Microsoft Build is always a great opportunity to share innovations and it’s been an exciting start to 2023 for Azure Video Indexer! We aim to be customer obsessed and have listened to and worked with our customers and partners to deliver impactful improvements. The overarching message from them was to make Video Indexer cheaper, faster, and safer. There is also great interest in integration with Chat GPT/Open AI, smarter insights, and an overall experience that’s easier to use and manage.
- We were asked to help our customers “Do more with less” and lower the cost of indexing projects to enable the indexing of huge media projects as well as the video content powering fast growing applications and social platforms.
- We were asked to make it quicker to index with Video Indexer in all scenarios – be it through our amazing webapp and embeddable widget or our API when indexing vast media archives!
- We were asked to raise the bar regarding our commitment to enable secure indexing with Video Indexer and allow customers to have more control of when to opt out of using sensitive AI’s.
- We were asked to continue innovating with new AI’s and Open AI integration while making it easier to index and monitor your Video Indexer resources safely and confidently.
- Finally, we were asked to provide a solution that can index your media wherever it resides, be it in Azure or on the Edge
With that in mind, we are happy to share the latest and greatest from Video Indexer:
Cheaper
Price Reduction
We lowered the price of our most popular presets by 40%, making it easier than even to innovate with Video Indexer. By reducing prices and the introduction of a new Advanced SKU, we offer competitive pricing while providing more options for customers to balance costs and features. Additionally, as we continue to improve and add more AI capabilities, customers will be able to take advantage of these cost savings when performing new or re-indexing operations.
Faster
Ten uploads at a time!
You wanted the ability to upload and index through our webapp more than one video at a time and we heard you! We completely revamped the webapp upload experience, which now enables you to upload and index 10 videos at a time! It is also more intuitive and consistent with your overall Azure experience.
Observed people indexing duration optimization and quality improvements
We have optimized the memory usage of the observed people model, resulting in a 60% reduction in indexing duration when using the advanced video analysis preset. You can now process your video footage more efficiently and get results faster. In addition, Observed people now supports people who are sitting. This improvement makes observed people model more versatile and suitable for a wider range of use cases. We have also improved the model re-identification and grouping algorithms by 50%. The model can now more accurately track and group people across multiple camera views.
Secure and Sensitive
Support for storage behind firewall
It is good practice to lock storage accounts and disable public access to enhance or comply with enterprise security policy. Video Indexer can now access non-public accessible storage accounts using the Azure Trusted Service exception using Managed Identities.
Exclude Sensitive AI’s
In line with our commitment to Responsible AI, Azure Video Indexer now allows you to exclude specific AI models when indexing media files. The list of sensitive AI models includes face detection, observed people, emotions, and labels identification.
Innovative AI, Smarter/Easier to use and manage
ChatGPT & VI for content discovery
We have released code samples, demo’s, and articles on how to use ChatGPT and OpenAI together with Video Indexer for content discovery and insight extraction.
New Speech model experience including Pronunciation training
Azure Video Indexer has added a new custom speech model experience that reduces the need for timely and costly transcript edits and fixes. The experience includes ability to use custom pronunciation datasets to improve recognition of mispronounced words, phrases, or names. The custom models can be used to improve the transcription quality of content with industry specific terminology.
Topics fully mapped to IPTC standards
Video Indexer topics are mapped to the media Ontology of IPTC. This hierarchical set of concepts is the industry standard of media topics which is used for content categorization. We now support all five levels of IPTC ontology for enhanced video recognition, search, and recommendations applications.
Additional language support
We frequently add support for additional source languages and so far in 2023 have added support for 10+ new languages.
Textual logo detection
Textual logo detection enables you to customize text logos to be detected within videos.
Notification experience
The Azure Video Indexer webapp now has a notification panel where you can have visibility to your recent operations and upload status and stay informed of important product updates, such as service impacting events, and more.
Resource Health Integration and Diagnose and Solve
Azure Video Indexer is now integrated with Azure Resource Health enabling you to see the health and availability of each of your Azure Video Indexer resources. Azure Resource Health also helps with diagnosing and solving problems and you can set alerts to be notified whenever your resources are affected.
Index everything everywhere….
Azure Arc enabled extension
There are scenarios where content can’t be sent to Azure and customers need a way to unlock insights of this content as well! With this in mind, we are super excited to share that Video Indexer will be extending beyond Azure and opening to preview an Azure Arc enabled extension that can run on-premises, leveraging the Azure Arc platform. Customers will be able to bring the Video Indexer experience they know and love to their media wherever it is, delivering multiple AI’s in an easy to install and use solution. The initial scope of the preview is our Basic Audio preset. If you are interested in learning more and joining the preview, reach out to us at vipreviews@microsoft.com .
Want to explore Video Indexer and stay up to date on all releases? Here are some helpful resources:
- Use Azure Video Indexer website to access product website and get a free trial experience.
- Visit Azure Video Indexer Developer Portal to learn about our APIs.
- Search the Azure Video Indexer GitHub repository
- Review our product documentation.
- Get to know the recent features using Azure Video Indexer release notes.
- Use Stack overflow community for technical questions.
- To report an issue with Azure Video Indexer (paid account customers) Go to Azure portal Help + support. Create a new support request. Your request will be tracked within SLA.
- Read our recent blogs in Azure Tech Community.