that 20% of genetics scientific papers contain errors caused by spreadsheets, it’s commonly known that trusting your important stats to Excel is far from reliable. Even if the data itself isn’t complicated, tiny mistakes – whether from repetitive manual user input, imports of incorrectly formatted data into existing files, or simple miscalculations in formulas – can all make spreadsheets prone to errors.
Fact #2: Spreadsheets require expertise
Unless you and your stakeholders are professional data wranglers, spreadsheets can be difficult to analyze. Why? Because on one hand, rows upon rows of raw data are hard to gain insights from without the necessary filtering, graphing, and sorting it takes to really discern their importance. And on the other hand, although many software tools have visualization features built-in, it’s too easy for anyone to use them to interpret data incorrectly.
Whether you send out a spreadsheet nightly, weekly, or quarterly, it’s outdated the moment you hit “export.”
Fact #3: Spreadsheets are stale
How often do you have to update a dashboard, create a report, or provide analytics on your shared media files? Whether you send out a spreadsheet nightly, weekly, or quarterly, it’s outdated the moment you hit “export.” And that means the knowledge your stakeholders gain from the data may no longer apply – introducing potentially costly delays, and making important decisions too late. Without real-time data, your perfectly formatted, color-coded spreadsheets are simply not actionable.
A better way to track your content
There’s no trick to tracking your shared media assets with Insights, the media analytics engine within MediaSilo.
Insights is accurate.
There’s no mistaking the accuracy of analytics on your project, assets, and viewers; all the data comes directly from your MediaSilo system, not a separate software tool. How much is the file being viewed? Who is viewing the file? When are these people viewing the file? And how often are files being viewed vs. downloaded? No matter how granular you need the data, you never need to create a separate tab, formula, or file. From an entire project, right down to a single asset.
Insights is confusion-free.
The Insights dashboard is designed to answer questions about your assets, regardless of how you ask them. Want to see where your videos are being viewed? No need to create a graph from scratch — the IP address map will show you. Wonder when a video was viewed the most? Look at the timeline view. Happy that twenty people watched the clip, but you want to know which twenty? See them for yourself. Insights gives you easy access to visualize your data, with tools that can’t be tricked.
Insights is actionable.
One of the most important uses of your data will be in helping your business make quick decisions about your media assets — and better ones, too. You can gain intel, for instance, about how far into clips a viewer gets before viewership drops off, and have your team make changes to the content. Even more immediately, if you notice content activity in locations you don’t recognize, you can pivot your security on the fly by editing expiration dates, password protection, or presentation and link settings in the dashboard. With Insights, media security is like a crystal ball in your hands.
Break the spell
Media assets are the backbone of a studio’s or agency’s intellectual property. So when it comes to quickly tracking, analyzing, and reporting on them, it’s important to avoid the demons that plague spreadsheets. Make your sharing, reviewing and usage data more accurate, more understandable, and more actionable – instantly – using Insights in MediaSilo.
Try Insights in MediaSilo free for 14 days today!
Streamlined layout: Shift is optimized to fit better on screens of all sizes. By grouping certain options and reducing excess space throughout the app, it’s easier to see more of your projects and files at once. The “New Folder” button is now located under the “Add New” options, and the delete button remains accessible by right-clicking any file.
Organize projects – your way: Hovering over a project or folder in the project tree now reveals an options menu, so you can quickly create subfolders and organize your content. To access your project tree, open any project and click the arrow button in the top-left corner of the screen.
Smoother, faster searches: The search menu makes it easier than ever to search using a single tag or multiple tags. Too many results? Narrow down your search by using the “is” and “is not” options. Your saved searches now appear in their own section at the bottom of the search menu.
Bug Fixes:
- Review links now send properly when first copying the link before saving or sharing it.
- Insights reports exact video views when a Spotlight is viewed on a mobile device.
- Long titles no longer overlap with dates in Insights.
- Asset thumbnails are displayed without an extra space when your thumbnail preferences are set to “fit.”
- When you view a Spotlight, your video starts playing automatically if autoplay is enabled on the video or stage element.
- When you share an asset that is protected by an email watermark, the “Create Link” button is disabled until you specify your link recipients.
- The Media panel for adding files to a Review Link or a Spotlight now includes text to indicate the Projects menu is searchable.
Content creators put a lot of effort into presenting their work the way they’d like it to be seen, but what happens if the right people aren’t looking?
Add in the fact that your films, videos, creative assets, and pitch decks can be seen on mobile, laptops, tablets, and desktops and can be shared, streamed, and tagged, and it quickly becomes hard to track who is seeing what content where. And, perhaps most importantly, why some content trends more than others.
That’s why the team at MediaSilo has come together to create an all-in-one reporting dashboard to help you measure value, track consumption, and calculate ROI for all of your creative content.
The result?
MediaSilo’s Insights dashboard gives each member of your team the power to dissect data on specific content, weave together trends from across your portfolio, and paint a picture of who your audience is and the types of content they love to consume. Even better? You can customize the data you are looking for to see exactly what you need.
So what does deploying MediaSilo’s Insights mean for each of your teams, and how can they use it to drive next-level value?
Gain Insights for Every Team
From production and sales to editing and content security, Insights puts powerful reporting tools, filters, and analytics at your fingertips, giving every team member the ability to track, understand, and act on your content’s performance.
View our full video tutorial library here!
Use data to help sales and marketing educate, iterate, and win business.
Take a deep dive into your content’s viewership back to day one to see what is resonating with your audience, tagging content with filters and features that can be summarized to enlighten your team and fuel data-driven decisions about what and who to target next.
MediaSilo’s Insights can also help your team keep track of prospects and the types of content that is resonating with them, providing personalized data that can be used to facilitate new connections with potential buyers when they are most engaged.
Finally, step into your customer’s shoes during a sales pitch in real time with viewer-level reporting. Take the feedback to improve your sales pitch and present your most impactful content at the forefront.
Empower production to engage, track, and collaborate.
Looking for additional opportunities to streamline your production lifecycle and amplify the impact of each contribution?
Use Insights to track team viewership across the production lifecycle to develop a deeper understanding of internal engagement with your content to refine your workflows and identify choke points.
Your team can then use the data to remove barriers, hold team members accountable for meeting their timelines, and consolidate engagement and feedback data whether they’re sitting in the office or participating in remote collaboration across the globe.
Waiting for feedback from colleagues or collaborators? Use Insights to discover who is reviewing which assets and who might need a reminder.
Understand, optimize, and evolve content security.
With team members on the go and using a range of platforms, security has never been so critical.
Leverage the power of Insights to validate your security controls to confirm that your content stays in the hands of your intended audience and know the exact point when data began to flow outside of your area of trust, complete with viewer locations on an interactive map.
Seeing content behavior that you don’t like? Pivot your content security on the fly by editing expiration dates, password protection, or presentation and link settings in the dashboard.
Take Production to the Next Level with MediaSilo
Your team works hard to make the best creative content possible for your customers, clients, and audience to enjoy.
Every word, image, and frame has been carefully crafted to be impactful and engaging, so why would you depend on your best guess as to what will strike a chord with your viewers?
When it comes to taking your content to the next level, don’t guess. Drive an intelligent content strategy with Insights.
Want to see more from MediaSilo? Check out our new asset-based commenting features.
No two creative teams are the same, so it’s not efficient to force them to use the same collaboration and digital asset management tools. Given that the review and approval process varies by team and content type, a versatile platform capable of meeting a team’s needs without sacrificing visibility and structure is essential.
With MediaSilo’s customized and flexible asset-based commenting feature, teams can implement the processes that work best for their specific needs while providing different options required by other teams.
MediaSilo’s Flexible Digital Asset Management
No matter the file type—including documents, images, and videos—or stage of development, MediaSilo makes it easy for teams to collaborate on content, wherever and whenever your reviewers choose to do their work.
With the digital asset already in your MediaSilo workspace, the process can get started with a click of the “Review Mode” button. You are then presented with a history of past comments, and users have the ability to add their own feedback.
Collaborate directly on an asset.
Whether it is one large piece of content or a broad portfolio MediaSilo makes it easy to collaborate with a larger group.
As comments and feedback are made, team members can review, respond, and track the history of an edit. Using MediaSilo means all comments are consolidated in one place, making communication seamless and transparent and allowing constructive dialogue to flow all in one forum.
Find a resolution to a comment or want to make a specific suggestion? Mark the comment as resolved or make an edit. These comments can then be hidden to help streamline the review process.
View our full video tutorial library here!
Once the feedback period closes, everyone will be on the same page, and your team will spend less time tracking down edits and more time reviewing and approving the next steps.
Provide specific asset feedback.
MediaSilo even allows team members to comment on a specific section or portion of an asset.
Just select the area of the asset with the built-in toolbar and record the comment. As team members review the feedback, the relevant area of the media will be highlighted along with the comment.
Collaborate with review links.
Need to reach beyond your team for feedback and input? MediaSilo makes that easy too.
You can quickly generate and send a private review link to a target audience, easily bringing them into the loop while still maintaining the peace of mind that comes with knowing that your content is for certain eyes only.
To get started, select the files you want to share, enter the email addresses of your collaborators, and hit “Share.” If you want the feedback to stay within that group, select “Limit comments to this link” before sharing.
After the review period, access to the asset can be quickly turned off, but the comments or annotations will remain directly tied to the file itself, allowing the entire team to review feedback together.
Take the Next Step
With a constantly evolving design and digital asset management workflow, you need a platform that is able to evolve and flex with your team.
With features like Review Mode, your team is free to work in whatever way is best for them all while staying on the same page.
Ready to learn more about the MediaSilo platform and other innovative ways to enhance how your team manages digital content? Set up a time to chat with one of our experts.
You can now leave comments on an asset directly from your Shift project. Simply go to the asset and click the “Review Mode” button to access your commenting and annotation tools. Your feedback will be visible to all collaborators with access to the asset. This mode also displays the comments made in review links, providing you with one centralized place to view all your feedback.
If your workflow requires a private review session, where comments are only visible to the people with a link, you can still create a Review Link and turn on the toggle “Limit comments to this link.”
Whether you need Review Link commenting or in-project commenting, our newest tools let you choose the best way to gather feedback on your content.
We’ve updated our video player to improve your viewing experience. The arrow button next to the timecode now opens a menu, so you can choose your preferred timecode format. You can also click “Show duration” to display the video’s duration alongside the timecode.
Additional features are now accessible by clicking the gear icon next to the volume button. For example, select “QC Mask” to apply an aspect-ratio overlay to the video, or select “Keyboard Shortcuts” for a list of time-saving shortcuts.
The comment bar below the video player also includes a checkbox, so you can choose to leave a timecode-specific comment or a general comment. All comments appear in the right-side drawer, which you can open and close by clicking the speech-bubbles icon. This section now includes search and filtering options to easily find and display the comments you’re looking for. Once a comment has been addressed, click the blank circle on the right to mark the comment as “resolved.” You can still access resolved comments by selecting “Show resolved” from the filters menu.
Insights is the new hub for analytics on all your links, viewers, and assets. See how your content is performing by clicking the Insights icon in the navigation bar.
The left side of the Insights page provides a summary of your activity, including the number of visits to your links, the number of unique visitors, and the date of last activity. Click “All Activity” to display a map with your viewers’ locations, or select “Graph” to track viewer engagement over a period of time. Use the search bar along the top of the page if you are looking for analytics on a particular link, viewer, or asset.
You can select any item on the left side of the page to display more information in the right column. This section contains details on your viewers’ activity, including the specific assets they viewed or downloaded and the video percentage watched.
To learn more about the ways Insights tracks activity, please visit our support article.
