UFA is a one hundred years old TV production
company.
So we are very used in things of changes.
The whole market is at the moment in a big shift based on a digitalization, based on
new IT possibilities.
For us a big new step is the change from a production company to a content provider.
That's the main step.
One of those possibilities is to get our archive into the cloud and put very intelligent Microsoft
Azure based cognitive services on the video on demand platform on top of our archive.
So we are able to create new possibilities to monetize our whole content.
Normally you have only an archive and a video on demand platform.
And both together in the cloud, with Microsoft and Microsoft Azure Cloud is our archive on
demand.
As a first step, it was very important to
us that the costs to make all the videos out of the archive available, have been reduced
to such an amount, that the first time we could think about a longtail business in the
VOD area.
Secondly the solution is scalable, upwards and downwards, because we want to experiment
in the b2c business.
In the case of low demand, we want to have nearly no costs, in the case of high demand,
we want that the solution is acting with high performance.
That is given with the pay as you go-approach we have here.
UFA already had a long-term vision pioneering the cloud based production workflow.
In fact from the very beginning it matched our vision and our view of workflow digitization
in the media landscape.
In fact it matched perfectly our "Go Digital or Go Broke" initiative.
Interlake as a Microsoft partner is taking the lead in this project.
That means we started with a concept, with developing all the surroundings that are necessary.
We brought in the partners, coordinating nexx.tv. within the project
And are also doing the migration of the content of the archive to the cloud connecting it
to the VOD platform.
And once everything is running, we are taking care of the ongoing operations.
The biggest improvement so far is the scalability that we have through the cloud and the cloud
services, cognitive services, artificial intelligence.
They helped us a lot in extracting additional information from the archive content and that
makes it a lot easier for UFA to monetize the content online in the VOD platform.
And also the UFA employees today have the possibility to push a button and publish something
in the VOD platform.
Suddenly you can think about subtitling and translating thousands of episodes per
series automatically with nearly no cost and easily.
All the thousands of episodes could be made browsable by character or by storyline.
And last but not least it is also future business first time evolve.
Just think about linking video and metadata like e-commerce needed data, like the glasses
of the main actor, so we can think about completely new things.
The sky is the limit.
Nexx.tv offers an online video solution running on Microsoft Cloud Azure.
We enable our clients to manage, distribute, analyze and monetize their video content on
their own websites and apps.
Within the UFA project the nexx.tv solution is used to run the VOD platforms.
UFA was able to enlarge their business model to go b2c, offer video content to end customers
in several markets based on our technology.
Within such a project you are facing a lot of challenges, from on premise to cloud, from
b2b to b2c as well, nearly no stone to be left unturned.
Within the VOD project the preparation of the video content and this whole amount of
video content, the meta data was one of the major challenges.
This normally takes a lot of time, costs a lot of money, but due to Azure cognitive services,
which are deeply integrated into our solution, this could be done really faster and cheaper
than before.
We have a very clear vision.
Our vision is to bring the whole value chain of media production into the cloud.
One very important step was the archive on demand, the next very important step is cloud
editing, because cloud editing is the center of the whole post production workflow.
And at the end we will get all those media directly from the camera to the cloud and
we are very sure with our partner Microsoft, our local partners nexx.tv and Interlake,
we are able to do that in the next years.
Azure is uniquely positioned with enterprise grade cloud and a partner ecosystem all tailored
around the media industry.
Therefore, we are aggressively looking to take the next step with UFA.