Reconsidering Digital Asset Management

Understanding that physical asset management is here for now and into the future - 05/07/04

Many organizations continue to struggle with the need to manage, and effectively use, the media assets that have been generated by their organization. Whether they are a cable or broadcast entity or a Fortune 500 company with a valuable fine arts collection, selecting the right software to manage assets is a critical business decision. If media assets are important to your organization, and in some cases the lifeblood of your company, how do you choose an effective technology solution that enables you to track and manage the use of these assets without treading in to a technology morass? An effective solution should first and foremost meet the needs of you organization and its defined business problem relative to those assets.

There has been a lot of discussion in the media and among technology innovators about digital asset management solutions. The promise of DAM is impressive, however the road to an all digital world still contains many potholes. In order to decide whether or not a DAM solution is right for you and your organization or in the future - you need to first ask a few fundamental questions:

What are your media assets and how are they being produced and distributed?

What percentage of your assets today are analog and what percentage digital?

What percentage of your operation is moving toward digital?

What is the need to manage analog or digital tape?

The majority of production installations currently still generates analog tape and has a legacy library of analog tape. Those physical assets are not going to go away. Even if the Herculean effort were undertaken to digitize all of your analog assets you still would not throw the tape away. They would be valuable backups to their digital counterparts and may also be used in other areas of production in an organization.

Small pockets of digital production and distribution may exist, but the core requirement of the existing library is to manage the physical asset. This may mean digital tape as well as analog tape in a mixed production environment. Or a combination of physical assets and digital files that are stored on a video server.

Your assets are worth nothing if you don't know what you have. Spending the money to implement a complex and expensive Digital Asset Management system to digitize analog assets, and not knowing what content you have, is a no win proposition. It is something like the old computer adage "garbage in, garbage out." How much of what exists in the library is worth the effort to digitize? And then there is the question of rights. One of the common problems in many libraries is knowing who owns the rights to assets. Repurposing and redistributing material that is not yours is a valuable waste of time. And in reality, how much of what exists in the library is worth the effort to digitize? Not all of what exists there is going to be worth repurposing.

Once you have assessed the need, how do you reconcile the current need to manage your physical assets while keeping the door open for digital asset management? Current DAM systems are very expensive, labor intensive, and difficult to implement within an enterprise that has been fine-tuned to produce analog video. The current ROI on implementing a DAM system is nebulous at best. From ingestion to distribution there are currently too many questions surrounding a DAM solution to make it a viable one-stop solution for your library requirements.

An Integrated Approach

A practical solution for asset management would then be one that could handle both analog and digital content. This would satisfy the requirement of the core production environment (analog) and prepare for discrete pockets of digital production or future plans to implement a comprehensive digital solution. One system should be able to provide access to both formats.

As mentioned earlier many production groups identify small areas of their operation for digital production. Or, they significantly narrow the time period for which they maintain a full real time digital production operation, usually one to three days. Another approach is to identify assets in the current analog library for digital ingestion. These incremental approaches to digital asset production are usually managed as micro standalone projects. In many cases, even when digital is the preferred method for archival, there still exists a physical tape that is inventoried and cataloged within the operational structure of the current physical asset management inventory system.

The benefits of the NSi Media Library System is that it integrates with many of the current DAM systems and therefore provides a single library system for all of your media assets, analog and digital. It therefore addresses the current asset management needs while preparing the organization of a digital future.

The following case study highlights how the NSi Media Library System is helping companies today manage, archive track and use their assets today with an eye toward the future.

Case Study

A sports production company client has implemented an innovative technology solution to this problem that addressed both digital and analog asset management requirements.

In additional to the traditional analog tape production that occurred in Company X a digital production project was initiated for live game feeds. Company X takes daily live feeds from numerous sporting events and ingests these individual feeds in to a digital asset management software product for editing, production and repurposing. Three days of digital video are kept on the video server (this was the maximum amount of digital video that was thought to be manageable). As video files are rotated off the server they are copied to digital tape and cataloged into the existing media library (which contains analog video tape as well). These videotapes have all been bar coded, scanned and have had meta data descriptive information entered for them in the NSi Media Library System. (MLS).

At this point the digital tape is given a bar code and scanned into the MLS, shelved and metadata from the DAM system is exported into the MLS database. The common data identification between the two systems can be an individual game ID or a tape/file ID. There is complete cross-reference capability between the two systems. Either MLS or the DAM system can query the other based on the ID or other asset metadata. This convergence between the two systems means that a system query will show search results from both databases. The key requirement of tracking physical assets is solved while accommodating the pocket of digital production.

As analog tape is ingested for digital video production, this same cross-reference functionality is available for media access and management. The DAM system and MLS work in tandem to manage all assets for complete availability, no matter if they are analog or digital.

Guidelines to Success

The fundamental point to be made is this: the first priority is to organize, inventory and manage your current asset base. Know what you currently have, who has the rights to it and where it is. Define how you want to arrange the media within the library and understand how people in your organization think about their work and product. Use this as the basis for defining the data by which you want to manage your media library and manage your physical assets as you prepare for digital production. Then you will be able to make a knowledgeable decision in choosing the right software tools for your media asset management requirements.

We recommend our "10 Tips on Organizing Your Media Assets" as a reference piece to help you begin this process. Please contact us for your free copy.