Why Consider Library Migration?
Content monetisation is a very effective way of making your asset library generate more income for your business. Old archive content that has been sat on the shelf for years costing you money to store can suddenly become a source of valuable and unexpected profit.
With VOD platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and Disney+ driving an explosion of content, there has never been a better time to uncover the hidden gems of your archive library and explore your options for monetisation. The current ongoing COVID-19 situation too has had an impact on demand for content. With shooting on new productions forced into hiatus, VOD platforms and traditional broadcasters alike have been searching for extra programming for their schedules.
If you have original content in your archives, the markets definitely exist to leverage those assets, breathing life – and value – into your library.
The traditional approach of selling your content to broadcasters isn’t the only way to generate revenue from your archive assets, either. Thanks to improved connectivity and reduced costs, cloud-based environments have allowed Artificial Intelligence processes to flourish. This has enabled innovations like scene detection for product placement. Using algorithms, products such as Mirriad enable impressively natural product placement in your content. This might be inserting an advert onto the newspaper a character is reading, or adding a brand logo to someone’s clothing. This means you can effectively sell advertising space within your programmes or films.
Other AI tools include cloud-based analytics tools that take the pain out of streamlining your archive. These can clean up the format clutter in your archive, as well as identifying duplicate files. That makes it easier to find specific content amidst thousands of files and means you’re not paying to store the same asset twice.
Of course just about any monetisation process is reliant on your content being in a usable format, and that means digital files that can be readily delivered and analysed using software solutions for opportunities to monetise them. LMH is a market leader in migrating your legacy-format assets to a digital platform. We can help you identify the best workflow, orchestration, storage and distribution options for your business needs. Our unsurpassed tape ingest capacity, combined with cutting-edge automation and orchestration tools, mean we can service your content in a timely and cost-effective manner. That means you are that much closer to realising your goal of monetising your archive content.
We can help you put in place the correct systems to give you the best chance of achieving sales of your content. The below examples touch on how we might go about doing this.
A production library acts as a reservoir of content that you, or a client, can use to supplement programme output. This tends to cost a mere fraction of what you would spend to make entirely new content. Especially within the post and distribution mid-level content market, these libraries can be used to feed the recycling of content. From your digital files, scene detection algorithms such as Gray Meta Curio can be used to create a Media Asset Management (MAM) index from your metadata. Your files can then be quickly accessed by productions that require the insertion of archive or complementary footage.
VOD platforms call for a more distribution-focused rationale in how we prepare and store your files. Codec and wrapper choices are geared towards a mezzanine-master-proxy approach. The mezzanine is the top-quality file that you will keep as your definitive reference file. The master is the work-horse you distribute to satisfy your sales. Lastly the proxy: this is the play-anywhere-on-any-device file that you use to achieve the sale in the first place. While this approach may cost more to set up in the first instance, it delivers the full spectrum of materials you will need for VOD sales and for servicing the client’s packaging requirements. That means you avoid costs and time delays later on in the process of selling your content.