MAM and DAM Evolve Into the Cloud, Going Beyond the Basics
By Jim Bask
For those of us who have been around since the prestreaming days, neck deep in film and videotapes while we wrestled with edit decision lists (EDLs) and three-point edits, the idea of storing a list of all these physical assets in a computer—the metadata about the media assets—was an admirable goal.
The content creation industry has traded in paper edits and EDLs in favor of maintaining EDLs and performing non-linear editing (NLE) on the same computer. But the ability to move the media asset management (MAM) online, digitizing the assets and upgrading the metadata so that the digital clip itself was searchable and easily accessible—in other words, the concept of digital asset management (DAM)—seemed akin to the Eighth Wonder of the World. “Digitize once, use often,” was a recurring sales mantra.
Yet, the maturation of MAM and DAM solutions over the past 20 years, as they expanded to include online-only content and new delivery methods—from YouTube to over-the-top (OTT) premium content delivery—has generated a bit of a conflicting growth pattern.
In some ways, growth in feature sets for DAM and MAM solutions have stagnated, in no small part due to the need by most solutions providers to put their solutions “in the cloud,” thereby virtualizing an offering that used to require multiple beefy servers—one for uploading, one for indexing content, one for search and retrieval, and so on.
The move to the cloud was driven by the solutions providers themselves, since not every customer wanted to part with the ability to buy a product for use in an on-prem solution. But there were enough greenfield cloud-based MAM customers with an aversion to capital expenditures (CapEx) to allow these MAM solutions providers to justify the move from local servers and operating systems to cloud-based nodes with specialized operating systems. In the intervening 5 or 6 years, while MAM solutions have been moving to the cloud, feature enhancements suffered at the hand of bringing basic parity between the on-prem versions and the newer cloud versions….[continue reading]