A tool that didn’t exist four years ago can be essential to your media operations today. And a tool you adopted six months ago likely is a meaningfully different product than it was when you first turned it on. In other words, media tech is evolving quickly — and faster by the day.
Accelerated innovation in media processing applications is being driven in part by advancing AI capabilities, as well as by rapid AI-driven development. So, while applying the right tool for every job remains a critical element of efficient, cost-optimized content preparation and delivery workflows, organizations today face an added mandate: ensuring their media supply chains can take advantage of the latest tools and innovations quickly, with minimal risk and negligible operational disruption.
The Right Tool for the Job — and the Freedom to Try
No single platform can ingest, analyze, transcode, localize, package, and deliver content on its own. Thus, every media supply chain relies on an amalgamation of specialized applications that together support the full content life cycle. Organizations can optimize their operations by choosing the right tool for each job, balancing functionality, performance, and cost against the content and delivery requirements.
The Rally media supply chain management platform supports an ever-evolving ecosystem of applications, known as Rally Application Services, and makes them available on an as-needed, consumption basis. In addition to activating the specific applications required by a supply chain, Rally dynamically provisions the technical resources to support running those applications at any scale.
While this model affords media organizations essential flexibility, it also gives them the freedom to experiment. They can try a new tool, run it inside a real workflow, and see how well it meets their requirements. No need for a time-consuming and relatively costly stand-alone integration project just to try out an application and its capabilities. Instead, Rally users can evaluate new applications within existing operations, rather than in a vacuum, and understand how it adds value as part of the larger content flow.
While this ability to experiment with various media processing tools has always mattered, it matters even more now because media tech is advancing at an unprecedented pace. As the pace of innovation rises, the payoff from being able to evaluate and adopt quickly rises right along with it.
Let’s take a closer look at why and how ….
Accelerating Innovation, Expanding Supply Chain Automation
AI is the most obvious of the forces driving innovation across application services, and it’s working on two fronts. First, it’s creating entirely new categories of applications — increasingly sophisticated tools for analyzing video, generating metadata, and helping organizations to understand, describe, and monetize their content in ways that simply weren’t possible before. Second, AI is accelerating software development itself. The companies behind these applications are shipping new features faster than ever, which means even the tools you use already are evolving on much shorter cycles. Because there’s so much more innovation, so much faster, rapid testing and deployment is all the more vital.
AI isn’t the only force at work. Organizations are distributing more content to more destinations — more regions, languages, niche audiences — and they increasingly want to bring that work inside an automated supply chain. To do so, they are extending the scope of their media supply chains. Processes including ingest, quality control, transcoding, captioning, wrapping, and packaging are now well established and highly automated inside a managed supply chain. Looking beyond these core capabilities, media organizations are exploring ways that emerging application services can support and streamline additional aspects of content preparation and delivery.
From New Tool to Operational Advantage
At SDVI, we see this trend reflected in a steady rise in requests for new and highly specialized applications. We handle the integration and the benchmarking, vetting a tool and making it operational within our application services ecosystem in a matter of weeks. As a result, Rally users can adopt a capability the moment it’s ready, put it to work inside an existing workflow, and swap it out if something better comes along.
Automated ad-break detection is a great example. Four years ago, the application didn’t exist. Today, it significantly reduces time-consuming manual work by applying an AI tool to take a confident first pass and suggest a set of spots that an operator then reviews. Multiply that kind of efficiency gain across localization, metadata, and monetization, and you can see the supply chain doing more valuable work across more processes, in an automated fashion, than it ever has.
When these applications are united and orchestrated within a managed supply chain, organizations can be confident that each is invoked automatically at the right moment, with its output collected, cataloged, and made usable by the next tool downstream or by the operator who needs it. Follow-on actions can be automated or informed by whatever that application produces. A promising application thus becomes an operational advantage.
Automate Today, Adopt Tomorrow
The pace of change in our industry is genuinely astounding. Companies that were relatively obscure just a couple of years ago now provide critical software tools that are central to modern content processing. And applications from longtime industry leaders are continually updated and enhanced to enable more sophisticated capabilities. With a platform capable of integrating and orchestrating these applications as services, a media organization can build a media supply chain that automates today’s workflows and supports ongoing evaluation and adoption of whatever comes next.
If you’re an application provider interested in making your tool a Rally service, we’d like to hear from you. And if you’re a Rally user eyeing a new capability for your supply chain, get in touch! Let’s talk about adding it to the ecosystem.
