The evolution of MAM

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Jul 17, 2015 - the business domain, where each organisation is different,” says Nick. Ryan, chief technology officer a
Media Asset Management SYSTEM FUNCTIONALITY

Dalet: serviceoriented architecture

The evolution of MAM

Media asset management systems are gaining increasing functionality as file-based workflows and multiplatform delivery become standard across the industry. Adrian Pennington reports

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sk different users and kit suppliers what they understand media asset management (MAM) to be and you’ll get a range of answers. Once MAM simply connected storage to a layer of software with information about its contents, but today asset management has become fundamental to pretty much every part of production, post and distribution. This creates its own problems, which are not helped by the way different vendors market their products. Where does MAM stop and PAM (production asset management) start? Or GAM (graphic asset management) for that matter? Others use terminology like ‘media logistics’ or ‘workflow orchestration’. Is MAM a library management system or an end-to-end content lifecycle platform? 28 | Broadcast | 17 July 2015

‘MAM is no longer about just news or sports programming. It is also about promos and playout and live production’ Petter Ole Jakobsen, Vizrt

“Vendor-driven categorisation of MAM is meaningless,” says Vizrt chief technology officer Petter Ole Jakobsen. “Our view is that the task of MAM is changing from simply storage to getting content from in-point to outpoint in the fastest way, and to store it for eternity.”

Fast access Service providers need to be able to launch channels quickly and to repurpose material for OTT on-demand and catch-up, international versions and boxsets, and to produce promos to support it all. That means knowing where content is – and getting access to it fast. “Service providers used to come to us and say: ‘We want some intelligent storage for our content and to deliver

it to a single point’,” says Deluxe Media Europe chief operating officer Lesley Marr. “Now the requests are about the whole supply chain delivering to multiple platforms and not about one area or piece of kit. “These are not new requirements, but demand has massively increased as services have become outsourced and aggregated. ITV, for example, has a VoD platform it manages inhouse, linear playout managed by Ericsson, content preparation managed by Deluxe, and global content produced and distributed by a range of providers. How do you tie all that together and get some intelligence in the supply chain in order to find an asset?” A few years ago, MAM vendors had strengths in particular business areas www.broadcastnow.co.uk

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or workflows, whether this was news, production, programme prep or archive – to the extent that some facilities ended up with multiple MAM systems or, at the very least, a lot of overlapping technology. “A siloed approach is typical of the way that software has been developed in the broadcast industry,” says Tony Taylor, chief executive of asset management system firm TMD. “There can be no argument that the future will be around file-based workflows in data centre environments. This depends upon metadata: acting on it, reacting to it and enriching it as it passes between and through facilities.” If smart MAM is better understood as metadata, then the gathering of it starts at the point of acquisition. It journeys through the production stage, then incorporates mastering and formatting into deliverables such as the Digital Production Partnership’s AS-11 file, culminating in its retrieval from archive afterwards. “MAM is moving further away from technical standards and deeper into the business domain, where each organisation is different,” says Nick Ryan, chief technology officer and cofounder of consultancy firm Nativ. “In terms of metadata, MAMs generally aim to support over-arching metadata standards such as the European Broadcasting Union’s EBUCore specification, while also trying to provide mechanisms for flexible custom schema definitions. Rights data is even more complex,” he adds. “Standalone rights management systems are needed, and hence integration starts to play a part.” It may be helpful to conceptualise a multiplatform workflow in terms of layers. At the bottom are hardwarelike servers, encoders and transcoders and the content delivery networks. Next is the control layer, which tells the hardware what to do with each piece of content. Above that is the business layer, where executives examine the economics of the operation to make commercial decisions. In the middle lies asset and workflow management. “Put simply, a CEO should be able to look at one screen – familiar to them because it is in the enterprise management layer – and make a decision to, say, put a particular programme on iTunes,” says Taylor. “That decision should pass automatically to the workflow management system, www.broadcastnow.co.uk

‘There can be no argument that the future will be around file-based workflows in data centre environments’ Tony Taylor, TMD

which will draw on the technical metadata to determine precisely which processes are required, and implement them at the right time, fully automatically.” Vizrt says its latest developments will extend reach into the control room for video management ahead of playout, and into post with deeper Adobe After Effects workflows. “MAM is no longer about just news or sports programming – it is also about promos and playout and live production,” says Jakobsen. “It doesn’t make sense to have a number of different video management systems when the goal is to get content to air really quickly.”

One size fits all? Is it desirable to implement a onesize fits all MAM when such a system is probably not going to be ‘best of breed’ in all areas? “A MAM that claims to do everything won’t be doing anything to ‘best in class’ standards,” says Ryan. “QC, transcode, format conversion – these are where specialist vendors come into their own. Integration allows for existing infrastructure to be migrated gradually. Customers don’t want to hear that investing in new MAM capabilities means that several other tools they have invested in and standardised on will no longer be used.” This doesn’t mean that the service as a whole can’t appear to the end user as one system. And this is where workflow orchestration and integration come to the fore. “Focusing on a single system interface may not be the best approach,” says Ryan. “Users across the organisation in operations, legal, technical or craft edit need to access the system via an interface that is appropriate and familiar to them.” Taylor says it is “ridiculous” that the media industry can think about multiplatform delivery in anything other than a single workflow environment: “Conceptually, you are delivering your content to your audience. It is one concept, so how can it be anything other than one workflow environment?” Broadcast engineers have always chosen the right set of functionality and performance for a specific installation and this is unlikely to change. “As we move into the IT-centric and cloud era, we have to find ways to maintain and simplify that choice,” says Taylor.

WHAT IS AN ASSET? The notion of an ‘asset’ has changed. With linear delivery, an asset often equates to a single episode of a series. The challenge is to ensure that the individual asset passes through the workflow in time to go on air. In a multiplatform world, the thing being monetised may actually represent several episodes or an entire series. “That changes the nature of the workflow quite significantly, with concepts of ‘bulk’ work orders and grouped encode and distribution,” suggests Dalet’s Davenport. The traditional assets of MAM encompassed video, audio and images. Now closed captions and subtitles, too, have become primary assets. “Considering all the ways in which captions could enter a workflow, and the options for storing legacy captions, the tool-set required just to handle this critical piece of ancillary data is massive,” says Davenport. “The role of a smart MAM is to make this underlying numbercrunching completely transparent to users, ensuring that they can focus on business level and creative activities.”

Some MAM vendors make a virtue of a service-oriented architecture that allows their software to easily hook into that of third-party storage, edit, QC or playout systems while maintaining consistent metadata. “The new generation of MAM systems feature centralised catalogues and a core infrastructure with workflow- and task-specific toolsets for each business area, enabling media organisations to deploy a single MAM for individual parts of the business or enterprise-wide,” says Dalet marketing director Ben Davenport. “The ability to integrate tools from a range of vendors is perhaps the most critical element of any installation. The toolset requirements are significant and also constantly changing. The industry may talk of ‘swiss army knife’ media processors, but there is very rarely a single tool that will handle all requirements, and even more rarely one that will do so well.” 17 July 2015 | Broadcast | 29