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- Industry Insights: Media Asset Management Continues To Embrace New Technology
- Industry Insights: What You Need to Know About Media Asset Management
Only a year ago, one of the biggest decisions for anyone looking to implement, replace or upgrade part or all of their media supply chain was where to put it — on-premise, in a private cloud, in the “public” cloud, or some hybrid of the three. Today, for the majority of media organizations, it is almost taken for granted that at least some of the infrastructure and services will be cloud-based.
“What or how much is on-premise depends largely on legacy storage or systems that need to remain operational,” says Karsten Schragmann, the head of product management for Vidispine. “Cloud-based platforms are already helping to reduce those start-up costs and diminish risk. With minimal initial investment, systems can be spun up and, especially in integrating other systems, sandbox and staging systems can be managed cost-effectively.”
Schragmann was one of a number of experts from vendors of media assessment management technology examining the march to the cloud for a two-part “Industry Insights” roundtable discussion hosted by NewcastStudio.
There are already excellent examples of existing cloud-native supply chains, such as A+E Networks, Discovery, ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia, embracing this journey to the cloud. They recognize that moving to the cloud not only helps them become more efficient, but it gives them newfound agility to pursue new opportunities much faster.
“Increasingly, broadcast supply chains will migrate to the cloud, from ingest through delivery,” said Geoff Stedman, CMO for SDVI. “For many, the goal is to push content directly into the cloud from the point of ingest or acquisition, and never have it come back to the ground until it reaches the viewer’s device. This kind of efficiency and agility will allow broadcasters to scale the number of channels and services they can offer dramatically.”
“It would allow content creators and distributors to focus more on creative tasks: plan, produce, manage, package and distribute their content quicker, helping them stay competitive in a content-hungry world,” added Mathieu Zarouk, director of product strategy, Media Workflows at Dalet.
READ MORE: Industry Insights: What you need to know about media asset management (NewcastStudio)
Hybrid storage environments are gaining traction, although a large piece of the market will continue with on-prem storage for some time. MAM workflows have to straddle them.
“With remote working now being so fundamental, it is important for users to be able to execute their broadcast workflows regardless of where they are working from, and regardless of where the media is located,” says Camilla Powell, for Grass Valley. “Our larger customers, with multiple production sites spread nationally and globally, benefit from the federated view of all assets and the ability to use any content, wherever it was ingested or created.”
Metadata still plays an essential role in content organization and it is increasingly allied with algorithms to speed workflows and optimize the supply chain.
“Broadcasters are looking to these new technologies as readily available gateways to the cloud, and reporters are already starting to stream video live to air over 5G mobile networks. In dense environments like stadiums, Wi-Fi 6E means people will not compete for bandwidth like they do today, which means new opportunities for streaming content and delivering experiences during sports matches and other events.”
— Bill Admans, Ateliere
“Media without metadata is close to useless,” Powell answered. “Customers are demanding AI solutions to automate metadata creation and enrichment, whether it is logging metadata, transcription services, facial recognition, scene detection… the list is endless. These are rapidly becoming must-have core feature expectations in a product as opposed to product delighters.”
Russell Vijayan, head of business development for Digital Nirvana said, “Metadata enables memorialization of media assets,” and for that reason, it is essential to ensure structured metadata is preserved.
READ MORE: Industry Insights: Media asset management continues to embrace new technology (NewcastStudio)
“Technical, speech-based, or video-based, all have specific use cases today and are widely used by AI engines for modeling and recommending. This makes it essential for MAM systems to have a robust way of generating, preserving, and retrieving content based on metadata tags,” he said.
New and upcoming ultra-fast networks like 5G and Wi-Fi 6E don’t just mean more data streaming from the cloud; they mean faster access to the cloud from the point of content creation.
“Broadcasters are looking to these new technologies as readily available gateways to the cloud, and reporters are already starting to stream video live to air over 5G mobile networks,” said Bill Admans, COO at Ateliere. “In dense environments like stadiums, Wi-Fi 6E means people will not compete for bandwidth like they do today, which means new opportunities for streaming content and delivering experiences during sports matches and other events.”
“Increasingly, broadcast supply chains will migrate to the cloud, from ingest through delivery. For many, the goal is to push content directly into the cloud from the point of ingest or acquisition, and never have it come back to the ground until it reaches the viewer’s device. This kind of efficiency and agility will allow broadcasters to scale the number of channels and services they can offer dramatically.”
— Geoff Stedman, SDVI
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- Industry Insights: Media Asset Management Continues To Embrace New Technology
- Industry Insights: What You Need to Know About Media Asset Management
As expected, the requirement to work from home has accelerated the adoption of cloud-based infrastructures for content management as organizations look for ways to enable collaboration between locations and to reduce their reliance on on-site data centers.
“The requirement for remote working hasn’t changed our approach as much as it has reinforced our view that leveraging cloud-based workflows provides the most efficient access to content and applications for people that may be located anywhere,” said Stedman.
Nor are media production workflows reverting back to traditional models. “Over the past 18 months, MAM technology providers have been forced to prioritize roadmap items, pushing collaboration, workflow, remote visibility and discovery features to the top,” said Rick Young, head of global products at LTN Global. “These new enhancements are a direct response to the new normal where teams are not heading back to shared facilities but they still need to collaborate with one another as if they were sitting in the same cubicle or edit bay.”
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- Industry Insights: Media Asset Management Continues To Embrace New Technology
- Industry Insights: What You Need to Know About Media Asset Management