In 2021, online video content is more important to consumers than ever. People across the world have spent the majority of the past year in front of screens, and their appetite for video is only growing — by 2022, Cisco predicts that videos will account for more than 82 percent of all consumer internet traffic. Video production teams couldn’t possibly meet this extraordinary demand without specialized tools that transform outdated processes and streamline workflows. 

Media asset management is one process that can be particularly inefficient without the right tools. However, thanks to the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI), it’s easier than ever for content creators to access, search for, and filter through huge volumes of media assets, ultimately making production more efficient. 

Media Asset Management vs. Digital Asset Management

Media asset management and digital asset management are often used interchangeably to refer to the same process. While they are definitely similar, the functionalities of each are usually targeted to different users.

Digital Asset Management: Digital asset management tools have traditionally been used to organize, manage and distribute brand-related assets — everything from company logos and product photos to marketing materials. Organizations use digital asset management solutions to help make these materials accessible across departments, ensuring brand consistency and reducing bottlenecks.

Media Asset Management: A media asset management solution is often used to manage and distribute large media files like audio and video. These tools are regularly leveraged by media and broadcast companies as part of their audio and video production workflows.

In this article, we’ll focus mainly on media asset management and explore how automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology can streamline your workflow and save you hours of searching for the right audio or video clip. Let’s dive in!

What is Media Asset Management and Why is it Important?

Simply put, media asset management is the storage, organization, and management of video and multimedia files. With the sheer amount of video being produced today, efficient media asset management can help teams meet deadlines, collaborate more easily, and produce better work. But on the flip-side, inefficient processes can be time-consuming and seriously hinder productivity. Research by GISTICS shows that on average:

• Creatives spend one of every 10 hours on file management, mainly searching.
• They look for a media file 83 times a week.
• They fail to find that file 35 percent of the time.

Media asset management systems give video producers the ability to add metadata to audio and video files, making those files more easily accessible for the whole team. With traditional tools, users can extract information such as the file type, who created the file, the time it was created, its duration, and its format. Unfortunately, these traditional solutions rarely provide information about the file’s contents — details like who was speaking in the clip, what was said, or key phrases and themes. 

Sure, video producers can comb through these traditional tools to manually log and tag their assets, but they rarely have the time. But with modern media asset management tools powered by speech-to-text AI, video professionals can save themselves hours of tedious file management.

How ASR Improves Media Asset Management

Speech recognition technology can make all of the voice data within audio and video files visible and, most importantly, searchable. Media asset management platforms now integrate with ASR APIs to create AI-generated transcripts of those audio or video clips. That way, media professionals can transcribe hours of audio or video in a single click, and then find the key pieces they need with a simple search.

Time and Cost Optimization

By transcribing media files into a text-based format, video editors and producers can search for and use assets in minutes. Let’s say you’re putting together a customer story video and you need to find one particular clip where the interviewee mentions a major reason they love your product. The only problem is that you can’t remember what the clip was titled, and there are thousands of media files in your shared drive. Using a media asset management system with speech-to-text capabilities will help you find that clip instantly — just search for a keyword, spoken phrase, or theme.

Enriched Metadata

Harnessing the power of speech recognition technology can produce valuable metadata that will help create operational efficiency and drive collaboration. AI can generate a transcript in which the text is timestamped, attributed to speakers, and added to that file’s metadata, creating more paths for creatives to find the assets they need. This helps the editing and production process move much faster, and allows teams across your organization to share files and collaborate on projects, regardless of location. This enriched metadata will also help ensure that legacy assets don’t get lost in a sea of folders — with easily searchable clips, you can resurface your old golden moments and use them in new ways. 

Content Unification

A good media asset management solution will act as a single source of truth for your media files — a centralized repository for everything from live or stock video footage to raw audio from an interview or a finished podcast episode. In this increasingly digital world, organizations have giant volumes of media assets, but they are often stored in several different solutions. These fragmented systems can make those assets difficult to access and slow down production. With a cloud-based (or hybrid) media asset management platform, your organization can aggregate assets so that they can be found quickly and easily by anyone who needs them. 

Harness AI for More Efficient Media Asset Management

ASR technology can help video editors and producers streamline their workflows, collaborate more effectively, and be more productive. An asynchronous speech-to-text API like Rev.ai can integrate with media asset management platforms to transform the way media production teams work, so they can tell more great stories faster. Check out our webinar with media asset management platform iconik to see how Rev.ai helps iconik users access richer metadata and trim fat from workflows.