by: VMware Director for Global AV and Events Josh Burton, VMware Sr. Multimedia Product Manager Jal Chen, VMware Sr. Manager for Broadcast & Multimedia Events Craig Chapman, and VMware Multimedia Solutions Architect Felipe Giannazzo
Like many companies over the last few years, VMware accumulated multiple video streaming and storage repositories to support both live events and on-demand content. Some popular examples are Brightcove, IBM Video Cloud, Panopto, Saba (Hive), Intrado, On24, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, Zoom, etc.
We currently have several video delivery platforms within VMware and needed a video tool that provides better interactivity and collaboration capabilities for published video content, live events, and integrated webinars.
Finding a comprehensive solution that centralizes content and addresses critical factors like governance, risk mitigation, syndication, and cost control is akin to discovering a hidden treasure. Enter VMware TV, our enterprise media one-stop shop that streamlines and enhances the management, distribution, and enrichment of media assets.
The challenge and goal
Our current video infrastructure is disjointed and cannot meet our evolving video requirements. Additionally, we have several departments that are primary consumers of video services for internal and external use cases. Our goal for VMware TV is to reduce duplication, operational overhead and spend.
Publishers increasingly depend on automation to maximize the reach of new and existing content. VMware TV rises to the challenge by collaborating with partners and startups in designing generative video AI-driven toolsets. According to VMware multi-media solution architect Felipe Giannazzo, we plan to refactor existing content into short form highlights and summaries that succinctly reach our viewers with needed information. Automating this process has been a dream of our many marketers and communications stakeholders and it is finally becoming a reality.
Felipe said that “maintaining rich metadata and organization of tens of thousands of entries is challenging, but AI can be a game changer. With more accurate transcriptions and intelligence on the content and intent of existing videos, we can help content creators and viewers find each other with accurate tags, machine-generated descriptions, summaries, and category and taxonomy recommendations.
However, we stand at the threshold of a transformative change. Thanks to a suite of innovative toolsets currently under rigorous evaluation, we’re on the brink of automating much of this process and slashing associated costs. Our journey toward delivering top-tier, global content begins with the precision of transcriptions, which serve as the foundation for crafting nuanced translations into the numerous languages we support.
What’s truly exciting is the advancement in generative AI technology. By harnessing this technology, we’re poised to deliver accurate translated subtitles and audio-dubbed content that captures the richness and nuance of our technical material in many languages.”
A primary objective of VMware TV is to simplify and optimize the complex landscape of video content management. By consolidating various aspects of the video creation and delivery ecosystem, this platform harmonizes workflows and elevates overall efficiency introducing cutting-edge tools and features that promise to redefine how we produce, share, and interact with video content. See Figure 1.
Figure 1. VMware TV Architecture
At its core, VMware TV addresses the critical needs of operating at scale. It ensures seamless syndication, enabling our content to reach a broader audience. Simultaneously, it places paramount importance on data privacy and security, safeguarding sensitive information and protecting against unauthorized access. Furthermore, VMware TV enforces stringent record retention policies, ensuring that content is preserved in compliance with regulatory requirements.
VMware TV goes to great lengths to shield personally identifiable information (PII), reflecting our unwavering commitment to data protection. This comprehensive approach ensures that we are at the forefront of video innovation and of safeguarding what matters most: our data and our relationships with our colleagues, customers, and partners.
The journey
Our journey toward enhancing VMware TV yielded remarkable achievements, firmly establishing it as a cutting-edge enterprise media platform. Key milestones include:
- Successfully migrating content, including 125TB from external platforms across the company, into one central repository, reducing the number of vendors from 10 to two.
- Implementing a centralized managed event production service and chargeback model to manage the spend category within our user groups enabling USD $1M in yearly savings for the company.
- Integrating AI-powered video processing and content creation tools that provides content creators with robust tools, such as video editing, chaptalization, clip creation, autotranscription and autotranslation. This streamlines content production and elevates the quality of our media assets.
- Seamless integration with video conferencing platforms recognizes the evolving needs of our users, bridging the gap between VMware TV and popular video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Teams. This seamless integration fosters a cohesive user experience, allowing for the easy transition between media consumption and interactive virtual meetings.
- Providing a user ecosystem for live streaming and webinars supports our commitment to user engagement. This includes features like chat, polls, surveys, Q&A sessions, and more, ensuring our audience remains actively involved. Moreover, our integrations with marketing platforms like AEM, Marketo and Salesforce enhance our marketing capabilities and audience reach.
- Open source-published API promote transparency and encourage collaboration and innovation within our user community, reflecting our commitment to fostering an ecosystem where ideas and creativity flourish.
- Comprehensive analytics suite empowers content creators and administrators with insights into user behavior, content performance, and engagement metrics.
- Enhanced user engagement ensures content reaches multiple audience endpoints through features like dynamic embeds and API calls, creating a rich, user-centric experience. This approach enhances content accessibility and promotes user interaction.
- Liberating content and data by enabling content to be published once but distributed across multiple channels. This allows creators to reach wider audiences while maintaining data integrity.
Governance
As VMware TV has matured, our team made a deliberate pivot toward governance, recognizing it as a cornerstone of our continued success. This shift led us to embrace automation in numerous aspects of the media management processes. One of our key accomplishments lies in the realm of media archiving. We effectively automated the archival process through a combination of SaaS modules and in-house microservices. This ensures the preservation of valuable media assets and enables us to retrieve and leverage them as needed.
Another crucial facet of our governance strategy involves the stringent enforcement of retention policies. By automating this aspect, we reduced the margin for error and the risk of noncompliance. Our system acts as a vigilant guardian, seamlessly applying retention rules without manual intervention, safeguarding us from legal complications.
Furthermore, we took a proactive stance toward security. Our approach is twofold: first, we automated the access control mechanisms to ensure that only those with a genuine need have access to specific components of our system. Second, we’re continuously vigilant against potential security vulnerabilities.
Our team leaned into governance as we VMware TV matured. Automating processes for media archival, enforcing retention policies, and restricting access to the essentials needed for each integration ensures that we stay ahead of security vulnerabilities and legal risks. With a combination of SaaS modules and in-house built microservices, we reduced the amount of manual effort needed.
What’s next?
According to VMware Director of Security Strategy Craig Savage, “VMware TV is a game changer for our organization and the teams charged with developing, maintaining and promoting the video distribution ecosystem for content creators and audiences inside and outside of VMware.”
Our next step in the evolution of the platform is to fully exploit the syndication features available to position VMware TV as the single source of video content for all audience touchpoints. We’re already tapping into this potential with video embedded in our main marketing websites and product documentation, but we can unlock additional value by connecting the platform to other audience aggregators like YouTube, Spotify, and BrightTalk.
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We look forward to hearing from you.
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