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?
