Will DAM flood the media? For cost-effective ways to manage and leverage content assets, here's digital asset management. But is it the solution? - Storage Management

Computer Technology Review, Dec, 2003 by Ken August

"We were looking for an easy-to-use, powerful, fast solution that would be able to operate without any client for most of our consumers, such as ad agencies," he says. "All they'd need would be a browser to access the information."

Roach looked at a variety of vendors and went with Artesia because of its functionality and, not unimportantly, the fact that the vendor partnered with Getty Images, Fox's ASP. Six months into the new system, he says, the cost of duplications is gone, as is the shipping and the time to market. Fox pays a monthly fee to Getty Images, which pays a licensing fee to Artesia.

"It's working great," Roach says. "We're expanding into other divisions. The only variable for us is the hard disk space, which is relatively cheap, so we can add other business units with less value that don't have to demonstrate ROI."

Down the road, Fox will be exploring different areas where the company could use the system to monetize stock film footage--say, a helicopter flying over L.A. "Other companies could download the footage for a fee to use for their productions," Roach says.

DAM Strategies

According to Michael Moon of Gistics, at the highest level, DAM represents one of three business strategies. The underlying premise, he explains, is that you deploy new technologies to execute a business strategy. The first strategy for media companies he calls "smart media strategy," in which you're trying to maximize revenues or profits from a base of branded assets. That might mean eventually automating workflow in the media creator space by enabling quick and easy access to referenceable files that allow a National Geographic production team, for example, to access content from its magazine to produce a documentary on the same topic.

The second strategy is "media services" and, like the Fox example, is typically owned by marketing and licensing services departments. If, Moon says, Disney has hundreds of authorized images of Mickey Mouse in various poses that could be used for different purposes, instead of having a high-, medium- and low-resolution file in half-a-dozen file formats for each image, a digital master is created that is capable of dynamic rendering and is placed in a secure image portal accessible to clients.

The third strategy is "content acceleration," says Moon. "Look at the number of websites under the AOL Time Warner umbrella; there are probably a couple of hundred. Content accelerators will gather up newly available assets as well as textual information, tag it with XML and push it into any of the appropriate websites. So, you have automated publishing and distribution of Web content, which reduces the cost of doing e-channel e-business."

But, Moon points out, these are all concepts that take DAM as a point solution. "It's about integrating what you have with two or three new things you'll need."

Facing Down the Future

If DAM is just now getting a toehold into media companies, what has to happen to create more of a driver for companies to deploy it?