This article has been taken from the IABM Journal Issue 108. To see the full Journal click here.
Microsoft recognized for 2018’s top technology innovation
At IBC2018, Microsoft’s Video Indexer won the prestigious BaM Award® for Content Management, which was perfect timing, as Video Indexer was announced as a generally available product at that same time; meaning that it reached product maturity in Microsoft and Azure standards. At the IABM Annual International Business Conference in December 2018, Video Indexer went on to win the Peter Wayne Golden BaM Award® – recognizing it as the year’s top innovation from the shortlist of 20 individual category winners at the NAB Show and IBC editions of the IABM BaM Awards®. The judges said of Video Indexer: “A great product making powerful machine learning modules available to the masses with multiple use cases to drive operational efficiency and revenue. It enables media organizations to make sense of their content in a period in which this is exploding.”
“Video indexer started two years ago as a small incubation at Microsoft with a team of only four people,” shares Ohad Jassin, Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft Azure, and founder of Video Indexer. “The team and I are super excited and proud to see how far along it has come since that humble beginning and the impact it has on our customers and on the media industry. We are looking forward to continuing our journey and enhancing Video Indexer with the aim of helping our partners and customers get the most out of their data.”
Video Indexer is an artificial intelligence service in Microsoft Azure Media Services that provides an orchestration of 27 different machine learning models to extract deep insights easily. Many of the insights make use of multiple channels of the video (audio, speech, visual) to provide more advanced and accurate insights. For example, brand extraction uses the transcript taken from the audio channel and OCR taken from the visual channel, while emotion extraction uses both transcript and audio cues.
This pre-integrated and customizable set of machine learning models enables leading broadcast and media companies such as AVID, Ooyala, Dalet, Box, Endemol Shine Group, AVROTROS and eMAM to take advantage of the latest and greatest in artificial intelligence and cloud computing without needing any machine learning skills in-house or to invest in the heavy lifting of integrating to build their end-to-end solution. They can simply get one coherent response over one shared timeline of all the insights found in their content, as well as predict in advance and control the cost of their content indexing. As a result, companies can get the most out of the growing amount of content that they own and stay competitive in the rapidly changing media industry.
This award represents the industry’s recognition of the value and innovation that Video Indexer brings to the media industry and the way it helps media companies stay competitive and get more out of their data in this era of digital transformation, data explosion data, and movement to cloud computing. We are absolutely honored and thrilled to have won this award!
