In Broadcast - May 2012 - 54

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 8 - MAY 2012

InMEDIA

MAM Platforms Update
The business of efﬁciently managing programme assets has become a major issue for broadcasters. Kevin Hilton examines the workﬂow options available…
Kevin Hilton

Asset management in broadcasting is nothing new, it’s just that the assets were once more usually known as programmes. Just because something is not stored as a digital ﬁle does not mean it does not have to be managed. Video tapes of myriad formats – Quad, 1-inch, Beta SP, DigiBeta, D3, HDCAM – as well as reels of 16mm ﬁlm and quarter-inch audio tape had to be stored and catalogued, with full details of what they contained and who worked on the material. There are the horror stories about videotapes of old programmes like Dr Who and Hancock’s Half Hour being wiped, thrown away or just lost because, although there was a logging system, it was not always adhered to or the log sheet simply got separated from the box. But a ﬁlm or tape reel is still something physical and tangible that can be looked for. In the digital world a ﬁle can be obscured amid thousands of others in the same format. It has to be properly ‘labelled’, otherwise it can get lost in the mass of material held on the massive storage servers used by broadcasters today.

European Parliament

Data Control
Which is why media asset management (MAM) is the big focus for broadcast companies, producers and facilities these days. “The term itself is well established,” comments Peter Gallen, Solution Architect at Tedial, where he works on the design and execution of MAM projects. “Broadcast people understand what MAM means but

it is not universal, particularly on the supply side.” Gallen observes that the main impetus behind the spread of MAM systems is the shift to ﬁlebased operations in broadcasting, with programmes received in data form from post-production and production companies, as well as being stored as data for playout and archiving. “This is being driven from acquisition,” he says, “and that has had an inﬂuence on the ﬂow of

Tedial Tarsys

material as more is being put in ﬁle form.” Tedial’s main MAM product is Tarsys, which is often installed in conjunction with the AST Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) and Ficus Business Process Manager (BPM) systems. During NAB 2012 Tedial introduced a new interface for Tarsys, designed to “enhance operator experience”, as well as giving additional features for cataloguing, editing and exporting media to other manufacturers’ systems. Gallen says the ﬁrst rule of MAM is to “put something somewhere and make it able to be found”. He adds that another aspect behind the adoption and development of MAM is the proliferation of formats and TV channels: “More people can use tools to control the channels. And there is more attention to things like multiple language and other extra things that need to be found. The picture is a lot more complex than just ﬁnding a DigiBeta tape.” Eivind Sandstrand, Senior Manager of Business Development for North America at Arvato Systems – formerly known as S4M (Solutions for Media) – accepts that asset management has existed for some time within broadcasting organisations, with implementation

ranging from binders with paper copies, excel spreadsheets and homemade databases to smaller or larger systems designed explicitly for the purposes. “While many existing broadcasters either have an asset management implementation like any of those, no new facility for media management is planned without the inclusion of a proper digital asset management system,” he says. Arvato Systems produces the VPMS MAM tools. Sandstrand says the main areas to bear in mind when instituting a MAM system are: workﬂows and business processes; data formats and transfers; and business requirements such as accounting and auditing. “To achieve the correct business processes people need to review and revise traditional broadcasting workﬂows and have the media and the consumer as the key components, not the equipment and platform,” he explains. “But the reality is that there is a myriad of media formats and locations in which these need to exist. Getting the data to the right place in the right format still remains a formidable challenge, both logistically and ﬁnancially. And
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In Broadcast - May 2012

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