What’s New in Programmable Media

Programmable media technology continues to evolve, with savvy organizations leveraging it to captivate visitors, retain users, and increase conversion rates for their products and services.

The demand for effective media management has driven the evolution of programmable media, leading to artificial intelligence (AI) technology for facial detection, video and audio transcription and detection, background removal, content analysis, and video moderation. It’s never been easier to manage media assets.

In this article, we’ll look at the newest trends in programmable media and some Cloudinary products that you should consider integrating into your products.

New trends in media consumption have encouraged the innovation of unique, personalized media experiences that help keep customers engaged. The widespread adoption of mobile technology and high-speed internet has enabled consumers to stream high-quality, device-optimized, location-specific video.

Another trend driving the growth of programmable media is the proliferation of business data analytics, which help companies understand their target audience more thoroughly. AI has become instrumental in optimizing media experiences, enabling us to analyze enormous quantities of data to help with:

• Content analysis.
• Image and video analysis.
• Audio analysis.
• Media forecasting.

Breakthroughs in AI have made automation easy — and essential. AI-powered transcription tools let you automatically convert speech to text for video and audio content, enabling seamless video captioning, pronunciation tests, and assistive learning. 

Let’s explore how Cloudinary’s AI-driven tools can help you easily manage your images and video assets.

Deleting an image’s extraneous background objects helps users focus on what matters. Cloudinary AI Background Removal uses machine learning (ML) algorithms to identify and erase the background of an image during the upload, when it’s updated, or on the fly. Let’s look at how the tool works with the Cloudinary Node.js software development kit (SDK):

cloudinary.v2.uploader

.upload("cat.jpg", 

  { public_id: "cat_i",

    background_removal: "cloudinary_ai",

    notification_url: "https://mysite.example.com/hooks" })

.then(newImg =>console.log(newImg));Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Passing cloudinary_ai to background_removal activates the Cloudinary add-on, which removes the image background during upload and stores the result.

To remove the background on the fly and store both the edited image and the original, use the following method:

cloudinary.image("docs/cat.jpg", {effect: "background_removal"})Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Cloudinary AI Content Analysis uses AI-based object detection and content-aware models to perform object-aware cropping and automatic image tagging. 

Object-aware cropping allows you to preserve specific objects in an image, which is helpful in image processing and optimization — particularly for applications like product images and visual searches. Object-aware cropping helps with the following:

• Improving product visibility. In e-commerce, you can use object-aware cropping to ensure that products are visible to customers. It can improve customer experience and increase sales.
• Increasing visual search accuracy. Use object-aware cropping to improve the accuracy of visual search algorithms by preserving specific image objects, making it easier for the algorithm to identify and match the image to the appropriate product.
• Improving user experience. Object-aware cropping can improve the user experience of a product by making it easier for viewers to identify and focus on specific objects — particularly useful for e-commerce and retail websites.

Automatic image tagging helps to manage and organize images with greater efficiency. Accurate tags also make on-screen content accessible to people with visual disabilities.

With automatic resizing tools, you can deliver media in a variety of sizes to your users, serving multiple devices from one source.

Cloudinary image tools allow you to crop and resize images to your desired dimensions. To crop or resize an image, just specify to the Cloudinary API or SDK the resize/crop modes as a parameter, or declare the dimensions — height, width, and aspect ratio.

Here’s an example to demonstrate how the Cloudinary resize tool works using the Cloudinary Node.js SDK:

cloudinary.image("docs/cat.jpg", {height: 300, width: 300, crop: "crop"})Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Here, we passed the height and width parameters as 300 and the crop mode as “crop”. Cloudinary supports additional crop modes, including fill, fit, thumb, scale, limit, and pad. 

To crop an image of a person to leave only the face, repeat the step above but remove the height and width parameters. Then, substitute in gravity: “face” in their place.

With content updating more rapidly and frequently than ever, the pressure is on creative teams to keep up. Programmable media allows you to revamp designs on the fly and keep your brand looking fresh.

Cloudinary’s media API tools make it easy to transform, manage, and optimize assets. Cloudinary provides a variety of API endpoints to help you move fast and stay ahead of the competition:

• Upload API enables the upload of media assets: basic and advanced assets and metadata management.
• Search API allows you to filter and retrieve information from media assets, searching by embedded data, descriptive tags, or analyzed data.
• Admin API gives you full control of all media assets in Cloudinary.
• Media Optimizer API enables you to manage your Media Optimizer configurations.
• Video Player API provides methods and attributes to use when working with the VideoPlayer object.

There are many places to store, update, and monitor media. For example, you might want to:

• Store related media together in a folder.
• Share a collection with desired user groups.
• Perform bulk operations on media like adding tags, downloading and editing, updating details for a single asset, or searching for assets based on designated criteria. 

With so many channels, it’s easy for a media asset library to become chaotic. Asset management is crucial to avoid the problems that come with having many channels. It also improves collaboration among teams. 

Cloudinary’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) keeps you on top of your media needs:

• Search media assets. There are multiple ways to search for media assets. DAM allows you to filter and get any desired media within your media library.
• Upload and store assets. Upload images, audio, video, and other media to your media library and easily retrieve them at any time. 
• Organize and share assets with folders and collections. Folders and collections make it easy to share and recover assets. Grouping related media helps the team stay organized as your media assets grow.
• Manage each asset in your library. Managing individual assets in your media library is easier with editing, access control settings, analysis operations, and many other operations that can be performed on assets.

There will come a point in the product life cycle when you’ll  need to integrate tools from another vendor into your workflow. You’ll need to be able to do so without adopting a totally new and unfamiliar tech stack.

Tech-independent, composable architecture makes it simple  to integrate different system components, regardless of the technology on which that system was built. With composable architecture, a tech team can easily plug a new component into an existing component architecture.

Cloudinary’s tech-agnostic composable architecture is a headless, AI-powered media platform for visual content within your existing tech stack. Like all composable architecture, Cloudinary was built using the API-first principle, so it connects with any tech stack. Using its APIs, SDKs, and widgets, you can seamlessly integrate it with your stack.

With new technologies and tools constantly emerging to help manage, optimize, and deliver media content, programmable media technology is moving swiftly. Processes that previously took a long time can now be done in seconds, and AI-powered tools allow us to automate many tasks.
Smart companies stay on top of trends and harness the power of programmable media with Cloudinary. Sign up for free today.