What will it take to create a video processing system that maximizes content output and minimizes management input?

Producing a "smarter server" will take a lot of time and effort, but the seeds of innovation are clearly in the market today. While an industry roadmap is not yet established, Elemental CEO Sam Blackman weighs in on the development potential for a smarter server. Here's an excerpt from the Streaming Media article:

"High-level approaches have already been implemented to improve the media processing workflow. Platform players have long been devoting resources to improve this pipeline. Complete solutions like these often focus on the overall high-level management layer, but this isn’t necessarily the best way to solve the problem for the rest of us. Other approaches for keeping up with the rising demands for online content have created a niche of prohibitively expensive systems that are only applicable to a small group of very large media properties.

A better overall solution is to make the individual components of the system smarter, not just develop a more intelligent overall architecture. In turn, these individual components will be useful to a wider range of content creators, providing them with necessary workflow improvements.

Elements of smarter servers are already appearing, including features like load balancing and grid encoding. But we still aren’t using these encode systems to their full potential. Instead, we remain focused on tailoring system design to match human workflows; the resulting solutions are dependent on manual intervention at far too many stages. Fundamentally, next-generation systems should focus on reducing human touch and increasing system autonomy."

Read the whole piece, "Industry Perspectives: Building a Smarter Server" at StreamingMedia.com.

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