Vidispine is focussed on helping customers build data-driven, cloud-based video content management solutions on their Videnet media service platform. Rather than out-of-the-box products, they have commoditised media asset management by providing a ready-made cloud platform that media companies who have their own development team can access through a developers tool kit and APIs to create custom solutions. Three products are promoted by Vidispine - Vidinet, Vidispine API and Vidispine Development Toolkit. The first enables services to be spun up on the cloud, the second provides the API for configuring, monitoring and controlling, and the third are development tools.

ARCHITECTURE: Vidinet is a cloud based platform, which it assumed is not available for on-prem only deployment. Vidispine promote their relationship with AWS as their solution’s cloud platform, as evident in their NAB press release and having a demo pod on the AWS booth. Underlying technologies include deep paging performance during a search by enabling the use of cursors from Solr and ElasticSearch.

INTEGRATION: Vidispine promote a relatively small portfolio of technology partners (their “ecosystem”) that cover file transfer, AQC, storage and systems integrators/consultants. While they mention machine learning, no detail is provided and they mention no third party AI vendor. They mention NLE, billing and other integrations, but do not mention vendor names.

AUTOMATION: While simple workflows triggered by API calls exist (such as to perform a transcode or move a file), Vidispine do not seem to have any form of more capable workflow engine, neither closed within their solution, nor with customer access for self-service design and real-time monitoring of workflows.

METADATA: Vidispine product supports Items, Shapes, Components, Files/Storages, Libraries and Collections. This includes tagging of collections and items, making time-coded comments, harvesting existing metadata when importing assets, and building custom metadata schemas. No mention is made of an intuitive tool for building metadata definitions, but instead promote the use of their feature-rich RESTful API to access advanced metadata handling and search functionality.

USER EXPERIENCE: Vidipine seem to have focussed on being a development platform and not invested in developing a finished front-end portal experience. Anecdotally, they have relied more on third party technology partners (particularly Cantemo) or the customer’s own development teams to create their own. Having said that, the VidiXplore UI is clean in style, but arguably lacks depth of functionality. They claim their search functionality is now much faster after recent developments.

ANALYTICS: Vidispine do not promote reporting or analytics capability. It is assumed that a development team can query the API and obtain the metadata required for this, but there seems to be no ready-made tools in Vidipine products for this.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: No reference to AI integration or application was found in the Vidispine marketing material reviewed.