InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
October 4, 1999
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"The metadata is the key to this. It's the information that gets associated with the clip during the logging process," says Forrester's Schwartz. "The goal for companies is to understand what they have so they can get at it. And if they are forward-thinking companies, they're looking at how to leverage these assets."
General Motors Corp. is using the Virage VideoLogger to speed customer input into product development. The automaker conducts frequent focus groups to gain consumer feedback as it designs future car models. In the past, technicians and product analysts spent countless hours taking extensive notes and shuttling back and forth while viewing videotape. Using the VideoLogger, technicians feed focus-group video into a video server. The logger analyzes the video and creates a centralized index and storyboards. So far, GM has digitized and logged 400 hours of focus-group video. The video-management tools give product analysts instant access to searchable video on their notebook computers.
"People can find exactly what they're looking for, rather than going through a stack of 10 tapes. It has cut their prep time in half," says David LeFevre, technical adviser for General Motors Media Archives. "The payoff is quick results. In some focus studies, they may have to get data turned around in two weeks."
GM Media Archives is also using the Virage VideoLogger to index and repurpose the company's video assets. These assets include TV commercials, product rollouts, executive presentations, and even 1950s films of car manufacturing. So far, GM Media Archives has digitized, logged, and indexed 800 hours of its more than 8,000 hours of video.
Value-Add: Accurate Indexes
Harvard Business School is also maximizing its video assets. The school uses the Virage VideoLogger to help students and professors easily access video streamed on its intranet.
"The loggers run all day, every day. We're busy all the time either logging new material or logging old stuff," says Larry Bouthillier, Harvard Business School's manager of multimedia production. The school's video assets include speeches by CEOs of major companies who visit Harvard. The loggers create data, including the text of speeches and an index. "Having this data available as part of your enterprise data, you can give people access to specific pieces of targeted video content," Bouthillier says.
Digital media asset-management companies have bundled video searching, sifting, and sorting tools into their products. These companies include Artesia Technologies, the Bulldog Group, and Cinebase Software. These vendors provide a broad range of database tools that let users manage images, text, and video. These companies are banking that business archives can be transformed from dusty repositories to vital asset-management centers. "I am convinced that corporate video will move at a faster pace than the Internet did," says Artesia chief technology officer Dipto Chakravarty. "The Internet involved preaching and adoption of new techniques and changed the way work used to be. Video is something you already have. You are re-expressing or repurposing your assets, rather than changing the way you work."
Montalvo of Virage estimates that large companies will typically require four to 10 loggers to manage video assets. Virage's VideoLogger is both an analysis engine and a master controller. The software controls and synchronizes the functions of multiple video encoders. It also uses image- and audio-analysis technology to extract a visual storyboard and a searchable index. The audio-analysis technology identifies who is speaking and the topic. All of the information extracted from a logged video clip comes out in a video description file that is stored in the company's database or Web server.
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"It becomes a valuable tool when you can index in an accurate and meaningful manner so that somebody can search the video later on," LeFevre says. "This allows our brand-management folks to see what was done in the past." With its video assets digitized, indexed, searchable, and easily retrievable, GM can reuse portions of video shot for other purposes and more efficiently shoot video in the future. The company's use of the Virage tools is part of a larger initiative to digitize 3 million still images. Ultimately, GM Media Archives plans to offer stock footage and images to car buffs over the Internet.
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