The Root 6 ContentAgent solution is a configurable workflow engine targeted at broadcasters, post houses, web content producers, agencies, and corporate creatives. ContentAgent adds value in specific areas of the supply chain, to “make common ingest, transcoding and delivery processes accessible to non-technical staff and free up your creative suites for revenue generating work.” ROOT 6 do not claim that ContentAgent provides comprehensive asset management capabilities, and hence why our overall scoring is not high. Automation is where its strength can be seen.

ARCHITECTURE: It appears ContentAgent is only deployable on-premise, running as a software application on a variety of PC hardware including blade servers, workstations and even a laptop. Additional transcoding nodes (Job Agents) can also connect together with a main ContentAgent system. Neither microservices, database(s) or other underlying technology are mentioned.

INTEGRATION: ContentAgent integrates with leading third party tools such as Avid for automated ingest and delivery tasks, Cinnafilm’s Tachyon and Dark Energy tools for high quality noise removal and motion compensated frame rate conversion, NexGuard for invisible watermarking, Minnetonka for Audio Tools Server processing and leading file-based quality control products including Vidchecker, Baton, Aurora and Pulsar.

AUTOMATION: ContentAgent provides a graphical workflow design tool that seems intuitive and easy to use. This is provided with a number of flexible templates for ingest, file-based quality control, and social media uploading. The ability to monitor workflow progress in real-time is not clear from the marketing, nor support for custom scripted nodes within the workflows.

METADATA: The ability to add custom metadata is referenced, but no further information provided in the company marketing. It is therefore assumed that ContentAgent only manages some basic taxonomies and does not support more advanced functions such as thesaurus, tagging, logging, taxonomies etc.

USER EXPERIENCE: The Root6 user interfaces (content capture, workflow designer, and job monitoring) seem to be designed by a third party called HeavyLight. These UIs seem not to have been updated in many years, so their style is rather dated. From an asset management perspective functionality is very limited.

ANALYTICS: ContentAgent includes a UI for jobs monitoring that provides some visualisation with job status traffic lights, progress bars, and hardware CPU usage graphs. No other reporting or chart creation capability, fix or customisable, is mentioned.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: No reference to AI integration or application was found in the Root 6 marketing material at the time of this review.