Navigating the Media Maze

A leading media technologist has told the Making the Media Podcast of the challenges which cloud developments, the move to more software-based applications, and artificial intelligence are posing to the industry.

Roberto Raponi, from the Italian Public Broadcaster, RAI says that this is an exciting time for the industry with a rapid pace of developments, but it is also impacting the skills required among the technical teams to address the challenges. Cloud workflows are a case in point.

In the latest Making the Media Podcast, called “Navigating the Media Maze,” he tells host Craig Wilson, “We are working internally to have the tools, the skills, and the culture to manage different offers. One of the primary points is also how the technology supplier, or how the vendor of the solution, are connected to this cloud provider. I think, for example, many solutions, many technology vendors, many partners say ‘Ok, we are developing this system if you want with Amazon, or Azure, or Google, or whatever you want.’ The problem is that who is in charge of managing the integration between the cloud provider? Who is in charge of managing the troubleshootings or any relationships or any, of course, activations of some workflow or not?”

All of this emphasizes the need for staff with both traditional broadcast skills and also a wider understanding of IT, cloud, and hybrid workflows. This is hard to find, he says.

In the episode, Roberto also speaks of the caution within European public broadcasters about being early adopters of technologies such as artificial intelligence. He recognizes the potential benefits it can provide and says they need to put in place the infrastructure to take advantage of it. He sees particular benefits when it comes to metadata enrichment, improving the discoverability of content, and opening up more opportunities for reuse.

“I think that my personal idea is in terms of metadata creation, the AI should be amazing because we have millions of clips and items in our library, so imagine considering the AI. Metadata enrichment is something that should be incredible, but of course it's something that we need to manage and to integrate to actual infrastructure that is quite large for us.”

Find out more on the next episode of the Making the Media Podcast, available on all major podcast platforms on Friday, December 15.

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