Media Excel and Six Floor Solutions are collaborating to develop new tools capable of delivering high-quality, real-time video content and customised highlights to wide audiences.
Media Excel, video encoding, transcoding and packaging specialists, has launched a collaboration with Six Floor Solutions, a platform developer for AI-driven video highlights. Six Floors’ expertise lies in detecting programming and ad breaks, recording real-time timestamps and producing video highlights from live sports and news events. The companies’ partnership was formed with the goal of developing new tools for the media industry that are capable of delivering high-quality, real-time video content and customised highlights to a diverse audience.
Real-time AI Highlights Generation
Media Excel's HERO platform now integrates directly with Six Floors' highlight generation software, combining the encoding and transcoding functionality of HERO with Six Floor's AI capabilities. The integration makes it possible to create personalised playlists of content that can be streamed at high quality. Media companies, broadcasters and content creators using the combined platform can then make real-time personalisation a feature of the video services they deliver to viewers.
Six Floor Solutions automates the work of video processing and metadata generation to help video service providers improve their quality of experience (QoE) and quality of service (QoS). AI engines analyse input video streams from news events and sports in real-time, automatically identifying the most engaging highlights. For more precision, users can search for specific events to highlight based on their interests. The results from their tools can be used to generate short, taggable video clips capturing key events, and make them easy to search. By browsing thumbnails, the software identifies and finds events, and then filters and compiles them into playlists.
Most aspects of the Six Floor platform are customisable, for example, events may be searched by keywords, or by faces identified during processing. Metadata generation can be tailored to create and monetize new services, without relying on manual information processing.
Media Excel HERO Live workflow (NMS - Network Management System).
Live, File-based and Remote Encoding/Transcoding
HERO works on the delivery side – adaptive bitrate, multi-device encoding/transcoding software that handles live and file-based workflows in a single platform. Using recent, efficient video codecs and operating in real-time, HERO Live and File support multiple simultaneous input channels and generate multiple outputs per input, so that users can deliver to various media platforms and devices.
HERO Event is used for remote on-location encoding at low-latency. Set-up is simple and its workflow is comprehensive, delivering the live signal from the camera or production switcher to local and global audiences. Like the File workflow, multi-channel, multi-format, multi-screen broadcast productions are supported.
Personalisation with Scalability
The developers anticipate a number of advantages resulting from the integration of Media Excel's FAST channel delivery with Six Floor Solutions' AI-driven highlights, including the efficiency and cost-saving that automation can bring. For instance, the combination of personalised, timely highlights with targeted advertising increases the potential for monetisation by attracting more advertisers and creating new revenue streams.
Broadcasters are expected to be able to make more engaging, relevant content available as well, keeping viewers for longer and expanding viewership. Because the combined system is highly scalable, media companies can handle large volumes of video content and reach many platforms and devices. This flexibility adds options when tailoring content to serve different audiences. mediaexcel.com
