MAM system architectures in comparison

When looking „under the hood“ of Media Asset Management systems, there is a heavily complex technical world. We want to briefly delve into this world and explain why the technical architecture and the processes that a MAM system is built on matters. To simplify the topic, we find a good comparison with physical products that are more tangible and familiar to many in terms of performance indicators. Picture yourself buying a car. The first option you are offered at a car dealer is a massive muscle car, say Dodge RAM v10. It is renowned for its exceptional power and towing capacity, thanks to its robust 8.0-liter V10 engine, making it a top choice for heavy-duty tasks and off-road adventures. However, it is extremely expensive, heavily polluting, massive, and not really the futuristic sustainable car that you had in mind. Then you are presented with another option: a lightweight and speedy hybrid car with a price tag a third of the Dodge. It drives like a dream, has an advanced and stable software, is sustainable and has a set of cool features. You are thrilled! This is exactly what you wanted.

This visual is created with AI by FlowWorks.

What type of MAM systems do these two options represent in terms of system architecture? The Dodge RAM represents the “classical” MAM that operates on CPUs (Central Processing Units). They can perform key MAM functions such as transcoding and processing, but they do this to a high cost and with an inefficient energy consumption, being slower and more limited in terms of capacity than agile alternatives. What CPU-based processing entails is expensive hardware in terms of servers, intense maintenance related to software updates, data backups, and periodic hardware checks as well as operational inefficiency in terms of heavy electricity consumption and blocked Internet lines. As green tech continues to emerge as a mainstream topic, the awareness of digital sustainability is established. The CPU-based, “Dodge RAM”, MAM systems were experiencing their golden days when the amount of media assets was significantly lower, the quality of the material was less demanding, and processing requirements were relatively modest. They have not managed to keep pace with the growing demands of modern media production and management. What is happening today is that the volume of media assets is growing exponentially, the quality of content is consistently improving with higher resolutions and more complex formats, and the demand for faster, GPU-optimized MAM systems to handle these challenges has become increasingly evident. Every single person with a camera or a smartphone can be a content producer with large volumes of media assets. This calls for intelligent and light-weight systems that can manage the content with a sustainable and intelligent modus operandi.

This visual is created with AI by FlowWorks.

Let’s then look at the futuristic hybid smart-car. What does it do differently from the Dodge? It can use all its engines and inner components in a balanced and optimized way, making use of any one of its components that can perform a specific task most efficiently. For example, instead of using the CPU for tasks such as transcoding, face detection or AI, it makes use of different available GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) or ML (machine learning) accelerators, that can perform the task quicker and more efficient. At the same time, it is not using any computational power of the CPU, which then is free for MAM core functions (such as file handling, database publishing, archiving etc.) and user front ends. While the CPU-based “Dodge RAM” uses 100% of the CPU power, while still performing its tasks much slower compared to its challenger, the GPU-based system consumes only 1% of the CPU-capacity. For example, when the so called “Dodge RAM” system is transcoding at 100% of its capacity, it has no computational capacity left for any other tasks. This means that the user experiences extreme slowness and malfunction when simultaneously using the MAM system – simply because the system already is at its limits. As a comparison, when its counterpart, what we here exemplify as the “smart-car” system, is transcoding, the user will not notice this while simultaneously using the MAM system since the system has 99% of its capacity left for operating normally. In addition, when you need to scale up a “classical” MAM system that we compare with a Dodge RAM car, to, for example operate a growing amount of media assets, or when there is a need to add more users to operate the system, you are forced to buy expensive CPU-based hardware, that equals “muscles” of the Dodge RAM to be able to scale the system. With this, you gain more muscles but remain slow and operate with the same stagnating way as before – not to mention the enormous costs that this comes with.

A MAM system that can perform on the top of its class needs to be flexible and intelligent. Factors such as scalability, capacity and efficiency are at the centre of this. Modularity enables customization and a cost-efficient way to build a MAM system that serves the specific needs of a customer and can easily be extended with new features as new needs emerge. Digital systems are difficult to evaluate from the outside since the performance indicators are not clearly established and the architecture and processes that make the system are so highly complex that few are able to evaluate and understand them. Our advice to anyone searching for a MAM system or wanting to understand more of the topic is to ask any MAM provider of interest about the system architecture, which factors are affecting its capacity and how flexible and scalable the system is and to what cost it is scalable.

What you should go for instead of expensive muscle-power is agility and intelligence.

We at Flow Works see that MAM systems will be an essential tool for anyone operating a large volume of pictures, videos or audio files in the near future. Thus, we are working on solutions that will make agile and intelligent MAM systems available to anyone who is ready to elevate their work around media assets to new heights. If this topic is as fascinating to you as it is to us, we should continue the disucssion together.

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November 8, 2023 Future solutions, Innovation, Media Asset Management, R&D, Trends No comments yet

🚀 Unlocking ROI Potential: How Investing in a MAM System Drives Business Success

Investing in a Media Asset Management system is a strategic decision that yields substantial ROI for organizations. By enhancing productivity, streamlining workflows, optimizing storage, unlocking revenue opportunities and enabling data-driven decision making, a well-implemented MAM system delivers tangible benefits that directly impact the bottom line. 🚀 💼💡

Here is a compact list with 5 areas of the tangible Return-On-Investment (ROI) that organizations can achieve by investing in a professional MAM system:

1. Enhanced Productivity and Time Savings:

A MAM system eliminates the inefficiencies associated with manual media asset management. By automating tasks such as file organization, metadata tagging, and content retrieval, employees can quickly locate and access the required assets, reducing time spent on administrative tasks. This increased productivity translates into significant time savings, allowing teams to focus on creative endeavors and actual business. ⏰✨

2. Streamlined Workflows and Collaboration:

Collaboration among team members, departments, and other external stakeholders is key for seamless content creation and distribution. A MAM system acts as a centralized hub, enabling easy sharing, version control, and real-time collaboration. By eliminating bottlenecks and reducing miscommunication, teams can work more efficiently. 🤝🌐

3. Optimized Storage and Reduced Costs:

Cloud storage costs can quickly escalate if not managed effectively. A MAM system helps optimize storage utilization by eliminating redundant files, leveraging automated transcoding to reduce file sizes and formats, and implementing intelligent archiving for infrequently used assets. By minimizing the used storage space and eliminating unnecessary duplicates, organizations can significantly reduce storage costs. 💰💾

4. Improved Asset Monetization and Revenue Generation:

Media assets are valuable assets that can be monetized in various ways, such as licensing, distribution, or repurposing. A robust MAM system empowers organizations to efficiently catalog and manage their assets, making it easier to leverage them for additional revenue streams. With streamlined access to a well-organized library of assets, organizations can maximize the value of their media content. 💎💸

5. Data-Driven Insights:

A MAM system provides valuable analytics and reporting capabilities, offering insights into asset usage, performance, and audience engagement. These insights enable data-driven decision making, helping organizations refine their content strategies, identify trends, and allocate resources more effectively. By leveraging data, organizations can make informed decisions, optimize their content production, and stay ahead in a competitive landscape. 📊🔍

FlowWorks offers a professional MAM system, derived from the broadcasting industry. With us, you can start small without a large initial investment and grow the system as your MAM needs evolve and grow.

Contact us to talk further!

This article was originally published on LinkedIn

#MediaAssetManagement #ProfessionalMAMSystem #ROI #BusinessSuccess #Productivity #StorageOptimization #MediaAssetMonetization

October 5, 2023 Benefits of a MAM system No comments yet

Media Asset Management for beginners

Are you new to Media Asset Management and wondering what it is all about? Media Asset Management (MAM in brief) is for most people an unknown term. We want to give a brief introduction into the world of Media Asset Management and explain a few great benefits of it for someone who is new to the topic and wants to get started with the basics.

Is your hard-drive(s) full and you already tried transferring digital material to the cloud, which still did not solve the issue since the storage quickly gets expensive? Are you storing your content on several USB sticks and/or hard-drives and struggling to stay on top of where specific files are stored and spending a lot of time on searching, moving and trying to manage versions of the content? Not to mention the problems related to sharing content or cooperating with others during production. Worried about back-ups? These are often some of the first problem that occur when the need of a MAM system starts to be topical.

What is a media asset actually?

Media Assets are simply put all digital picture, video or audio files – also simply called content in many contexts. We all produce such media assets when for example taking pictures with our mobile phone, a camera or a drone. When the quantity and/or size of media assets grows, or there is a need to work with media assets in business context, there is quickly a need for a software that can help keep order of all the media assets, optimize the use of them in various contexts, such as sharing them to others, saving them on a cloud or collaborating with others during production. We will glance through a few of the most relevant added values of Media Asset Management and why it matters to everyone, both private persons and companies, who produces media assets.

#1 A MAM SOFTWARE CONNECTS AN UNLIMITED NUMBER OF STORAGES AND PROVIDES ACCESS TO THEM THROUGH ONE SINGLE INTERFACE

Digital storage is a topic of its own, with multiple solutions available. We will not dig deeper into the actual storage solutions here. It is however a topic for anyone who works with a larger number of media assets. A typical situation is that the material cumulates over time, resulting in a jungle of hard-drives and USB sticks that are all their own entities and require resources to stay on top of. A NAS device (Network Attached Storage device) can offer several benefits related to for example back-ups or easy access to the material. However, to get the most out of any storage system or combination of multiple storage units, a Media Asset Management software provides a very easy and simple way to connect all storages and to access them through one single interface – for as many users as needed. This can be said to be the most basic added value that a professional MAM software can offer to anyone. The interface we talk about here is simply a browser-based user interface. Our software can be installed on any device that runs on Linux (x86_64 Intel or AMD) Architecture. The Flow can also be installed directly on selected NAS device from the producer QNAP.

#2 A MAM SOFTWARE WILL SAVE YOU ENERGY COSTS AND ELECTRICITY

Digital activity naturally consumes electricity, digital storage space and Internet lines. It therefore matters to use efficient hardware that minimizes the use of electricity as much as it matters to optimize the digital processes so that they in turn minimize the use of both hardware and cloud storage as well as the capacity of Internet lines. A professional Media Asset Management software, such as Flow, will optimize the use of all these three parts so that the user efficiently can manage its content from a cost and energy point of view. More about this topic in our previous article Green Tech concerns every organisation

#3 EASILY FIND CONTENT WITH METADATA AND PREVIEW IT VISUALLY

Metadata and the advanced search functionality related to it is one of the key features of a professional MAM software. This is also one main thing that sets a MAM software apart from for example a Digital Asset Management (DAM) software. With a MAM software you can “find your stuff” and visually preview it in the search field.

Metadata is basically various types of information about content that can be the name of a file, the length of a video clip, GPS locations used in production, language and the date when it was produced. In our coming articles we will dig deeper into the topic of metadata since it is such an interesting topic of its own. More advanced metadata becomes relevant when working with larger volumes of content or in a business context. The Flow software allows detailed metadata for each content that not only is useful related to search, but that can also be used to link together related material or to find materials from the Archive (storage place for material that is no longer actively used). In addition, metadata is important during the production phase when there are multiple versions to manage.

#4 OPTIMIZING FILE SIZE AUTOMATICALLY TO SAVE STORAGE SPACE AND ENABLE SMOOTH SHARING

Without getting into the highly technical world of Media Asset Management we want to introduce the automated transcoding function that the Flow software contains. This function is something the user does not have to interact with, it operates in the background without requiring any user activity, but it is another of its key functions that distinguishes a Media Asset Management system from several alternative solutions such as Digital Asset Management systems or online video services (focusing on sharing/distributing content) or file transfer tools. The transcoder will automatically optimize the format and size of any content stored in the system. The benefit of this is that you can send optimized file sizes without blocking Internet lines, share videos without them getting stuck while viewing and use a minimal storage space.

#5 WHAT SERVICES WILL A MAM SOFTWARE REPLACE?

While so many users are unfamiliar with Media Asset Management and how it could make their life easier, they instead turn to different online services that do small parts of what a complete MAM system does, and that mostly also with poorer performance than a MAM system. This quickly gets expensive compared to working with a MAM system that eliminates the need for many smaller services. Such services are:

  • online video services focusing on only streaming or distributing video content
  • collaboration tools that only store a derivative (proxy) of the file, which makes the file unusable for future post productions. This type of a service also does not enable deep archiving, making it impossible to access the original files when needed.
  • file transfer tools do not offer any media management services with basic features such as previewing, transcoding or with metadata mostly not being available. Files are therefore transferred with unoptimized format and size, without important file information that is needed for basic MAM functions.

#6 A MAM SOFTWARE OFFERS UNLIMITED SCALING POSSIBILITIES AND FUNCTIONS AS A CONNECTING POINT TO OTHER SOFTWARES

When you get started with Media Asset Management and want to dive deeper into all its possibilities, the next level includes automated functionalities that are set up through workflows as well as integration of numerous other systems and platforms (such as Edits, QC, existing Transcoders) or specialized online services (such as file exchange or CDNs). The modular DNA of the Flow software allows the user to scale the system without limitations and to do this step-by-step as new additions are needed. Contact us to hear more!

January 13, 2023 Media Asset Management No comments yet

Green Tech concerns every organisation

Sustainability in the digital world is still a relatively unknown concept, but with recent global developments it is more important than ever. So called Green Tech is for many an abstract topic. While we talk about energy saving by using less lights or getting energy efficient household appliances, it may seem difficult to understand the magnitude of energy spent related to media asset management. Green tech is also not creating the momentum it deserves since there are many commercial actors in the market who make money on inefficient use of cloud storage or transferring large volumes of digital files and hence, do not want this topic to get attention. All digital assets consume energy partly by the storage that is used to store them as well as the energy needed to transfer, view or share them. For users, whether private persons (“prosumers”) or companies, this topic becomes increasingly more urgent as the number of digital assets continues to grow. Not only the amount of video, text and audio files increase, rich media in presentations or communications materials is the norm. What are we talking about with “digital assets”? Digital assets are every file, whether text, video, picture or audio. It therefore is a topic that concerns every organization or person working with digital material.

Flow Works has the solution for the future of media asset management

We at Flow Works spent a few years envisioning the demands of the future digital world and have a solution that saves your time, money and minimizes the use of energy and cloud storage. Our software gives you a complete set of tools for everything one might need related to digital asset management – and the best of it all is that it will save you time, money and energy! Digital asset management is no longer a topic for just professional media producers, news agencies, production houses and so forth – it is a topic for every organisation that works with digital material.

MINIMIZE THE NEED FOR CLOUD STORAGE

Cloud storage is a huge business. For companies selling digital storage, it is good business when customers have a high quantity of large files. Large files eat up a large amount of storage space that generates income. For the customer this quickly gets expensive and in addition makes it more troublesome to share, view or distribute the material since it requires a solid and strong Internet connection as well as processing power to work with large files. This is inefficient and expensive! The ideal solution is to optimize the size of each file by automated transcoding that requires no action from the user. Flow Works’ software includes exactly this, giving its customers a professional tool for viewing, editing and sharing digital media files (among numerous other fantastic features). When digital files are in an optimized format, then less cloud – and physical hardware space – is used. In addition, with our software only the necessary parts, which is the content intended for sharing or distribution, are transferred to the cloud while the rest of the file stays on local cost-efficient storages (physical hard drives). With all this we limit processing power in the cloud – ultimately optimizing cloud usage. All this matters since it is part of enabling an increasingly digitized world while being energy efficient and sustainable.

MINIMIZE THE USE OF INTERNET CONNECTION

Blocking Internet lines for inefficient use related to digital media files is wasting energy and slowing down other functions that make use of the same Internet connection. Not to mention the frustration we all are familiar with when trying to view a video that is stuck due to upload issues. The optimized file formats that we can offer with our software are transcoding, or in other words pre-processing the file automatically to a minimal size and optimized format. With pre-processed formats and files, we only transfer a fraction of the original sources through Internet lines while still maintaining highest quality. This keeps the Internet line free while delivering content with ultimate speed. This also speeds up the overall media workflow up to 25 times compared to other online services, while at the same time capping down the download file sizes for collaboration and distribution partners. When sharing for example a video online, it not only consumes Internet line from the one sharing it, it consumes Internet for every single viewer. The quantity quickly becomes enormous. Sustainability in the connected digital world that shares digital material is strongly linked to minimizing the use of Internet lines.

POWER EFFICIENT HARDWARE IS GREEN

Flow Works is ultimately a software company, operating its own professional media asset management software since 2005. Hardware is still the other part of the digital world and therefore we have customized our software to function on the operating systems of QNAP NAS devices. NAS devices are in other words Network Attached Storage units that instead of being connected to a computer are connected to a network. This makes it possible to access all materials safely and quickly, as well as enables an easy back-up system. When working with digital media files, QNAP NAS devices are the go-to solution. Now, with our Flow software customers can make the most out of their QNAP NAS. How? They can access all materials stored on their QNAP NAS device through our browser-based user interface that allows the user to view, edit, share and collaborate both internally and externally related to the materials stored on the NAS. It is as easy as it gets when talking about media asset management and offers both private persons as well as professional organisations a very simple way to get started with professional handling of digital files.

The technical superiority of this set-up lies in the optimized use of resources that shifts the system’s resources to parts of it that do the job better. The user does not have to care for the technical processes that are working in the background, but the user naturally benefits from all the upsides of this power-efficient technology. For the user it is in the long run more green, more cheap, more efficient and more hassle-free! Why waste any more time on complex systems that cannot do the job anyway nearly as professional as ours?

September 8, 2022 Future solutions, Media Asset Management, Trends No comments yet