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MediaSilo Product Update: Drag-and-drop playlists in Spotlight

In Spotlight, you can now drag-and-drop an entire playlist into an empty gallery.

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Our guest Darian Chornodolsky explores how interactivity can bring new life to all of your old digital content.

The following interview is an excerpt from our video series, Marketing – In Conversation. To watch the full interview and see more video content, click here. Or you can listen to the Shift In Conversation podcast here.

Darian Chornodolsky – VP of Platform Growth – WIREWAX
Grace Amodeo – Marketing Manager – Shift Media

Grace:
To get started, could you introduce us to WIREWAX and yourself?

Darian:
I’m Darian and I lead platform growth at WIREWAX. WIREWAX is interactive video, and interactive video is WIREWAX. So I’ll get a little bit into what interactive video is, some of the use cases, and specifically how it pertains to reusing and recycling existing assets. Also talking about how in today’s reality of a halt in production, how content creators and content owners can really maximize their results with their existing video library. Recently I’ve been thinking about defining interactive video as the technology that allows content owners and creators to bridge that gap from passive viewing to engaging, active, and action-driven viewing. We’re used by brands, agencies, retailers, marketers, broadcasters — the bottom line is anybody who is looking to make their video work harder and to drive results with their video that go way beyond just a view count.

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Our guest Zach Basner outlines how video content can streamline your sales team, and how to get started.

The following interview is an excerpt from our video series, Marketing – In Conversation. To watch the full interview and see more video content, click here. Or you can listen to the Shift In Conversation podcast here.

Zach Basner – Director of Inbound Training and Video Strategy, IMPACT
Grace Amodeo – Marketing Manager – Shift Media

Grace:
I’d love if you could start off by telling us about IMPACT on a high level, and more specifically what you do at the company.

Zach:
IMPACT is a digital sales and marketing company. We specialize in training and consulting, so we train our clients to be fully self-sufficient when it comes to their digital sales and marketing success. We work with our clients for sometimes up to a couple of years to get them to the point where they’re fully confident, fully insourced, and fully in-house. And my role within the company is to oversee all of our training offerings, and also the way that we teach and talk about video strategy.

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Global Search now supports Metadata as a search filter option, so you can track files based on keys and values.

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In the right-side navigation drawer, you can now sort your playlists by type: static, folder, and project playlists.

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A MAM philosophy for a world requiring nimble production workflow from any location
By Sunil Mudholkar – VP Product Management – EditShare

Media Asset Management Systems are everywhere. There’s a small MAM at the heart of every video editing system (NLE). These are, after all, essentially databases whose reports are in the form of a timeline. And, on a larger scale, in every modern media production facility there will be one form of video content management system or another. Most of these solutions have grown over time adding features and functions to a monolithic software stack that may end up providing the set of features you are looking for. However, these monolithic systems also end up with a lot of stuff you don’t need, and consequently, things you don’t want to pay for. 

As more remote production workflows are supported and as media production workflows move to the cloud, the requirements of a media management system also change. One way to address these new requirements would be to continue adding to the stack. However, this isn’t actually helping solve the problem. 

The better path:  Skinny MAM

There are two essential parts to achieving skinny software, and hence Skinny MAMs. These are microservices and APIs. Microservices are the smallest possible fragments of software that still do something useful. An API is a standardized way to exchange data between software, including microservices.

Let’s just drill down here into what exactly defines a microservice. How do you distinguish a microservice from another, similar-looking piece of code that isn’t one? Simply this: ask what it does. If, in the description of the functionality of a piece of software there’s an “and” (as in: “it does this and that”), then it’s not a microservice. You can’t use an “and” when it only does one thing.

Microservices would be of little use if they were like single cell amoeba, floating around in an electronic sea, with no means to communicate with each other. That’s where APIs change everything. APIs are standardized, published interfaces to software modules. And because they’re public and fully documented, there are no surprises: if you send the right data through an API, it will respond with whatever it is you’ve asked for, as long as you stay within its capabilities, and obey its rules.

APIs aren’t just used for communication between microservices: they are for liaising with the outside world as well. This makes a microservice-based Skinny MAM incredibly flexible. All kinds of external services have APIs, so building a highly customized workflow becomes simply a matter of integration. New and previously untried workflows become dependable solutions, not science experiments, simply by selecting from the API a la carte menu.

Our FLOW media management solution embodies the characteristics of the Skinny MAM.  It is lightweight, modular, and open – composed from the start as a set of microservices and complemented with a robust set of open APIs. Our strict adherence to a solution composed of microservices and APIs, allows us to deliver all the advantages of this modern architecture. 

Applying microservices and APIs to collaborative video editing workflows

Imagine an educational establishment that uses Zoom for online teaching. Even though Zoom can record sessions, the options are limited and quite inflexible for anything other than a broad-brush approach. However, Zoom has a useful API that can talk to EditShare’s FLOW (a Skinny MAM). It means that a far more granular approach is possible. More importantly, it means you can make use of FLOW to edit and manage the content of your Zoom recordings leveraging Zoom as an input to build your content.

Another example: Closed Captions.  Legally required in the US, closed captions contain text that can be utilized as metadata for the related video content. Since they exist with every piece of video, it makes sense to capitalize on the information they contain, treating them as free, instant metadata. FLOW’s openness allows you to connect with third party speech to text APIs, allowing you to build a system that will programmatically search for video footage according to what is being said in the closed captions.

There is an almost limitless roster of ways that the FLOW APIs can be used in combination with external data and other services to create an extended palette of capabilities.

A complete solution suite

EditShare’s Skinny MAM approach is the key to secure an open MAM functionality that’s also able to integrate with best of breed third party hardware, software and services, without any compromise.

FLOW sits at the top of the MAM technology stack. It’s equally at home on-premise and in the cloud, but it’s not the only part of the EditShare technology suite. At the other end of the stack, there’s storage, which can be implemented in on-prem, cloud, or hybrid configurations. Like FLOW, EditShare’s file system and storage management layer, EFS, has a full set of APIs. This set of APIs not only connect with the upper levels of the stack, but also allow EditShare users to work across storage platforms, with full redundancy and scalability, while maintaining superior performance.

It’s easy to get started.  Contact us at https://editshare.live/skinnymam/ to try our Skinny MAM for free until July 1, 2020.