Broadcast-quality video can greatly improve the user experience in digital signage. What are some of the challenges in managing video in a digital signage system?
With the rise of social business and the democratization of video, content creation is growing exponentially – from professional broad-cast quality videos to user-generated content created by employees using desktop tools. Organizations are facing real challenges to measure, monitor, and control a growing content library, while avoiding content silos.
The organizations that are the most successful in deriving value from their video assets have adopted proactive approaches to video content management. It’s becoming necessary to standardize video processes across your organization, including rule-based workflows for content import, format transcoding, approval, retention and storage. And these processes have to be automated, with simple tools and workflows, to reduce human errors.
For organizations that use digital signage, the challenge is to apply these standardized rules to the video assets that will be exposed to digital signage system. Did the videos intended for the digital signage system go through the right approval process? Were those videos transcoded in the right format? What about version control when updated content is imported into the content library? Does that content automatically get loaded into the signage platform, and out-dated content expired from the signage platform? These challenges can be addressed with automation and rules, which reduce the work for content managers.
Can you introduce our readers to Polycom’s Real Presence Media Manager software – and discuss how it helps organizations improve how they capture and manage video?
Absolutely. The Polycom® RealPresence® Media Manager is enterprise software which helps organizations launch and expand online communications, training, and educational initiatives. It speeds knowledge sharing by overcoming the challenges of distance and time, making the whole organization smarter, more responsive, and more agile.
The Media Manager software streamlines the processes, devices, and technology required to produce and distribute media effectively over your existing IT infrastructures. It is the industry’s only automated, complete platform to support the content lifecycle of all video assets regardless of source or format—from the point of video capture, to import and organization and administration, to portal-based viewer access, to the delivery and expiration of content across diverse network environments.
When a customer integrates Scala software with RealPresence Media Manager – how do the products work together and what new benefits does the integration bring?
The Digital Signage Integration solution helps customers gain more value from their video assets by making their valuable content library universally accessible to their digital signage platform.
This solution provides content managers with streamlined and standardized processes, which reduce the need for redundant procedures. Using the Media Manager solution as the central management console, he or she can do the work once, in one place, and see the results across the video content library and signage platform. Simple tools help enable them to upload, organize and expire content everywhere at once.
The Digital Signage Integration solution also provides automated workflows with permission-based controls; content managers can scan entire locations of content meta-data, and then let the Media Manager do the heavy lifting to precisely upload the correct content to their signage platform.
Are there particular application areas that are best suited for the combined Polycom and Scala solution?
This integrated solution will provide the most benefit to organizations that not only use digital signage to keep their messaging targeted and timely, but also have a broad range of live and on-demand video applications.
It delivers much more functionality than workflows for communications departments to publish and syndicate recorded video content to dispersed digital signage. It addresses the intersection of a broad set of video use cases, driving the need for a centralized video content management strategy, which includes interoperability with a digital signage platform.
For example, most organizations use video assets for multiple purposes—internal corporate communications, employee training, external marketing, and a variety of digital signage applications.These organizations also create video assets from multiple sources—professionally recorded brand videos, executive all-hands meetings with slides and Q/A, project teams recording video conferences for colleagues who couldn’t attend—even desktop video recordings created to foster knowledge sharing among employees. The list of applications and use cases goes on and on. Customers need software solutions that are flexible, scalable, open, and interoperable, and avoid (or eliminate) content silos.
All together, the RealPresence Media Manager – Digital Signage Integration solution for Scala is uniquely positioned to deliver the “from any source, to any destination” objective universally desired by our customers.