Vision and hearing are your main senses when experiencing a movie. You recognize the actors, you understand the spoken language even if it is not your native language. You follow the story and enjoy the amazing film photo of the different environments - and by sharing all these experiences you can not only relate to the movie itself but also convince your friend to see the movie.
Wouldn't it be great if your Media Asset Management system could possess similar capabilities when managing your media? Being able to understand the language? Recognize actors, detect and define parts of the image - maybe also differentiate between genres? But how?
In order to do this you need a system that can actually see and listen what's inside your media - you need a system that has cognitive capabilities like yourself and can store that info in - yes, you guessed right - metadata.
But how do we navigate our vastly growing archives of file-based media?
Media files themselves today includes a lot of metadata already in a descriptive format. In here, there is room for all general metadata as well as technical metadata describing the actual file structures. MAM (Media Asset Management) systems make use of this existing metadata along with additional layers of metadata frameworks to help you navigate, find and tag not only media files themselves but also the time-based intervals of the media.
Because of this, you can argue that the true definition of a media file must include an audio-visual asset AND an associated metadata description. Without one or the other - the asset is not complete.
Cognitive Metadata to boldly go where no MAM has gone before Traditionally, the common notion is that while a machine can read and act on the associated text-based metadata of a media file, a human can understand the storyline. We can detect lipsync, recognize actors, emotions, and all the visual objects inside a frame. We can also listen to the language spoken, understand the story and do a translation into a new language.
Because of this common view on the differences between machine capabilities and human capabilities, it is still also quite common that production companies and similar, divide many tasks in a media supply chain between man and machine this way.
But times are changing, and they are changing fast. For any Content Owner, CTO or technical strategist building a modern media workflow, it is vital to challenge this traditional view on what machines can and cannot do.
Interview with Ralf Jansen Product Manager and Software Architect at Arvato / Vidispine To find out more on this subject, we talked to Ralf Jansen, Product Manager and Software Architect at Arvato / Vidispine AB. Ralf Jansen has a strong technical background, finished computer science degree with a Thesis Diploma at Fraunhofer Institute and has since worked as a developer and software architect in the industry for nearly the last 20 years. Today Ralf Jansen is managing the development of the new Vidinet Cognitive Services (VCS) and is part of the Vidinet partner success team.
So, Ralf, why is cognitive services important? Cognitive services allow the machine to find information inside the video and audio frame itself, very much like we humans can interpret the same content. This of course opens up important new possibilities depending on what type of workflow you are managing. A channel distributor can use cognitive services to automatically find (new) types of information in a huge amount of media content that could not be processed manually before - and thus use or present that insights to the viewer as a program, highlights, suggested shows or even as autogenerated trailers. Cognitive services carry this new information as metadata and give your MAM system new and much more granular methods of managing your media files. This is very important in the process of optimizing the performance and capabilities of your evolving media supply chain.
Revenue and how we can improve revenue are, of course, a driver for the advancement and adaption of cognitive services like for most other technology. And once you are getting familiar with the idea of challenging your common view on what machines can do - the subject of revenue by technology gets even more interesting.
In what areas could cognitive services improve existing revenue streams? Knowing and understanding the inside of your media opens many new opportunities that can improve revenue and help customers to monetize their owned media assets. The first one that comes to mind is of course speech to text - where cognitive services can in best case reach or even exceed the magical benchmark of human understanding (which is roughly at 5% error rate) depending on how purely spoken and what known vocabulary was used with automatic transcribe functionality already today. Automatic speech to text at this level not only free up human resources and saves money otherwise spent on external subtitling services, but also enables a new layer of time based metadata where you actually can navigate in time to find deep linked subjects, names and topics by simply searching the contents of your subtitling in your MAM systems accurate search capabilities and in our case powered by Elastic Search. And this is of course just one of many examples.
It is important to understand the value of temporal metadata since captured reality stored into the video (and audio) file changes every 30-60 frames per second or more - and because of temporal metadata we are able to define accurate time spans for different video and audio content detected by cognitive services. A post house ingesting reality content normally uses human resources for logging and preparing projects for the editors. In these and similar production workflows, the challenge is the huge amount of incoming raw footage that needs to be sorted a
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
01/06/2026
Designed to solve a common problem in broadcasting, the automated workflow detects, identifies, removes, and documents copyrighted music
AudioShake has introdu...
01/06/2026
The sports-analytics company combines its data with proprietary AI to help leagu...
01/06/2026
Category line-up & sponsors announced
Photo: Paul Clarke
The Production Music Awards (PMA) have announced that submissions are now officially open ahead of...
01/06/2026
New hybrid sample/synthesis instrument revealed
Excite Audio have just released the latest instalment in their Evolve series, which has been developed in co...
01/06/2026
Latest TONEX expansion captures three rare vintage amps
The newest addition to IK Multimedia's ever-growing TONEX line-up introduces a set of three incr...
01/06/2026
Musically intelligent soft synth gets upgraded
Scaler Music will be probably be best known to many for their music theory tools, but their product range al...
01/06/2026
SBS confirms its broadcast sponsors for FIFA World Cup 2026
1 June, 2026
Media releases
SBS has secured Hyundai, Hisense, Macca's, Rexona, bet365, Com...
01/06/2026
Rohde & Schwarz Satellite Industry Days 2026 guided by the motto From Earth to ...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Marshall Electronics is showcasing a comprehensive lineup of next-generation POV cameras, purpose-built to power today's connected AV environments, at InfoC...
01/06/2026
Adobe Announces Concept to Vector
Deepa Subramaniam June 1, 2026
0 Comments
One of the biggest frustrations we hear from designers is how difficult it...
01/06/2026
Vampire Feature Night Patrol Graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton June 1, 2026
0 Comments
Colorist shapes dark, gritty tone for horror thri...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Mardi 2 juin 14h00
FilmLight (ARRI), 10 rue Ren Boulanger, 75010 Paris
Rejoignez-nous pour d couvrir comment FLAPI (l'API FilmLight) peut transformer e...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
31/05/2026
Olivia P rez-Collellmir to Premiere Original Work at Gaud Centennial in Barcelona The Berklee graduate and faculty member will debut her choral symphony with...
31/05/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Wins 15 Awards at the Canadian Screen Awards - See Pho...
31/05/2026
Taiwan is home to more than 500 NVIDIA ecosystem partners. More than 1 million N...
31/05/2026
As factories move from isolated automation to plant-wide intelligence, manufacturers need AI systems that can connect live machine signals, quality systems, wor...
31/05/2026
The NVIDIA AI Cloud ecosystem is accelerating the global buildout of AI factory infrastructure. Partners are expanding capacity to meet growing demand from ente...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Zero in on one that says yes (and no)
Andy Marken May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image courtesy of Deposit Photos
For content creators the most difficu...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
Vision and hearing are your main senses when experiencing a movie. You recognize the actors, you understand the spoken language even if it is not your native language. You follow the story and enjoy the amazing film photo of the different environments - and by sharing all these experiences you can not only relate to the movie itself but also convince your friend to see the movie. 
