Iconik does 3 things really well:

Presents A Complete Archive: Have an easy and holistic overview of all your media assets, wherever they are located. To do this it indexes all your storages, whether on-premises or in the cloud, and aggregates either the originals or the proxies to the cloud.

Enriches Media: Automatically tag your media assets with descriptive metadata using machine learning to make them searchable and discoverable. This is done for the entire video, shot-by-shot or even per frame.

Enables Collaboration: Here you can collaborate with anyone, anywhere, in your media workflows. This means, for instance, sharing assets for preview or download, review and approve WIP, or even in the media editing process.

Yes! You can bring your own storage (BYOS). Just mount your cloud storage in the admin section and iconik will start indexing it, generate proxies, and make the assets available for the relevant users.

We like this approach since it will also keep your consumables costs down as these will be handled directly with your cloud provider. For performance reasons, however, the proxies and keyframes are always stored on iconik storage.

Even if your library has petabytes of data, the hybrid cloud model of iconik will make it work great.

We address this by using something called the iconik Storage Gateway (ISG), which is a lightweight cloud connector.

Using the ISG hybrid cloud model, meaning that your high-resolution content can stay on-site, while proxies and keyframes are automatically generated on-premise and pushed to the cloud. iconik uses the proxies for most of the workflows, including global sharing, collaboration, and even editing. That said, ISG can also upload the hi-res files if desired.

Iconik is a globally load-balanced hybrid cloud system comprising of microservices. Here’s a diagram and more details about how we’ve designed iconik.

Yes. Security of your content, metadata, and information held within iconik is our highest priority.

You will have many access rights options to prevent unauthorized access by internal staff or those outside of your organization.

The iconik security model, infrastructure, compliance to standards and development will serve to keep your content and related information safe and you in control. Please read more here.

We’ve built an AI-framework for auto-tagging video and audio assets, so we can easily use any machine learning service to tag content. This also includes a workflow for relevant users to manually review and approve the suggested tags.

Iconik is currently integrated with Google Video Intelligence and Amazon Rekognition, but can also be integrated with a custom trained service for your specific data.

The iconik Storage Gateway (ISG) is a small daemon that runs on Mac, Linux, or Windows and monitors traditional filesystems (NAS/SAN/DAS).

Its basic job is to index those filesystems, generate local proxies of any item it can, and then push the proxies to the cloud while linking the cloud asset to the on-premise file.

It can be configured to do more than this as well, including pushing the original assets to the cloud, or perform customer steps based on your business logic.

The only iconik component required from local servers is the iconik Storage Gateway.

Sizing depends on estimated volumes of media and what kind of transcode pipeline is being used.

Smaller environments could thrive with very lightweight VMs with a few processors and 4GB of RAM.

When doing transcoding on the node we recommend 4 cores and 4GB of RAM per concurrent transcode stream. For iconik Edge Transcoders, we recommend the same sizing.

We’re actually growing at a very healthy rate, but yes, we do still have measures in place for every eventuality.

The iconik API’s are very extensive, and because of this each customer can access essentially all the information available in the system relevant for them. This includes everything from media assets, metadata, annotations, comments, user/group information, and more. Using the API’s our customers can easily set up backup scripts, e.g. they can set up an automatic backup to a location of their choosing on a nightly basis.

Since we apply “bring your own storage” (BYOS), you can actually hook up your own Google Cloud Storage or S3 to the system. This way, in the unlikely event of iconik becoming unavailable, your assets will remain accessible outside of the iconik realm. You can also limit iconik’s access to these storages with only read and scan access.

Enterprise customers running iconik on their own cloud infrastructure also have full access to the infrastructure at all times, meaning full control of the backend and the data.

There are a couple of ways of doing that. Through the API’s you can get or update any information in the iconik platform using your app token and user credentials. In fact, we have no hidden API’s - meaning everything you see in the front-end is using the same API’s that are available for each customer.

In addition to API’s, we have webhooks. Any third-party app can subscribe to specific webhooks and trigger workflows based on specific events in iconik. E.g. export an asset when a specific metadata field has been updated to a specific value, or send an SMS to the ingest manager if an ingest job fails.

We’re also working on extending the customization capabilities of iconik. Soon you’ll be able to add your own buttons/links to specific places in the UI - e.g. navigation bar, or the side bar buttons.

We believe the SaaS version is sufficient for most of our customers. However, the Enterprise version makes sense for customers with the following needs:
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1. A dedicated deployment (single-tenant) of iconik
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2. The ability use their own cloud provider/account, e.g. on Amazon Web Services, IBM Cloud, or Google Cloud.
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3. The option of deploying and managing iconik within a virtual private cloud (VPC)
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4. Access to the iconik backend services, like the database, search engine, etc.

Generally, our customers use a multi-tenant domain as part of our SaaS platform for test/QA. Given these environments generally have significantly less data/users/etc in them, the costs are often quite low.

For an Enterprise setup, there is also an option of spinning up a dedicated second domain as well that is a QA/Dev environment. The Enterprise iconik platform allows for internal domains to be created that are walled gardens, meaning the costs would just be associated with whatever users are added and the infrastructure costs would be shared.