Across the industry, many media organizations are arriving at a familiar crossroads. Their media asset management (MAM) system is reaching end of life. Their on-prem servers are aging out of support. Their storage infrastructure needs a painful migration. Or maybe the licenses on a transcode farm are finally about to expire. Whatever the trigger, they are facing a decision they can’t avoid: Something in the technology estate has to change.
In these moments, the instinct for media organizations is often to replace what you already have because it allows you to maintain the status quo. That approach also tends to minimize opportunity.
If you’re facing a technology refresh, maybe you should be asking a new question: Is the change your business needs just about your assets, or is it really about the work you need to get done?
Asset management is essential. But operational management is where your organization wins on agility, scale, efficiency, and cost.
When technology reaches end of life, the natural reaction is to replace like with like. You might not love it, but it feels safer than rethinking your operational foundation.
This is precisely the moment for you to think differently. The difference between a technology refresh and an operational transformation is that the latter gives you greater potential for future growth and success, especially with the fast-paced and ever-changing requirements of the media industry today.
In the blog, we take a step back to rethink the goals — and opportunities — at your next refresh cycle. We consider when the best times might be to make a change, and we give you five questions to ask when considering your next move.
Captions and subtitles for today’s myriad media platforms don’t just happen. They require reliable quality control powered by the right tools, workflows, and visibility.
High-quality captions and subtitles do more than meet accessibility standards; they protect brand reputation, streamline distribution, and enhance the user experience. Accurate timed text lowers costly revisions, prevents platform rejections, and ensures content is ready for audiences worldwide. When QC is incorporated early in the supply chain, teams can avoid last-minute fixes and instead deliver polished, platform-ready files every time.
Incorporating modern automated QC systems into your media supply chain bring speed and precision to caption and subtitle verification. Automated reports from providers such as Baton Captions and Closed Caption Creator help operators catch issues early and maintain consistency as delivery volumes increase. For high-throughput workflows, automated QC helps ensure accuracy at scale. Browser-based, frame-accurate caption editing tools like Codemill Accurate.Video Subtitle offer features like timeline-based editing, batch adjustments, and multi-user collaboration, allowing teams to quickly refine timing, formatting, and linguistic accuracy.
In the blog, we show how Rally unifies a workflow that includes automation, human review, and visualization, allowing captioning and QC processes to operate with precision, speed, and transparency.
Asset Cost Expander: Provider Cost Breakdown
The asset cost expander available on the asset details page in Rally Core now includes a breakdown by provider type. This enables Rally users to quickly check expenditures on a single asset, compare actuals to their expectations, and identify outliers.
Gateway Page Groups Icon Configuration
Rally Gateway administrators can now configure the icons for Rally Gateway page groups. As a result, users can more quickly orient themselves on Gateways with many different pages.
Asset List Widget: Enforce Single-Asset Selection
The Asset List widget now includes an “enforce single-asset selection” option that ensures only one file can be selected at a time. This matches the functionality already present in the Asset Picker, and it gives administrators tighter control over how the interface is used, reducing the chance of errors caused by multiple selections.
These are just some of the recent updates made to the Rally platform. Read more in our latest Rally Updates blog.
Partner Spotlight
Closed Caption Converter
With so many different subtitle file formats in use today, the team at Closed Caption Creator has built a solution for supporting and managing all of these different formats. Closed Caption Converter can help to convert your files to almost any caption format that may be required. With support for over 30 different closed caption and subtitle file formats, including SCC, WebVTT, XML, TTML, PAC, and more.
Correct for caption drift, offset timecodes to start from a specific frame, segment caption files, and much more. Insert blank frames to ensure a minimum frame gap between caption Events. Automate your closed caption workflows in Rally with all of the same functionality found in the Closed Caption Creator UI.
- Convert files to over 30 different formats
- Segment/conform files to match edits made to video
- Automatic QC & file validation using custom style guides
- Verify sync and missing captions based on dialogue detection
- Automatic captioning of pre-recorded media
- Priority 1 (P1) support
Learn more about the full spectrum of best-in-class tools in the Rally Application Services Market.
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