Media Asset Management (MAM)

Media Asset Management (MAM)

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In the course of the progressive multi-media development in our information and media age it becomes more and more important to administrate multimedia contents like pictures, diagrams, audios, videos, technical drawings, layouts and presentations, which occur in the most different formats, in an optimal way. In the financial world the asset management describes the administration of assets. The media asset management attempts to administrate the assets, which present media information objects for a company, and to make it available for an optimal utilization. Thus, the target of the media asset management (MAM) is to facilitate an effective and efficient management of multimedia information and to achieve an economic benefit and competition advantages by this.

However what is a media asset?

Basically a media asset is a form of content. Content is information in structured, weakly structured and unstructured form, which is made available in electronic systems for utilization. A media asset consists on the one hand of multimedia unstructured information objects like pictures, diagrams, presentations or rich-media contents like audio and video, on the other hand of structures meta information. Only by adding the structured metadata a media information object, which only presents information, becomes a "value containing asset", which becomes available, can be investigated, reused, and traded. For example, the structured metadata include information about the author, copyrights, date of creation and format information as well as information about the colour management and content descriptions. Also knowledge management (KM) can profit from the capabilities of MAM. Knowledge in companies is also contained in media assets and can be localised from MAM by means of the metadata of the multimedia information objects.

Definition problems CM and MAM

However, how can the media asset management be distinguished from the conventional content management (CM)? At first sight the difference to the content management can hardly be recognised. Basically by means of a content management system (CMS) the same information objects can be administrated like with a media asset management system (MAMS). In the media sector content management is considered as "sub-division" of media asset management, whereas the CMS-functions like "watermarks", "digital rights management", "eBilling", "digital video channelling", "user profiling", "distributed high performance asset repositories" and many more are missing. However, there are hardly any real MAM-products - many of the solutions have been screwed together individually for a media asset supplier.

The considerable differences are the technical implementation. The content management has come into being from the document management. The latter has been created for the purpose to administrate the legal and business process relevant document stock of a company. Meanwhile CMS also is to meet the legal requirements like safekeeping period, prevention of adulteration and revision security, although this leaves much to be desired at WCM web content management solutions. The media asset management, however, comes from the area of the media companies and has been developed due to the need to administrate the value of the company in form of texts, diagrams, pictures and rich-formats and to make it available in a central and decentralised way. Permanent availability and commercial utilization of the information objects are in the first place. For this reason, CMS and MAM also distinguish from each other on a technical level.

On the contrary to the MAM a conventional DMS usually is realised with a reference database, which saves references of the information objects in the index. CMS-solutions partly work on file systems, linked HTML-sites, reference databases or object-oriented with XML-structures. The MAM, however, saves the information objects directly in specialised databases, which also have a higher performance with regard to availability. In order to be able to guarantee the availability also at strongly frequented systems, information objects are also kept redundant in MAM. At the DMS and CMS this is avoided for consistence, access protection and administration reasons, if possible.

MAM and cross-media-publishing

The media asset management is responsible for the acceptance, storage, categorisation, indication and provision of media assets with the premise to facilitate a high processing speed and an optimal re-utilisation. The basic equipment of a MAM includes functions like allocation of keywords and indication, mechanisms for the data security and access control, media-specific data management like colour management and media-neutral formats, complex search functions through metadata as well as automatic image content recognition, support of workflow at the media production, version management and administration as well as the management of copyrights, digital signatures, watermarks and licences. Currently multimedia clearing right systems (MMCRS) and digital rights management (DRM) are one of the biggest technological challenges. Also the electronic calculation of small amounts (micro payment) for the utilisation of contents is not permanently realised and is temporarily reduced. Another integral component is the "cross-media publishing" of the MAM. With this feature a MAM-system can publish the same content through different technical channels. As if to say "create once, use many", for example, the areas print, internet and multimedia can be served with the same content from MAM. Content syndication, the repeated utilisation of contents on different supplier sites with a different visualisation and information compilation has to be seen under the same points of view. The prerequisite is the storage of the contents on media-neutral formats, from which the required formats can automatically be generated for the most different application purposes.

MAM for the active provision of commercial content

At the end the fact can be recorded that a media asset management pursues two essential targets. On the one hand the availability of information objects in a company and beyond its limits is optimised, because the existence of media assets does not mean at all that these are also available and can be found. Through the provision of intelligent search functions and the limitation by means of keywords the categorisation and version management searching times are minimised with a media asset management, which leads to an essential cost reduction. On the other hand costs in the sector of production and data exchange can be minimised, because due to media-neutral data maintenance and the connected cross-media publication of a media asset management system a consistent re-utilisation and repeated utilisation can be carried out.

The MAM-products have been generated from the media world or have been developed by these companies themselves and in the meantime have achieved product maturity. On a long-term basis it will be more and more difficult to distinguish MAMS from CMS, because it is easier to distinguish them from a technical point of view than due to the functionality. Especially in this aspect the products are getting more and more similar to each other. In the near future both currently still independent variants will find together. However, the web content management and the enterprise content management suppliers still have to do a lot for this.

The increasing circulation of MAMS has to be evaluated as an important trend. Particularly because these systems also address new user groups. DMS and intranets were only used for an improved information provision within companies, CMS and portals opened up the way in extranets and B2B-businesses. Only few B2C-business ideas have economically been worthwhile in the meantime. MAMS, however, not only aim at the business information user but especially also at the private final user. Thus, MAMS can be found in the technological front line - TVs and mobile telephones as terminals, innovative forms of user surface and information formats, new technologies of utilisation control and calculation of electronic services. It is little probable that MAM-solutions will be introduced on the market as real standard software packages during the next one, two years. Only huge information suppliers, like the globally involved publishing houses, broadcasting companies, studios and game industry groups can afford such an investment today.

03/2004, Rainer Clemens

Rainer Clemens is consultant at the PROJECT CONSULT Unternehmensberatung GmbH. More information on Project Consult

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