The media and entertainment industries are set to produce more data in the next three years than they have in the last 30.
Supporting all that data within an infrastructure will be a major challenge, says AJA Video Systems. And to get there, the company has purchased an interest — “a proactive equity stake” — in data analytics software developer Diskover Data and launched a data analytics package, AJA Diskover Media Edition.
The software lets users easily search, find, and analyze media asset data originating from on-premises, remote, and cloud storage — aggregating associated metadata into a single master index, says the company, and helping users make better decisions.
In a video announcing the software, Ken Spickler, AJA director of engineering for visual data media services, notes that with the rapid increase in data, much of it unstructured, an easy answer for some might be to buy more storage.
“The better answer is to do better management of the data that we have… . We have to have some ability to index it, some ability to search against it, some ability to just give us reports on where all of this data and how that data inevitably moves from one location to another — and we need to have that system that allows us to report on that,” Spickler says in the video.
And the Discover package, he continues, does that.
It lets users see all their storage volumes, trends, comparisons between points in time, and associated costs across their system. It brings powerful search and analysis tools — important when some users spend more time looking for data than using it.
It helps identify wasted storage space, aging and unused files, data changes and more, the company says. It can harvest metadata to add business context and insights to files to inform decisions and streamline workflows.
Other highlights include:
Elasticsearch: Scale to any environment size and type with an open-source core that simplifies asset search and provides insights into associated storage costs. Easily integrate with external APIs and order management platforms.
Tagging: Use tags to support workflow actions and approval processes, such as file deletion approval on an expired asset.
Analysis: Advance media workflows and monetization efforts with access to robust technical metadata (such as codec, number of audio files, resolution, etc.) via a simple search.
Support for hybrid environments: Seamlessly run Diskover across on-premises storage solutions and cloud-based storage services.
“We’ve seen firsthand how unwieldy data management has become for our clients in content production and post, which poses a huge challenge as the M&E market braces for an unprecedented content boom,” said AJA president Nick Rashby. “AJA Diskover Media Edition takes the guesswork out of the equation, helping M&E professionals work much more efficiently. One of the secrets to AJA’s success these many years has been our ability to deliver technologies that solve industry problems through partnerships with companies like Diskover, and we’re excited to share the resulting technology with the M&E community.”
