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

It's important to understand what opportunities enabling its application will be created in media and entertainment, and those aren't there yet. That's the push side. The pull side is: what business developments are going to hasten the deployment of digital asset systems?

The megatrends in this arena are new distribution modalities, globalization and new business models. All will be enabled by the power of digital asset management and networks. The ability to protect licensing is one driver. Another driver, in the case of film companies, is the ease of reformatting from theatrical print to DVD or change languages without redubbing. In the case of broadcast, it's the ability to let local affiliates cut a network-originated story to fit content.

But first, says Levine, industry standards for sharing assets need improvement--specifically in the area of tagging metadata. Barros, on the other hand, sees security as being the driving issue. "Our customers are pushing us to a more intense and granular security model," he says. "You'll see in the next quarter or two a real change in our security model."

In film and post-production, Chris Albano, director of content technologies with Avid, says that the big challenge for his customers is moving large, high-resolution assets around. "They're still struggling with digital dailies. People are still sending out videotapes. The underlying infrastructure really needs to come up to speed to allow for the seamless distribution of assets."

Gunnerson of Gannett agrees. "As DAM expands to include higher resolution photos and video, we also need larger and larger amounts of digital storage," he says. "Today at Gannett, DAM and DRM require significant infrastructure investments in ancillary systems, increasing the implementation costs without clear monetary gains. When the business benefits become clearer, we will seriously reevaluate our investment position for DAM and DRM."

Ultimately, even with people looking ahead to new revenue streams that DAM could facilitate, it's the workflow that seems to be driving at least initial deployments of DAM. Media companies want a seamless way to find content and use it in any distribution channel without having to re-engineer the infrastructure every time. Workflow, says Albano, is critical. "We're in the workflow," he says. "We hear the pain points."

RELATED ARTICLE: Tip: Deploying DAM

Items to consider before implementing your DAM system:

* This is a business problem, not a technology problem. Think big, but start small with areas where business users can see an immediate impact and low risk of implementation. You want a high probability of success and a high return, whether that's in cost savings or implemental revenue.

* Deployment of DAM shouldn't be based on revenue opportunities alone because they're hard to quantify and hard to measure.

* Prototype, prototype, prototype. Do basic functions and features, get feedback from users, make changes and keep repeating the functionality until you're done. Don't go for the big bang and just present the system thinking your people will automatically buy into it. They need to be part of the process.