In Broadcast - May 2012 - 56

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 8 - MAY 2012

InMEDIA
MAM Platforms Update Cont.
without proper integration into the complete media enterprise, a MAM system runs the risk of being viewed as a mechanical piece of equipment. There has to be integration with finance, legal, accounting and executive management will also drive cost savings and innovation.”

Digital Discovery
On a more direct level, MAM is now becoming crucial as more broadcast and facilities companies install and begin to rely on big digital storage systems and servers. “If you don’t have asset management for that then it is just a vault,” observes Jon Folland, Chief Executive of Nativ. Folland says Nativ approaches the market from a software background, although it is established as a technical consultancy in broadcasting: “With IP people and broadcasters working together on this we are seeing a collision of terms and concepts. For us the idea of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is not exotic. Our product is both for asset management and workﬂow because we think they are two sides of the same coin.” Nativ’s core product is Mio, which comes in two forms: MioEverywhere, a licensed service offering remote ingest of video and audio, data asset management, automation of the production chain, repurposing applications to tailor original broadcast material for web channels, mobile devices, consoles and VoD (video on demand); and the more cost-effective Mio On Demand.

Nativ MioEverywhere workﬂow

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Andrew Winter, Director of Sales and Marketing with IBIS, producer of the iFind and iLogger systems, also acknowledges there has always been a form of media management in TV and radio since their earliest days but says the main difference now is the increasing lack of physical media and the reliance on metadata to track it.

Metadata Buzz
Metadata is an even more emotive buzz-term than MAM and, similarly, there has been a lot of misunderstanding over the past 15 years since it was ﬁrst discussed. At its most simplistic metadata

IBIS PowerPlay

is data about data. But this can range from the title and duration of a programme to giving full details of what a ﬁle contains, who produced / worked on the material, dates and times, copyright information and technical speciﬁcations. There have been doubts over whether, even today, metadata systems are advanced enough to deliver but the technology at last seems to be reaching maturity. “It depends on the way the workﬂow and metadata structures reference each other,” comments Winter. “We’ve not experienced any difficulties with something like managing embedded audio because iFind has been designed from the start to handle multiple levels of data about master files throughout the media workﬂow.” Brad Redwood, V i c e President of International Sales and Marketing at Masstech, developer of the Indigo system for both small and large broadcast installations and the Topaz archiving programme, comments

that broadcasters now understand how to get what they want from metadata, which has to be practical to meet the needs of today’s business. “The real challenge is to dynamically manage all media and its associated metadata from ingest to editing to play-out, without problems caused by the integration of equipment from different manufacturers,” he says. “The real advance comes from using media asset management technology that bridges production, transmission and digital archiving to make broadcast operations more efﬁcient.” Eivind Sandstrand at Arvato Systems says modern technology is “typically ﬂexible enough to handle almost any metadata model” but adds that this is also part of the problem. “Without a uniﬁed model for asset tracking and metadata, custom-purpose systems will be allowed to continue to exist, even while they result in increased costs and slower business movement,” he explains. “People have a natural saturation point for metadata, whether it’s tagging or searching, but better auto-generation of data and auto-retrieval based on data will continue to save time and costs by ignoring or eliminating unneeded or unwanted media.” For Jon Folland at Nativ, metadata is “the big one”. He says MAM is a “broad church” but now people are tending more towards open systems: “Things are getting better with metadata. Our approach is to allow customers to design their own metadata, hierarchies and structures for time and data and so on. But the problem with metadata
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