cloud-based Archives - Overcast HQ

Cloud-based CMS: How To Create The Best Tech Stack

Posted on March 8, 2021August 28, 2024 by Philippe Brodeur

Overcast MAX #6: Max Orchestrate

What is Orchestration and why do you need a cloud-based CMS (content management system)?

I could throw around terms like “RESTful API” and “transcode queue” and “headless” but I’d run the risk of stumbling into a rabbit hole of terminologies that often mean different things to different people. So, in the spirit of trying to keep things as straightforward as possible — which is one of our guiding principles here at Overcast — let me do my best to explain it in layman’s terms.

Let’s try this again.

The first thing we need to do is get comfortable with 3-letter acronyms. The digital world is full of them. One of the most popular is CMS or Content Management System. It’s a bit of a catch-all for all sorts of software use to manage the creation and modification of digital content. Ask a developer what a CMS is and they will tell you it is a simple software solution like WordPress. Ask a CMO of a large FMCG company like Diageo or Nestlé and they will say it is sophisticated solution for managing content as data over an API.

Bit of a difference — and the CMO version is a bit ethereal. Nonetheless, the term CMS has come to mean more than simply WordPress — CMSs are now the building blocks of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Web Content Management (WCM).

So on one level, a CMS can be WordPress (for managing your web content). On another level, Dropbox is also a CMS — like a filing cabinet that you use to store your content and share with others before putting it in your WordPress CMS.

Are you still following? We’ll try to use fewer acronyms from here on in.

Now what happens when your filing cabinet starts to fill up? You either delete content (or you could archive it) or get another filing cabinet. Problem is that eventually you end up with a slew of filing cabinets and it all gets a bit unwieldy.

Step in ECM.

ECM typically supports multiple users, groups, security and the ability to manage workflows in larger organisations.

So think about a large organisation (but by no means huge) like the London Metropolitan Police Force. With 44,000 staff and more than 250,000 cases per year — imagine trying to manage that content in Dropbox or Box or Google Docs!

Or think about a typically-sized local broadcaster with 200 employees. In a typical day, they will produce hundreds if not thousands of pieces of content (news, ads, bumpers, promos, tweets, posts, etc.) all of which need to go through a number of phases: production, a review and approvals, distribution, review, modification, and archive. Imagine trying to do that with Dropbox!

Which all goes to say: managing digital content, while maybe not glamorous, is essential to the well-being of an organization.

Cloud-based CMS is the future

Now let’s get back to how orchestration and a cloud-based CMS is the future of digital content management.

A cloud-based CMS is a “CMS built with Intelligent Cloud Architecture”. Mmmmm. CMS is like WordPress for websites. Intelligent (smart; got that) … Cloud (doesn’t live on my hard drive) … Architecture (my childhood Lego learnings are coming back to me). Whew! Got there in the end.

Now to get a grip on why I need one…

Max Orchestrate

The more technology we need, the more complicated our tech stacks become. But you don’t have to settle for a ‘one size fits all’ solution.

Max Orchestrate is ideal for advanced organisations that have complex tech stacks but need to simplify workflows.

By optimising your workflows, you’ll make them more efficient and thus get content to market quicker.

Let’s go back to our 2 examples. The London MET deals with cases and evidence while the broadcaster typically deals with projects and assets. Broadcasters use a number of software solutions that are tailored to their industry for tasks like editing and channel creation. The Police have forensic and case management solutions. The fact that they have very different needs means that it is unlikely that a vanilla pack solution for managing content is going to work for both of them — instead they need a solution that acts as a cloud-based CMS and integrates with their existing tech stack.

Benefits of Max Orchestrate

Workflow Optimisation

The great news is that whether you need a whole new system or just a problem solved, you can use Max Orchestrate to manage workflow problems of any size.

Micro-services for best-of-breed

Overcast wants to ensure you have the best-in-breed: with micro-services, you can swap in and out what you need. Easy! Overcast provides 9 native solutions — and it has an API to integrate other solutions that you are already using or that you need in the future.

Micro-services also facilitate you to identify expensive parts of the puzzle and replace them with more efficient tech.

Future-proofed technology

In addition to advancing your tech by adding new services, it’s strategic to decommission legacy technology. Monolithic architecture is dead and you don’t want it to drag you down. By swapping in and out what you need, you’re orchestrating the best applications to future-proof your technology.

Sound good?

Get in touch

If you have any questions about Max Orchestrate or any of the Overcast Max solutions, please get in touch with Philippe on info@overcasthq.com or through our contact page. He’d be delighted to have a chat with you.

No Limits To Your Live Streaming Ambitions

Posted on February 11, 2021August 21, 2024 by Fiona Ashe

Overcast MAX #1: Max Live Streaming

“The video streaming market is on track to become a $124.6 billion industry by 2025.”
— Grand View Research

There’s no doubting the burgeoning popularity of live streaming. The wide-ranging benefits to business who use it include:

access to a wider audience, unlimited by geographical or size constraints;
direct communication with customers and potential clients;
lower costs than running a real world event or traditional broadcast platforms;
viewers can access your live stream on any device, on the go;
the opportunity to grow your community;
involve viewers through live interaction;
the opportunity to cross-promote your social channels;
repurpose the content by sharing clips from the live stream afterwards;
take advantage of the SEO benefits of YouTube;
use analytics to evaluate the success of your live event.

Overcast MAX

In our previous blog post, we gave an overview of MAX, our suite of next-generation cloud applications for production, collaboration, storage and distribution that makes remote video collaboration effortless.

Max Live Streaming

You don’t need to be in the media and entertainment industries to grow your business through live streaming. It can be used for in-house trainings, public events, town hall meetings, etc. — in fact, anything you can think of. But you need a simple, high quality, secure way to do it: say hello to Max Live Streaming.

If you’ve tried live streaming before, you may have experienced low quality streaming due to limitations in the available bandwidth — it’s a common problem with free services. No such worries with Max Live Streaming!

It’s cloud-based adaptive HD streaming, so you are guaranteed a high quality result. You’ll never run out of bandwidth, which means you can be confident about being able to deliver the content to your audience the way you want to.

If you find that streaming is benefiting your business, you can easily scale up your live stream strategy — with no limits!

It’s quick and easy to set up; and once that’s done you can bring non-tech employees into the workflow and let them manage the content. If you’d like to create a channel, it’s as simple as dragging and dropping content.

We provide you with a network that has enterprise grade security. But while secure live streaming used to be prohibitively expensive, now your event can make money and you can re-invest it in your business.

Max Live Streaming is so easy that you can get up and running in seconds. What are you waiting for?

What else have we got?

In our next post, we’ll explore where to store and archive all those large video files and how to manage them effectively with Max Storage.

Get in touch

If you have any questions about live streaming, please do get in touch. Our email address is info@overcasthq.com or you can click here to get in touch. Ask for Philippe. He’s always good for a chat!

What Have We Learned About Remote Working With Video — Part 2

Posted on January 28, 2021August 21, 2024 by Fiona Ashe

Remote working: the challenges for video production

It’s been a long year of working from home and that doesn’t look likely to change any time soon. Since the unexpected and abrupt transition to remote working was thrust upon us, we have all had to adapt our work practices.

In the first part of this blog post, we looked at how video production and remote working can be easy bedfellows by using a cloud-based platform to facilitate efficient collaboration, simplify tasks through automation and speed up reviews and approvals. Now, let’s take a whistle-stop tour through other key considerations.

Make metadata work for you — not the other way around

Automating processes and getting content to market is all fine provided that you can find the content in the first place.

Using AI it is now possible to automate audio-to-text and do basic image recognition. That creates really rich metadata sets that ultimately become searchable…to the frame.

Gone are the days when you had to scroll or scrub through long videos to find what you were looking for — it’s all automated now.

Speed to market is essential

Getting videos to market — and that means on multiple platforms in multiple formats — needs to be fast.

Broadcasters, agencies, publishers and brands don’t have time to manually distribute content anymore: they need to automate it and people throughout the organisation need to be able to manage the content.

A cloud-native Video Content-as-a-Service platform such as Overcast makes this collective responsibility effortless.

Security is of paramount importance

When all of a company’s employees are working from the same building, it’s a straightforward task for the IT department to ensure the security of data and content. But the new remote working landscape presents challenges.

Overcast is partnered with AWS and Signiant — thus it provides a secure environment in which your digital assets are protected.

So, with remote working looking like the new normal in this vastly abnormal era, you can make your video production process smooth, easy, efficient, cost effective and scalable.

What are the long-term benefits?

Streamlined workflows such as the ones described in this two-part blog post were already available before the pandemic but the new normal has accelerated the widespread move to cloud-based collaboration.

The long-term advantage for enterprises is that they will be; more agile, have greater scalability and be future-proofed.

While many people are craving the social interaction and creative collaboration that is sparked in a shared workspace; the technological and economic benefits to companies of remote workflows means it’s likely that the future will involve some form of hybrid.