Azure Media Analytics – Search EVERYTHING In Your Videos

Last week I was in Singapore at the Microsoft APAC Education Partner Summit where over 140 partners attended two days of sessions. One that really stood out for me was a session on Azure Media Analytics.

The idea behind this service is to deliver deeper insights into the media content of an organisation, far beyond the simple number of plays on a video. The best platform for viewing this concept is below:

https://www.videobreakdown.com/

The demo was impressive and highlighted a range of really interesting use case scenarios on how Azure Media Analytics might be leveraged by organisations. As per the graphic above there is a lot of individual features and some of the ones that stood out to me included:

• Facial Identification/Recognition – tagging of names to faces
• Transcription – automatic transcription of content either live or post-recording
• Translation – automatic translation of the above transcripts
• Visual Text Recognition – a really unique one that allows you to search for any text that appears on screen, whether a sub-title or PowerPoint deck being shown.
• Indexing – all of the above is searchable from a global search box

From a real world usage perspective there is a range of very clever scenarios that could leverage this type of technology e.g.

• An organisation tags important people e.g. their senior leadership / VIP guests. They could then search their video archives to find footage where two people are in the same video shot such as a Prime Minister coming to open a new building at the school and the Principal is in the video shot with the Prime Minister.
• Recorded Lectures – students/lecturers could search recorded lecturers for anything e.g. key words either spoken or displayed on screen.
  • Because indexing is applied the above search results will play a few seconds before the keywords are spoken/displayed on screen.
• Providing searchable transcripts for visually/aurally impaired users, increasing the accessibility of content to all users.

The search capabilities available on the www.videobreakdown.com website

Another cool feature demonstration was Microsoft Hyperlapse a tool that was released last year that allows you to create smoothed accelerated time-lapse  videos. Designed to improve the viewing experience of “first person” videos filmed on devices like GoPro cameras that are often very shaky, the significant processing power of the cloud is used to improve these videos.

Video showing actual speed, 5x accelerated time-lapse and then 5x accelerated time-lapse with HyperLapse

There is a good summary from The Verge here, and the video below shows how Hyperlapse Pro can be used:

These all represent new ways to engage with rich visual media and maximise the value of it by making it searchable.