Life of MAM

A MAM was Born

Once the shift to file-based media began, the Media Asset Management (MAM) revolution was born, and has been giving the industry a constant nagging headache ever since, for both broadcasters and vendors alike, due to its bespoke complexity and uniqueness to every different broadcast facility. It comes in lots of different, exciting flavours - MAM-in-a-box, MAM-in-a-tin, MAM Everywhere, DAM, PAM, Uncle SAM.

When the seeds of MAM began to grow in the late 90's, it felt like an opportunity to create joined-up broadcasting, enabling users to share, view and edit media on their desktops with the click of a mouse, whether it was content just shot on location several minutes ago, or an historical piece of footage from 30 years ago, wonderfully recalled and restored from the vaults of a deep, dark archive. The ingest people would ideally press a button and it would magically appear in the control room playout.

It is a subject that is continuously challenging vendors and broadcasters alike, who are constantly trying to play catch-up with an industry that is spiralling out of control with its speeding, galloping, unstoppable changes. From IP and Cloud, to 4K and 8K, we are offered solutions from vendors that are claiming to be `Everywhere' in a bold attempt to deal with these massive transformations.

Has MAM Delivered?

With the never ending discussions in the market, it appears that most MAM solutions available so far have failed to properly address the evolving demands of broadcasters. Archive shelves are still stacked with undigitised tape without metadata in many facilities, as workflows are being placed across multiple platforms, and in desperate need of a flexible solution that can be easily integrated.

Some vendors will argue that they have addressed broadcasters’ needs, but a recent research study by Ovum showed that 40% of the respondents highlighted poor integration of broadcast systems as the primary pain point in a MAM implementation. The research indicated “poor integration, constant search for different middleware formats, and the break in the chain if one element is replaced” as significant causes of concern. Also, trying to reduce the unit costs of media assets on site was cited as a significant point - optimising ROI with an asset, being able to find it quickly, so it can then be reused when necessary.

What Should MAM do?

Needless to say, broadcast facilities have complex infrastructures, with MAM needing to be all things to all people. From vertically integrating with traffic and scheduling, rights and royalties management, monitoring, airtime sales, financial modules, managing rich objects and advanced asset relationships, accommodating legacy assets, fitting with the existing infrastructure, to being adaptable to change existing workflow expectations, this is all part and parcel of what MAM does.

But the core role of a MAM system should still be exactly what it says on the tin – to manage media assets. The best MAM installations are the ones where the MAM is almost invisible, yet manages to perform all its tasks fully.

The end goal of a broadcast MAM system is surely to allow broadcasters to make more and better programmes with fewer costs involved, making jobs more efficient, such as easier and faster access to content, tools at their fingertips, automation of technical operations such as transcoding, and a better view of the overall workflow. But unfortunately technology is continually moving the cost goalposts.

The world has changed since the MAM debuted. Now we all want instant Web access to anything at any time. Yet surprisingly, our industry is one of the last to embrace this anywhere, anytime concept. Although vendors are at least trying to address these needs, we still wait for tapes, email clips instead of collaboratively sharing them, travel to Soho to sit in edit suites, and work in big glass open plan buildings rather than collaborating from great distances. Everyone knows the experience of being holed up in the office at midnight, because that’s where the media lives.

My Experiences with MAM

My first introduction to the world of MAM was back in 2006, and wasn't a particularly pleasant one, helping the Ardendo (now Vizrt) bid team submit a proposal for the mammoth, doomed BBC/Siemens DMI (Don't Mention It) project.

It would be some five years later before I would become heavily involved with the frustrating world of MAM again, this time in India with Vizrt. Lengthy, complex discussions would drag on for hours, days, weeks, years even, with large broadcasters in India for a proposed solution, as I pushed hard for conclusions that could never be reached. Too many people in the chain deciding on what they wanted, too much money at stake, too much back and forth with the clever bods in Sweden to decide on whether we could meet their requirements off-the-shelf, or whether bespoke work had to be done - silly me, of course it did!

My last real involvement with the intriguing world of MAM was more recently, helping BBC Wales evaluate whether to keep their existing newsroom desktop editing solution, or replace it with Jupiter (and Quantel). We finally decided Jupiter was the correct decision for BBC Wales, and I was then deployed in a `Business Readiness' role for a year, as Jupiter was slowly but surely steam-rolled out across Wales. I had to ensure all users of the new system would be ready to go once Jupiter went live. This  included organising a training schedule for 300 journalists and 30 craft editors, `Show & Tell' open days in Cardiff and Bangor (one of the most picturesque BBC regional sites I have ever been to), and creating extensive, laborious User Acceptance spreadsheets, which meant spending hours in a dark room pressing every button in Jupiter and QCut to ensure the system met the requirements (and worked properly!) It's only once you have experienced the MAM world from a user perspective do you really begin to understand the difficulties and complexities involved.  

MAM in a Fluffy Cloud

Most broadcasters think about the promised land of fluffy Clouds, where content can be previewed from a tablet or mobile device, a revolution enabling people to finish their work faster from wherever they are, in a world where getting content to air quickly is always paramount, allowing more flexibility, lower costs, and reduced hardware.

But the cloud is not a bolt-on fix. It is not a technology thing, it’s a people thing. Web-enabling a MAM is not the same as cloud-enabling a MAM. Web-enabling is making an asset accessible via a regular Web browser, so that no custom software needs to be installed on a desktop.

By comparison, cloud-enabling MAM removes the reliance on local engineers to ensure that the spinning disks are online and available, user credentials and permissions to access the media are validated, while removing maintenance and upgrade costs from the operating budget, saving time and money. Until recently, however, it was not generally possible to place the entire MAM in the cloud. Internet access was unreliable, insecure or slow for the file sizes and volumes of high resolution content.

A true cloud architecture provides a secure, hardware/software-free, self-service, simultaneous access to common assets to be accessed from anywhere in the world. Putting the MAM in the cloud makes sense for a lot of broadcast and production companies. It holds substantial benefits in a global media market where content is centrally accumulated, and is globally repurposed.

Established Hollywood studios and broadcasters are unlikely to put their entire MAM in the cloud, since they have already invested millions with their local on-site systems, and the private networks to enable accessibility. Unlike smaller businesses, they have the IT resources to maintain these systems and networks.

However, even these bigger organizations with elaborate on-site MAM's have begun to explore the cloud as a way to work more efficiently — reducing the amount of storage they maintain by extending part of the MAM system into the cloud for certain areas of their business and workflows.

Conclusion

While technology started the MAM revolution, economics will ultimately drive it. Consumer technology ignited cross-platform TV, and is now the major driving force for the production and post-production markets. Creating production and distribution of premium content at scale efficiently, while looking to solve these media management and logistic headaches are the just some of the huge challenges the industry faces.