As media organisations have evolved to meet the consumer demand for more content from more platforms on more devices, so the need for better business and technology solutions has become ever more pressing. The need to be more efficient in acquisition, management and delivery has of course long been pressing. Now there is much more content to deal with.
The problem with implementing media solutions to maximise efficiency is not simple and straightforward when the business processes involved span many departments within an organisation. These departments will each have their own drivers, they may be geographically dispersed, and in some cases may even be in different organisations.
You can add to this disparate technology systems from multiple vendors. While inter-working standards for software systems are developing, providing real integration certainly adds to the complexity.
So the challenges faced by media organisations are multi-faceted. In the early days they were more to do with the technology, reliability and usability. Products could be evaluated by specifications, and integration was a matter of routers and distribution amplifiers. Today projects are defined by business outcomes, and success depends upon successful integration of software systems.
It is, perhaps, not surprising that we have seen
in the past significant and public project failures, for solutions that did not meet the business needs and “lost” millions of dollars. Those failures should now be behind us, and asset management, workflows and business analytics should be seen as a mature and largely successful sector. Of course there are still technological challenges in the integration of multi-vendor environments and the multiple formats and wrappers being used, but the tools and standards available provide a good framework for successful deployments.
Today, the issues are more to do with change and people management when implementing a solution.
Software solutions in broadcast and media organisations have typically been implemented in an island approach. Users of the solutions have often been isolated from department to department, often relying on systems as primitive as emailing to alert colleagues when content is available, what to do with it, and where to find it. As each department has often set up their own systems and (Continued on Next Page)
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Managing Assets
Considerations
By Tony Taylor
Asset Management :
For Today’s Non-linear World
As the challenges are now multi-faceted, so too is the solution.
Broadcast Beat Magazine / Sep-Dec, 2014