Cruise Lines - Digital Asset Management System

Our customer, one of the largest and most prominent cruise operators in the United States, offers a diverse portfolio of cruises and vacation experiences worldwide. With a strong emphasis on customer satisfaction and onboard experience, it continually innovates to set new standards in the travel industry. Recently, the company embarked on a transformative initiative to enhance guest engagement through advanced technology and improve operational efficiency across various cruise services. Seeking expertise in implementing digital asset management solutions, they turned to Apophis Consulting LLC to bring this ambitious vision to life.

Our client's ambitious objective was to elevate the customer experience and drive revenue growth through cutting-edge technological advancements on its cruise liners. The project aimed to enhance every aspect of the cruise experience, from personalizing customer interactions to creating new revenue opportunities through media assets like photos and videos. Apophis Consulting LLC was tasked with developing a comprehensive Digital Asset Management (DAM) system to capture, process, distribute, and monetize the vast amounts of visual content generated onboard. Key challenges included the need for robust, scalable data pipelines for handling media assets, creating an automated cloud synchronization process, and leveraging machine learning to personalize the media assets for guests while ensuring legal compliance and image quality standards.

The collaboration resulted in a sophisticated, automated digital media asset system that fundamentally reshaped the customer engagement experience onboard. The system enabled seamless capturing and processing of guest photos and videos, which were then automatically enhanced, checked for legal compliance, and categorized based on advanced face recognition algorithms. The onboard system allowed guests to view and purchase their media assets through strategically placed large screens that responded to guest proximity, offering a highly personalized, interactive experience. This DAM system also included a cloud synchronization feature, automatically syncing assets to our client’s AWS cloud infrastructure each time a ship docked at a port, ensuring data security and redundancy. Additionally, an IoT-based solution for Canon cameras enabled staff to instantly upload content to the system for processing, thus streamlining the workflow and reducing manual input. Installed on three cruise liners, this solution not only provided a new source of revenue through media sales but also enhanced customer satisfaction by creating unique, memorable experiences onboard

To address all goals and the project’s inherent complexities, Apophis Consulting LLC built a DAM platform based on OpenStack, enabling a compact cloud environment that could travel with each cruise liner. For scalable and reliable media storage, the team utilized Ceph, ensuring assets were securely stored and easily accessible throughout the lifecycle. Kafka and Kafka Streams were employed to build efficient data processing pipelines, crucial for handling the substantial flow of digital content in real time. Each media asset underwent several automated processes, including quality enhancement, legal verification, and face recognition, using machine learning algorithms to ensure regulatory compliance and deliver a high-quality product.To add a layer of interactivity, large digital screens were strategically placed onboard and equipped with sensors to detect guest proximity. This feature allowed the system to highlight relevant media assets to guests, offering them a highly personalized experience with the option to purchase directly.

Apophis also engineered a seamless cloud synchronization mechanism between OpenStack and AWS, ensuring that each time a cruise docked, all onboard assets were synchronized with the central cloud repository, thus securing data and supporting cross-ship operations. An IoT add-on developed for Canon cameras enabled real-time uploads, reducing manual effort and expediting content processing. Apophis’s DevOps team ensured system reliability and resilience, while automation testing reduced operational downtime and validated system robustness. Over 36 months, the project team—comprised of backend, frontend, ML/CV engineers, and DevOps experts—delivered a powerful digital ecosystem that enabled leverage data-driven, personalized customer engagement and unlock new revenue streams through media assets.

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