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Vice Media

The VICE Media technology-development team has devised a way to use the Frame.io API and AI to automate the once-manual process of Standards & Practices reviews, allowing them to meet the increasing demand for faster turnarounds.

See how VICE Media boosted their productivity by 70%.

Challenge

The Standards & Practices (S&P) team at VICE Media is responsible for ensuring that all VICE programming meets 3 separate levels of broadcast standards to comply with different media outlets’ requirements. VICE’s boundary-bending, often expletive-heavy shows made finding sensitive content a labor-intensive task for a team that had to spend nearly 3 times the actual running time across all programming in a manual review process, a particular burden for shows with same-day air times.

Solution

By developing an automated process using the Frame.io API with AI transcription tools, VICE has gained a massive boost in their productivity. Once the automated tool was developed, it took only a few minutes to train the S&P team to use the customized tool.

Results

Making the S&P team more efficient by improving and standardizing the output of their work means that they can use their skills to do more creative thinking. It also ripples out into the entire workflow because they can deliver programming with less stress during tight turnarounds.

“What the numbers don’t capture is the business impact of the time we save and the positive effect on the editors, producers, assistant editors, and supervisors who use the platform every day.”

Dee Wassell Director of Media Operations, VICE Media

Learn more about how VICE Media relies on Frame.io to streamline their large-scale content operation and realize greater efficiencies through customized workflows.

Frame.io helps VICE operate at scale.

VICE has 36 offices worldwide with 2,000 team members using Frame.io to manage 333,000 assets stored on 35TB in the cloud. Annually, they create over 200 hours of original programming, and they calculate that by using Frame.io they save more than 100 eight-hour business days each year. Their S&P department of only 2-3 members was charged with reviewing 6-7 hours of video content each day, with a maximum 2-day turnaround to review and finalize a show for broadcast.

Frame.io is customizable.

Ted Cost, VICE’s media systems developer, worked with Dee Wassell and Frame.io to focus on creating programmatic solutions for the arduous workflow. The VICE team collaborated with Frame.io in real time over Slack as they worked through the steps of using AI transcription tools to identify the expletives and automatically place the data into an easily viewable spreadsheet.

Ted created a custom menu action from the Frame.io adjustable UI to a program contained in AWS Lambda. The data he needed to run the computation was included in the custom action, so as soon as it was ignited, it became a self-contained process that left little room for bugs or user error. The overall project spanned a month of working on-and-off, with Ted spending 10-15 hours on the Frame.io component.

Frame.io enables innovative workflows.

VICE’s media tech org stays ahead of the curve in terms of innovation and development. Although every media-production ecosystem and workflow is different, most are using the same collection of a few dozen tools. The trick is in finding, among the near-infinite ways that they can be used together, the best, most efficient ways to combine them for each organization’s unique needs.