The latest version of VSNCrea benefits from even higher levels of automation, allowing users to more easily manage acquired content and advertising scheduling and enabling both improved accuracy and enhanced productivity.

“Historically, the management and monitoring of advertising scheduling and broadcasting rights has been a manual process, often relying on Excel spreadsheets – and as such, it was both time-consuming and error-prone,” said Patricia Corral, Marketing Director. “Now, VSNCrea provides new levels of automation that can minimize the time and resources spent on the task while eliminating potentially costly mistakes.”

Users can now locate content quickly with its associated broadcasting rights; automate the scheduling of their catalogue according to their own licenses and set-ups; and schedule advertising time slots with associated pricing depending on the time of broadcast or publishing while avoiding, for example, same-category repetition. It also allows users to perform a comprehensive revenue and ROI analysis with customized reports and dashboards.

New functionality now included in VSNExplorer MAM is said to enable users to derive even more value from their media assets. It uses semantic searching – in which the search engine understands the meaning of the enquiry, rather than looking for literal matches – to “significantly improve” how metadata is associated with content and improve the ‘findability’ of content so that searching becomes much more productive.

“For any organization looking to migrate its existing archive systems, or to bring its elderly archive system into line with what’s possible with new technologies, this new functionality will be extremely appealing,” said Corral. “It can exponentially increase the speed with which content can be catalogued, located and retrieved.”

VSNExplorer MAM is now capable of syntactically cataloguing all the terms and sentences used in the description of scenes in order to achieve formal, unambiguous, accurate and user-agnostic metadata for content in any language. Qualifiers – such as colours, mood, commercial names and types of objects - can be added to metadata in order to achieve more precise results.

VSN NewsConnect now enables users to control multiple studios in different locations, even if the systems used in the studios are different.

“What this means is that a user – typically, a journalist – can simply send a news item to any studio and NewsConnect will automatically ensure that the delivered content matches the format requirements of the receiving devices,” said Corral. “This remote interoperability is very useful in enabling news to be repurposed to the requirements of local broadcasters without worrying about technical compatibility – maximizing the value of the news.

“Previously, sending a story to a specific studio would require knowledge of the systems in use at that studio, and manual adaptation of the media to ensure compatibility with the target NRCS, NLE, CG, video server, studio playout system and so on. NewsConnect takes care of automatically adapting the media to the different systems available, sending e.g. linear TV, WebTV, non-linear platforms or social media as appropriate.”