Traditionally, MAMs have played a key role in the transition to tapeless workflows. Legacy monolithic MAM systems, which have huge amounts of functionality, have grown and adapted but these types of MAMs were silos, independent islands, they were the equivalent of a videotape library transitioned to digital, file-based storage. The days of the traditional, complex monolithic content management systems, which generate huge dependence on software vendors to provide the agility required to integrate new applications within the digital ecosystem, are over.

These new solutions include on-premise, hybrid and cloud-native designs that enable production teams to access, produce and distribute finished files in a highly cost-effective way.

Grass Valley (Stand 13.G107, 9.A01) will highlight its GV AMPP (Agile Media Processing Platform), which include software modules AMPP Asset Management with ingest support, a full workflow engine and AI integration; and AMP Playout for delivery to live linear and OTT platforms.

Production teams need the flexibility to work on-premise, at home or on location. This may be within the same country or across the globe. With AMPP Asset Management, users can simply log in to a browser-based UI and work with the content regardless of where they are and where the media is stored. AMPP Asset Management’s brows­er-based UIs cover search, preview, logging, editing, ingest scheduling and workflow design. Removing these manual, repetitive tasks frees up people to focus on value-add tasks.

“The main trends we are seeing in Media Asset Management center around the increased demand for content combined with the rising cost of producing it,” said Jochen Bergdolt, AMPP Asset Management Product Manager, Grass Valley. “This is driving media organizations to look for ways to create more content more efficiently. As a result, organizations are looking to leverage the best talent wherever they are located. Projects are being worked on across multiple, globally distributed sites. AMPP’s asset management tools enable globally distributed teams to collaborate in an efficient manner for fast turn-around video production in News and Sports by presenting diverse media storage types and locations to the users as a single, unified system.”

Bergdolt said that by improving the efficiency of the content creation process, allowing collaboration between globally distributed teams, and building systems that adapt dynamically to demand, media organizations can realize significant savings all while producing more content. Grass Valley’s cloud-native AMPP Asset Management solution is specifically designed to meet these challenges.

The software enables users to merge diverse media storage types and locations and into a single, unified system while collaborating with remotely located production team members on live and recorded content. AMPP Workflow enables customers to automate their operations without the need for professional services or outside development. The module features an expanding library of functions that can be linked together, including third-party integrations such as AI services, to streamline the process for handing and distributing assets.

At (Stand 7.B21), Rohde & Schwarz will demonstrate its SpycerPAM, a production-focused system that sits natively on the company’s SpycerNode storage appliance but runs in Linux on any platform (including the cloud) and can scan any storage to add relevant material to a project.

“The big requirement is for access to all media, wherever it is stored,” said James Gilbert, director of product and solution management, Media, at Rohde & Schwarz. “As projects grow in complexity and archives expand, so storage has to move beyond specific appliances to decentralized architectures and the cloud.”

He added that the asset management layer has to abstract the geographic information from the user, so they can find what they need wherever it is stored.

“This is particularly important in collaborative and remote projects: on a movie or television project editors start work on content as it is ingested on location, before it is moved to the post house (if it ever needs to be stored there),” he said.

Gilbert said that SpycerPAM solves storage management and collaboration challenges that are pervasive in busy postproduction environments, by organizing storage wherever it is located into projects. Within those projects there is tight integration with popular post tools like Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro, with the asset management layer matching the bin structures for each project.

As well as accessing through creative tools, users anywhere can use SpycerPAM via its HTML5 interface, so project management can take place anywhere, including selecting preferred takes and building rough-cut edits using the built-in Preditor application.

“Editors, producers and other creative users are placed at the centre of the solution,” said Gilbert. “They are the ones who need fast access to their content, and secure and simple capture of their decisions. What SpycerPAM does is take away from them the need to worry about where the content is physically stored. They see it in the project bins, whether it is in a storage appliance in the room next door, in shared storage at a remote facility or in the cloud.”

In Stand 10.D30, Tedial will introduce its cloud-native, NoCode Media Integration Platform, called smartWork. It was initially shown at the NAB Show in April. The concept is to improve business processes for Media companies. Tedial will also be showing smartWork integrated with the company’s existing Tedial Evolution enterprise MAM.

The smartWork software platform decouples the customary orchestration capabilities embedded in the systems that broadcasters have traditionally been using (MAM, DAM, PAM, CMS). It instead offers a framework where all the systems are integrated in the same way, based on three key pillars: Common Interface; Common Datamodel; and Common Workspace, where applications go to the media and not the media to the applications.

Tedial’s NoCode approach makes the Media Integration Platform accessible to everyone, from non-technical users to citizen-developers. And, because it follows Infrastructure as Code (IaC), smartWork can be deployed on-premises, in a cloud environment or in a hybrid architecture. Business continuity can easily be achieved with smartWork as the current systems can be integrated and improve operation by adding new business processes or cloud operation.

With smartWork, Tedial said it is empowering non-technical users by delivering an easy-to-use toolset that distills complex workflows into simplified processes. Built with microservices and Kubernetes buckets, smartWork provides future-proofing and scalability of media operations and resources, and is designed with the NoCode paradigm to enhance flexibility and minimize risk in operations. And because it follows Infrastructure as Code (IaC) it can be deployed on-premises, on any cloud or in a hybrid architecture for incredible flexibility.

“The Platform broadens the scope of media management operations with seamless integrations, quick time to delivery and reduced vendor dependency,” said Julián Fernández-Campón, CTO at Tedial. “Thanks to the NoCode approach, complexity abstraction and visual tools—which are built into the platform—users without coding or deep technical knowledge (citizen developers) can easily build and manage workflows, which can include integrations of external third-party systems without vendor or specialist intervention.

It’s clear that the M&E market is changing rapidly, impacted by evolving consumer behaviors. Users want seamless, effortless integrations and developers want to spend less time on repetitive software programming tasks and integration maintenance.

The key to success for media companies moving forward is to replace the monolithic systems, or multiple integrated applications, with solutions that integrate all the components and complexity of the workflows, using all the APIs and additional methods required, to read older systems.

“Media organizations want to manage costs by scaling up and down their infrastructure to match their production scale,” said Grass Valley’s Bergdolt. “As a cloud-native solution, AMPP’s asset management tools offer true elasticity allowing media companies to add and remove resources as needed, paying only for what they use. Automation is another way that media companies can easily create efficiencies.

AMPP’s use of AI-supported workflows like Transcriber helps boost productivity by simplifying the life of editors and journalists, automatically transcribing spoken word from video clips, and allowing the editor to quickly build a timeline by highlighting the relevant text in the transcription. Media organizations can also set up their own custom workflows through a visual designer to automate recurring tasks and inject business logic where needed.”

However, Bergdolt also said that the trend towards cloud is not universal. Many media organizations are looking to move at a different pace. AMPP offers the freedom of choice where to deploy and run workloads. AMPP can also be run on-premise or in private datacenters giving media organizations access to all the automated workflow and collaboration features without necessarily moving their assets through a public cloud.

At the IBC Show, evidence of this new integrated cloud-assisted/hybrid/on-premise approach will be everywhere on the exhibit show floor.

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