Vizrt: Automating Media Management

Digital media is progressing in leaps and bounds in today’s internet driven world. The online market for videos, images, music and digital documents is expanding at an exponential rate with the skyrocketing popularity of feature rich mobile devices and social networks that facilitate media sharing. Alongside, advanced technologies are being used to consolidate media content and bolster decentralization to spread media to more and more sites. In this fast moving space, the Norway-based media tool provider, Vizrt offers graphics and Media Asset Management (MAM) solutions that assist the media and entertainment industry in creating a good content creation workflow. “We facilitate smart, easy and fast content creation workflows all the way from ingesting content to publishing it, in any location,” says Dr. Stephan Würmlin Stadler, Chief Commercial Officer, Vizrt.

Vizrt’s flagship solution for broadcast and online MAM—Viz One manages the media assets using a file based workflow. Irrespective of whether it is managing images and videos— small or large or switching from the legacy way to big distributed decentralized media management— every requirement can be managed efficiently using Viz One. The solution manages all the assets of a media company by placing them in a central location, through which all stakeholders on the production pipeline have browser based access to search and edit videos.

Viz One’s primary tool—Studio, is web-based and accessible from any desktop, letting users edit and approve media remotely. This lightweight web browser-based interface gives users the access to content based on individual rights and permissions. Media personnel are also empowered to distribute content on air as part of the run down or playlist, or online on the mobile devices—from a normal desktop or laptop. Task lists in Viz One are driven by its workflow engine, which provides the required transparency and flexibility to automatically assign to the relevant departments, as assets proceed in the production workflow.

Companies can index all media in their existing media management systems bydeploying Viz One, which provides full access to all assets directly with their news room system or any other production tools. “Viz One serves more as a platform, which has a strong back-end built around extensive APIs, making the system easily adaptable to the media company’s workflow,” asserts Stadler. Vizrt leverages open APIs to perform customization for official broadcasters that form a major layer of the company’s clientele base. “Most of these broadcasters have station networks for distributing content, which makes it utmost for them to have a solution that can be used to share media across different sites, country, or across the globe. Viz One is a perfect fit in such cases,” says Stadler.

Vizrt is determined to extend an easy-to-use front end for all of our products, including our media asset management system. “The ultimate goal is to facilitate users to utilize Vizrt tools, anywhere and on any device,” states Stadler. Working along these lines, Vizrt has introduced a new type of video content production tool—Viz Story, which is powered by the company’s media asset management platform. It is a completely browser-based video editing tool to ingest and edit all media—videos, images, and audio—to rapidly turn around a story. Since stories are everywhere—not only on television, but also on YouTube and Facebook, Vizrt caters to all of them with easy-to-use tools that have great story-telling capabilities, and cutting edge graphics.