Apex Media COO: Anticipation is Key for M&E Companies
By Chris Tribbey
Margaret Boryczka, co-founder and COO of Apex CoVantage, said what makes Apex Media Solutions work for media and entertainment companies is pretty simple: “We anticipate industry trends and build solutions that address current problems.”
“The big new thing on the horizon is the vast stores of video and photo collections that are sitting out there, and growing each day,” she told the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance. “There’s tons of video … [and] that information is at the state that hard copy, books and journals were 25 years ago: They’re not accessible to anybody, they’re not accessible in any meaningful way at this point.”
“In terms of the universe of discoverable content out there in the market, less than 1% of that is video. It’s an area that is ripe and ready to be the next wave of accessible content.”
A global digital content services company dedicated to helping media and entertainment companies find new solutions in the digital marketplace, Apex Media Solutions has been working with content owners to create new products and workflows for more than a quarter century.
From creating and enhancing large sets of asset metadata, to creating transcripts and closed-caption files for new and archive content, to digitizing physical assets, the company works with studios, broadcasters, production houses, cable casters, Web casters and more to apply metadata tags and make content more searchable.
“Unlocking new revenue streams [has] been key to the [M&E] business for the last 25 years, getting content out of repositories and monetizing it in new revenue streams, no matter what that stream looks like,” Boryczka said. “There’s a lot of value trapped within video. We are helping media and entertainment firms digitize and add intelligence (and metadata is a piece of it) to the content, to enable them to repackage and resell ‘chunks’ of video.”
It’s an inflection point for the market, with new media assets being pulled out of storage every day, offering a great opportunity for companies to find new revenue streams, Boryczka said. Whether it’s making videos searchable for one client, or helping another digitize and monetize about 21 million archival photos, Apex prides itself on finding a balance between using the right technology and the right people to find new revenue opportunities.
For example, Apex worked with Condé Nast to transform content from its “Vogue” brand — dating back to the late 1800s — “into this amazingly innovative product,” Boryczka said. “Every photograph, every graphic, every sketch, even the advertisements, were richly tagged with data to make them not only searchable but also searchable in really interesting ways,” she added.
“It’s opened up a lot of different markets for that type of product because it’s made it searchable in ways that simply didn’t exist in the past. It was a real game changer for them.”
On the video side, Apex gives clients the ability to use logging and indexing to generate clips; use captioning as metadata to allow audio from video assets to become searchable; enable analytics about content and market performance to better inform content and marketing decisions; create new products; transcribe sound effects and other audible information for the deaf and hard-of-hearing; and improve the performance of video assets on search engines.
And metadata is playing a bigger part in the business of asset monetization every day.
“There’s no question that metadata is the key to unlocking commercial value of this enormous stock of assets,” Boryczka said. And because of that, Apex is working to help establish metadata standards for the Web, as an active member of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) and Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE), and as co-chair of the Metadata Working Group in the W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group.
First started as an outsourcing company, Apex has prided itself on identifying trends before anyone else sees them coming. The company built an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from the ground up, before anyone had even heard of the term ERP; was the first to create a customized format matrix for content conversion; and took only three weeks to construct a prototype that anticipated the advent of full-text databases.
“In terms of the content side of the world, which is what we got into very early on, [we saw the] trend going from what was then called fixed-field data to flowing text,” Boryczka said. “The databases at that time were minuscule compared with what they are today. … It was very clear that there was a huge need for digital content.”
That led to the development of the company’s ADEPT software technology, “and that was the beginning of large volumes of content being put in digital form,” she added.
For the longest time, all the way into the early 2000s, so much content was still being stored on paper or microfilm. Apex saw the need for a digital solution there, as well, introducing its IZAAC (intelligent zoning and algorithmic conversion) platform, a workflow solution that takes in any form of content (PDFs TIFF images, JPEGs, XML files, etc.) and tags it with metadata, allowing for simple and accurate search and discovery.
“IZAAC was a key technology for us [and] continues to be today, and virtually all of our clients in one way shape or form [use it],” Boryczka said.
Soon, Apex will deliver its next big thing, MediaSkiff™: a new product for media and entertainment companies that “is going to smash half a dozen or so current paradigms and provide users with the ability to find a selection of the most relevant content in minutes, not hours and days,” Boryczka said. The new platform will cover video, audio and photo content, she added.