Media Factory 3 Launch

posted by jambrose on 04.04.11

April 5th, 2011, Toronto - With version 3 of Media Factory, we continue our commitment to being the best user-generated content management platform. We've listened to our users and are proud to launch this next major version with more streamlined workflows, better navigation and powerful new media management features.

Our goal of this version was to update the overall design and standard UI elements to improve usability and lay the ground work for our product roadmap. That is, you can expect many more new features and improvements in the coming months that would have been particularly challenging without an interface that was cleaner and easier to navigate.

Several sections of Media Factory have received notable overhauls: Community and Media Manager.

Groups and Members

Every piece of media is linked to a member and we track all activity at the community member level. The first thing you'll notice in the Community section of Media Factory is the new Member Overview page. You can now sort members by most recently registered, by name or by most uploads and search by name, username, email, city state or country.

In addition to these essential tools, we've added a powerful new feature: groups. Community managers can now create member groups to organize people any way they wish. Members can be placed in multiple groups, and the member list can be filtered by group not only in Media Factory, but also on your websites using the API, or application templates.

You can use groups for many purposes, from managing multiple rounds of a contest, to granting different permissions, to presenting certain content to certain members only.

The member detail page can now be used to actively manage member data and media. Moderators can approve and deny media and comments as well as filter media by status. All personal information can be managed in this view including group membership, adding and editing custom meta data and even geo-tagging.

Media Management

Media Factory 3 (which has already received three updates to 3.0.3) is on the cutting edge of video and image management online. Based on conversations with our clients and partners and feedback from our product survey, we've been working on a number of exciting new media management features.

As always, the original file is always available for download or transfer to your FTP server. In fact, you can store all of your files on your own servers, or use your own cloud storage and CDN.

Faster and More Efficient Moderation

A successful UGC campaign can produce hundreds of files per day and thousands each week. A quick turnaround of the moderation queue is an essential part of keeping your community engaged.

Working with the best professional moderators, we've rebuilt our workflows from the ground up to minimize clicks and page loads. Now, moderators can edit text, view full-size previews and approve content without ever leaving the media overview page.

Image Cropper and Water Mark

Producers can manually crop images on the media detail page in Media Factory. The crop is applied to any custom media transcoder profile. For example, you could create a perfectly framed 100x100 thumbnail or make all images 400x500 portrait. Your transcoder can be configured to automatically crop all incoming images, and if one isn't just right, it can be cropped again manually. Now that you have perfectly cropped thumbnails, use the new Make Avatar button to curate beautiful member galleries.

The media transcoder system has also been outfitted with a watermark option. Producers can define an image URL and a position (top right, bottom left, etc...) that is applied to any custom image profile.

Change Owner and Location

By popular demand, we've added the ability to assign a file to an existing member. This can be done in the Media Factory uploader or on the media detail page by simply entering the target owner's member ID. The feature allows producers to download original files, manipulate them and then re-upload into Media Factory. A common problem this solves is blurring out copyright infringement such as t-shirts or editing a citizen journalist video for time.

Another typical issue is missing or incorrect geo-tagging information. We've added a Google-map tagging interface to every media page to make sure everything makes it onto the map.