This month, we announced a new offering, Ci Catalog. If you’re a current Ci user and have questions like, “What does this mean for Workspace? Should I use a Catalog instead of a Workspace?” You’ve come to the right place.
To learn why we built Catalog, read our press release.
Workspace and Catalog: Two Spaces, One Platform
In Ci, a Workspace is a space designed for production, broadcast, and creative teams who need simple, low-friction access to content for fast-paced work-in-progress projects. All Workspace members have equal access to Workspace content with the ability to add, modify, edit, share, and trash content.
The all-new Catalog offering is built for enterprise companies who need a central media management solution for finished content. Catalog serves various ‘downstream’ workflows ranging from digital sales, localization, monetization, and archive. Access controls in Catalog are granular, to better accommodate diverse workflows with internal and external end-users.
Since Workspaces and Catalogs are both “spaces” on the Ci platform, they naturally work seamlessly with one another. The addition of Catalog to the Ci platform brings compelling benefits to enterprises that you can read about more in our blog post.
How Workspace and Catalog work together
Read on to see specific examples of how Workspace and Catalog could work together in the real world.
Live Sports Example
Key Benefit: Save hours when sending hand-selected sequences to rights holders
At a live sports event, footage (files or live streams) can be captured at the venue and uploaded to a production team Workspace for logging and clipping. The production team edits, clips, and selectively publishes curated content to a Catalog managed by the content owner.
As soon as the cuts get published to the Catalog, the rights holders have instant access to the content they have rights to with the proper level of access control.
Episodic Production Example
Key Benefit: No duplicate storage or redundant transfers between production, marketing and sales
In an episodic production workflow, raw materials can be uploaded to a production or post-production Workspace. Edits are shared and reviewed in Workspace. Once the episode is finished, the producers publish to a Catalog.
Once the episode gets published to the Catalog, the Sales and Marketing department can have varying access to published content. The marketing team gets access to the episode to build promo materials. The marketing team will likely pull finished content from the Catalog to their marketing Workspace to create promo collateral. Meanwhile, the sales team can share screeners with prospective clients. When the series gets picked up for another season, the showrunners can relax knowing where to find all prior show content (including promos) and can be shared easily with new crew members with a couple of clicks.
Localization Example
Key Benefit: Centralized repository of all final versions of content across the organization
In a localization workflow, the production team publishes the finished content (e.g. film trailer) to the marketing department Catalog. In addition to the Marketing department Catalog, they could set up Workspaces for various teams/regions/languages for localization. A French localization team can pull the U.S. trailer from the Catalog and bring into the French Marketing Workspace to collaborate with local vendors to produce the French trailer. Once the localization for regional trailers wraps, each team can publish their final trailers back to the Marketing Catalog.
Need to Ci for yourself?
Many bespoke media solutions assume that the workflow ends when the final content is delivered. We know that the end of a workflow isn’t the end of the media lifecycle. We hear how enterprises are tasked with finding separate solutions for different workflows. That’s why the Ci platform is built to fulfill workflows at every stage of the media lifecycle. If you’d like a demo or want to learn more about Ci’s Enterprise plans, contact a Ci specialist today.
Yoshie Fujita
Marketing Communications Specialist for Ci (pronounced “see”) at Sony