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DAM, MAM or is it process management?
If you asked a selection of 50 broadcasters to define exactly what they think MAM or DAM is, I would bet that you’d get 50 different answers. And I would also bet that if you asked the same 50 broadcasters to tell you the difference between MAM and DAM, you’d either get stunned silence or a cacophony of conflicting views.
What makes me think this? Well one of the reasons is that at every NAB and IBC for the last couple of years, broadcasters who have set out to discover the secrets of employing MAM, have come to our booth and asked to see a MAM or DAM system.
The first question I always ask is what do you want to do? This appears to fox them and for quite a while they seem to continue in the belief that you can buy an ‘off the shelf’ MAM system in much the same way as you can buy an NLE.
Media Asset Management (MAM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) can also be known as archive management, content repurposing, and a host of other names covering a host of other activities. But whatever name you call it by, the fact is that it simply means managing all the stuff you need to manage. Which is why at IBIS we call it process management.
Planning, scheduling and playout, logically, is one process: You acquire programmes, put them into a schedule, craft a seamless playout download with commercials and promos, and play it to air. Usually, this involves knowing what content/media you have, where it has come from, what rights you have to play it, where it is now, where it needs to be in a day – or a week – or a month, what format(s) it is to be produced in for what purpose; if it can be archived and if it can, whether you can still get at it quickly if you should need to.
Process management means keeping track of all that information, whilst giving each of those in the process chain only the information relevant to their set of responsibilities. This sort of asset management - keeping track of all the metadata - is a fundamental element in an integrated broadcast automation system, of the sort that IBIS routinely delivers.
Now, you might think that tracking all that metadata would take a huge staff but if you want to run attractive channels in the most cost-effective way, all you really need is an effective, comprehensive and seamless automation system that covers every eventuality.
It can pose design challenges, particularly in technical areas, where many broadcasters have mixed environments with servers from, say, Leitch doing one part of the work, and Quantel or Pinnacle servers doing another part. But that is our problem and we resolve all of those interoperability questions so that the user does not even realise that there is an issue.
However, this type of process management (DAM /MAM) is not unique to the broadcast industry, and there are many other instances of exactly the same principles being applied to create DAM/MAM systems in other business environments.
A recent IBIS project at Universal Music Group – UMG - offers a good example of the point I am making. This was a contract in association with Andy Wray at Boxer Systems who had observed a process management system that IBIS had put in place at GPTV Manchester and decided the IBIS approach was exactly what UMG needed.
The traditional scenario at UMG (and other music companies) goes pretty much like this: A&R (Artist and Repertoire) people around Europe need to hear and see the latest offerings from UMG. They receive a paper list of new titles and videos available, call up the UK office and order a VHS of the titles which interest them.
As you can probably predict, the margin for error here is great: the potential for miss-spelling of names; the wrong title being associated with the incorrect order; the wrong VHS being placed in the wrong jiffy bag and then ending up in the wrong place…. And before you know it you have a catalogue of errors, which can cost a great deal of money each year to correct.
The first stage of the solution was to contract IBIS to produce a media and process management system which, in these circumstances, meant the automated transfer and tracking of material from tape to video server and back to tape. New material arrives on tape at UMG and is ingested on to an Omneon server from which different versions and different file formats are created.
IBIS moves the various media to where it needs to be and tracks it so it knows exactly what there is and where it is at any given time.
Customers can access a range of proxy material for which they have the rights, enabling them to make their choices through the ‘MUVER” customer database from &SUMM with which the IBIS system is seamlessly integrated.
IBIS tracks the production process, moving video and audio from server to a variety of tape formats to fulfil each individual A&R order. The IBIS MAM system uses the metadata from ‘MUVER’ to check that the material is in the correct format, then completes the process with the automated production of a despatch note to tie in with the end product. This ensures an extremely tight relationship between the customer, the production process and the delivery mechanism.
Sounds simple doesn’t it - but then clever stuff often does. The really clever part of this whole installation is that as a result of implementing an IBIS process management /MAM system, error rates have plummeted and the production process is much faster; the savings in respect of both time and money are huge; UMG have more efficient A&R people on the ground who can plug their product to more radio and TV stations, which means they sell more product… It doesn’t take a genius (just a company with some vision) to see that this makes sound financial sense.
So, what lesson have we learned here? That broadcasters are not unique in their demands for MAM or process management: that there are systems out there that can provide a useful model for broadcasters, and that it doesn’t matter what you call the system as long as it is reliable, flexible and user-friendly.
Because after all, the whole point of managing assets successfully is to make money isn’t it?