Mike Shore, co-founder, Pronology: Rather, MAM is evolving, as all systems must, to survive. In the early days, MAM systems were not typically an integral part of business operations. They were stand-alone pieces and served as a way for the media manager, whose job was to wrangle all of the assets that a production generates, to move beyond an Excel spreadsheet. Organizations soon learned that if they were going to monetize their content via ever growing distribution chains, they needed to centralise visibility, management and distribution of all of their assets.

Orchestration is all about achieving reliable results, from often highly variable inputs. The biggest challenge for organizations in this regard is consistency. Consistent metadata: from the beginning of an assets lifecycle, to its ultimate distribution to consumers. Consistent workflows: delivering the right content, in the correct format, to the proper destination. Consistent archive strategies: Can I access the content that has been created, in order to use it, and monetize it, to maximize value? In order to help achieve this consistency, most modern MAM systems have started to take on and centralize some of the tasks and roles that had been done before, in the systems around them.

BB: How have manufacturers helped media companies to gear up for life in a multi-platform world?

Shore: This is a never-ending game of cat and mouse. One piece moves forward, and everyone else plays catch up. There is no “one size fits all” workflow that suits every organization, or every scenario. Look at browser-based video players as an example…there are no standards at the moment. The big players do what they think is best, and the rest are left to make the decisions as to how to follow. Each organization is required to pick and choose from the standards supported by various vendors, to figure out the path that works best for them, based on their business needs. Hopefully HTML5 video standards will mitigate some of this, but I still have doubts that there will be one solution that will be applicable to all, at least in the near term.

What are the tools they need to create, deliver and store video files and metadata for broadcast, VoD, mobile, and web in one workflow?

Shore: I think the most important point here is to separate the user interface (UI) consideration from the backend. There is no one magical workflow. There is perhaps one desired outcome, but the path to that outcome is often different.

What the user wants is a single UI. What goes on after the user hits the “magic button” is of little concern to them…as long as the content they identified is delivered how and where it should be. There quite often will be multiple systems involved in this transaction, but the user is only really interested in the first and last step.

To that end, we have engineered a lot of front-end intelligence into Pronology, allowing us to automatically make decisions on how to best execute a given workflow for consistent results.

How important is the ability to integrate tools from a range of vendors?

Shore: The old expression says: “Jack of all trades, master of none.” No one can be an expert in everything…better to do what you do well, and let others do the same. At Pronology, we took a very purposeful approach to be agnostic to as many touch points in the workflow as we could. We are agnostic to a user’s OS, storage systems, transcode solutions, NLEs…basically anything we could envision. In this way, there are no specific requirements to accomplish a given task, recommendations perhaps, but no hard requirements. This way, we can overlay into a customers’ existing infrastructure with minimal effort, and very little, if any, customization.

Is it best to adopt a single system or opt for a modular workflow?Shore: To survive in the modern world, MAM systems must be the hub around which many other systems revolve. In order to satisfy the business requirements of organizations whose job is to acquire, edit and then distribute content, a modern MAM system must be capable of integrating into a very wide range of systems already in use within the organization. It is time and cost prohibitive, for example, for organizations to manage distribution formats and delivery targets in multiple systems. The MAM system should centralize this, while still allowing for best of breed vendors to do what they do best.