Managing media can feel like juggling a hundred balls. You’re constantly dealing with a growing archive, the demands of production timelines, and the need for collaboration. It’s a lot to handle. What you really want is more time to focus on the creative side of your work—the reason you got into this industry in the first place. 

That’s why we’ve designed iconik’s latest update to change how you manage media. We’re all about reducing friction and giving you more time to work on the magic of storytelling, not the details of file organization. 

With a new Automation Engine, AI-powered media summaries, a revamped media player, and dynamic watermarking, iconik is here to make media asset management more accessible, smarter, and faster.

Here’s what’s new:

⚙️ Automation Engine (BETA): Bringing powerful media management automation to everyone.

🎬 New iconik Media Player: Enhance clarity in reviews and foster teamwork.

🛡️ Dynamic Overlay Watermark: Enhance security with personalized watermarks.

💡 AI Summaries and Topic Extraction: Transform transcriptions into valuable insights.

📝 User Description Field: Keep track of users with descriptive notes.

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Let’s walk through what’s new, why it matters, and how these features will help you get back to what you love most: creating.

Automation Engine: A world where workflows run themselves (BETA)

We’ve all experienced the grind of repetitive tasks—tagging files, moving assets to the right folder, setting permissions. None of these are creative, but they take up a significant chunk of your time. What if those tasks could handle themselves?

The new Automation Engine is Iconik’s answer to that. It’s a no-code UI that lets you create workflows to automate everything from archiving files to tagging assets with metadata. The best part? You don’t need to be a developer to use it. If you can imagine a process, you can automate it.

Iconik has always had a powerful API that lets you create powerful automations. The beauty of the Automation Engine is that this power is now available to everybody—even those who don’t have any API or programming experience.

For example, say you’re working on a large project with a ton of footage that needs to be categorized and stored properly. Instead of manually archiving assets that are no longer in use, you can set up an automation that automatically sends files that haven’t been touched for a set number of days to an archive. Or let’s say you want every new file uploaded to have a specific tag, be sent to the right team member for review, or kick off an automatic transcription. Or you want to use metadata tags to create edit proxies and notify the editing team when they’re ready.

The Automation Engine can handle all of this and more.

You’ll free up hours every week to reinvest in more important things, like tweaking that final edit.

The Automation Engine will launch in beta. Please reach out to your customer success manager or via our contact page if you would like the Automation Engine enabled on your account. The final version of the player and information around pricing will be available later this year.

Key Features:

• No-code customization: Build unique automation workflows with an easy-to-use interface. No programming knowledge needed.‍
• “If this, then that” workflows: Connect different parts of your media archive by setting up triggers, conditions, and actions to streamline your media management.

• Versatile automation: Automate tasks like archiving, file transfers, tagging content, and more—tailored to your unique workflows.
• Admin interface: Admins can securely manage all automations, tweak permissions, and view detailed logs for complete control over automated processes.

Transform transcriptions into insights with AI summaries

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If you’re working with large video files with transcriptions that span hours of discussion, you’ll love this next feature: AI-powered summaries and topic extraction.

Here’s how it works. When you upload a media file, Iconik’s AI can convert any speech to text. What iconik now does, in addition, is generate a summary of the transcription content and extract key topics. 

Imagine quickly scanning a four-hour-long video and knowing what’s discussed and which parts are most relevant to you in seconds. That’s what we’re bringing with this new update!

Let’s say you just finished shooting a week-long event with multiple speakers. Instead of watching hours of footage to pull out the highlights, you upload everything into iconik. The AI summarizes each session, pulling out the key themes and topics. Now, you can easily decide which moments to turn into social media snippets or include in a promotional reel—without sitting through every minute of footage.

It’s all about saving time. With AI summaries and topic extraction, iconik ensures that it’s super easy to keep track of what’s in your media archive and what people are speaking about—while adding another layer of information to search for and organize by. 

With AI acting behind the scenes, iconik is only growing more powerful as your media assistant, so you can focus on the story rather than the process of surfacing it.

Key features

• Quick understanding: Upload your media file, run the transcription, and receive a clear summary and main topics.
• Enhanced searchability: Extracted topics can be searched within iconik, making it easier to find relevant content.

New iconik media player: Built for review

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Next up is the new media player. If you’ve used iconik for a while, you know that media review and collaboration have always been core to the platform. But we wanted to take it further and make reviewing media more intuitive and collaborative.

The new media player offers a larger, more responsive view that adjusts based on your screen size. But it’s not just about being bigger. We’ve also added a compare mode that lets you place two assets side by side for a direct comparison, or overlay one on top of the other than change opacity or use a wipe tool to compare the differences. 

Whether you’re showing clients different versions of a project or internally reviewing drafts, this feature makes it easier to see the details that matter.

There’s also a new timeline lane system that organizes comments, subclips, and metadata into separate lanes. If you’ve ever tried to sift through a cluttered timeline, you know how valuable this can be. Now, you can see exactly where feedback, edits, or key moments are in the footage at a glance.

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In short, the new media player isn’t just about watching videos—it’s about improving communication and making the review process smoother for everyone involved.

Key features

• Compare mode: Compare two versions of an assets side by side, or use overlay with adjustable opacity or a wipe feature to spot variations easily.
• Larger player window: The asset player window is now larger and more responsive, giving your work more prominence.
• A tidier interface: We’ve moved the comment entry below the displayed comments for a more natural workflow.
• Marker timeline lanes: Separate lanes for comments, subclips, and time-based metadata make navigation clearer.
• Zoom capabilities: Zoom in and out of assets for detailed viewing. Toggle between “display size” and “actual size” for true 1:1 resolution.

Dynamic Overlay Watermark: Protect your content

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Let’s talk about security. If you’re handling sensitive media—whether it’s unreleased content, client work, or proprietary footage—you need to make sure that it stays protected. Enter dynamic watermarking.

Iconik’s dynamic watermarking adds a layer of security by applying personal details like the recipient’s email, IP address, and other identifying information onto the media. Every time you share a video or image, it’s personalized to the recipient, making it easy to trace any unauthorized sharing.

Alongside powerful security features and permissions like ACLs, dynamic watermarking ensures that your content stays where it belongs—under your control.

Keep track of your team with the User Description field

A small update, but a useful one! Managing a large number of internal and external users can be a bit of a challenge. To make things easier, admins can now add descriptions to user profiles. This means you can jot down notes to remember each person’s role or why they have access. It’s just another simple way to identify, manage, and organize users within your iconik system.

The future of media management is now

Ultimately, these updates are all about one thing: giving you more time to do what you love. Whether it’s the Automation Engine saving you from repetitive tasks, AI summaries speeding up your searches, or compare mode making it easier to get client sign off on versions, iconik is designed to make your life easier.

You didn’t get into this industry to spend your days managing files and tagging metadata. You got into it to create, to tell stories, and to bring ideas to life. 

With these new features, you’ll have more time to focus on exactly that.

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