IBC 2024: Key Findings on the Future of MAM
IBC2024 demonstrated that finding a good media management platform (MAM) and centralizing operations within it are crucial steps for media companies aiming to streamline their content supply chain.
What are the biggest challenges media companies face in media management today? How can these challenges be addressed? What are the most important features that currently sets the best MAM system apart from the rest?
We explored these questions over four days at our own booth at IBC, where our media management platform attracted significant interest throughout the event.
In this text, we have compiled the major pitfalls raised in these discussions and the solutions to overcome them.
An unified MAM system fixes many problematic workflows
Many media companies use a variety of tools and systems for material storage, but the fragmentation of these systems creates significant problems. Material is often stored in different locations: some is kept locally on hard drives, some in cloud services, and some in hybrid forms, such as external drives. This fragmented approach leads to a complicated system architecture and makes the overall process frustratingly complex.
This issue is particularly pronounced in large and complex productions carried out by production companies, such as reality shows. Massive amounts of material accumulate, and integrating and managing content across different systems becomes more challenging. This also slows down the work of end users, such as editors and other post-production professionals, making it heavier and less efficient. One solution to this problem is also an advanced MAM system. It functions best as a unified storage system where all assets are stored centrally with clear, streamlined, and user-friendly user interfaces and tools. This reduces clutter and simplifies asset management and usage, significantly enhancing the entire production process.
Finding material in fragmented media storage is slow
When materials are stored disorderly across systems, finding them later can be cumbersome and frustrating. This issue is made worse if the material is not accompanied by sufficient identifiers, such as metadata or tags. Often, large amounts of raw material accumulate during projects, and without proper identifiers, finding the material almost impossible.
Especially in fast-paced productions, such as advertising or television productions, it is essential that the required materials can be found in the blink of an eye. When materials are scattered across different systems without clear identifiers, the process of searching for and retrieving the needed content becomes manual—in other words, slow and inefficient.
Better metadata management and the use of unified standards across systems could help address this challenge. Automated MAM systems, which can generate and attach metadata automatically from multiple systems through integrations, also help solve the problem and make asset management seamlessly smooth.
Sharing assets with external parties
One identified challenge relates to sharing material from media companies’ internal, closed systems with external entities, such as partners or subcontractors. This process is often complex and progresses slowly, involving numerous steps that can frequently cause frustrating delays.
In many cases, material is shared by manually transferring it through file transfer services or cloud platforms. This outdated manual transfer method can be both laborious and prone to errors. Transferring large amounts of files presents its own challenges, as files often need to be split into parts or transferred in batches.
Automated workflows through integrations and modern collaboration platforms enable direct and secure access to assets. This also simplifies rights and permissions management, allowing external parties to directly access only the assets relevant to them.
Video AI frees production from the chains of manual labor
Production companies, especially in reality TV, face enormous challenges in handling and reviewing material. Currently, most raw footage is manually reviewed, with someone recording what each piece of material contains. This process is time-consuming and frustratingly labor-intensive.
With modern technology, such as the increasingly popular AI-assisted video analysis (Video AI), it’s possible to automate some of this heavy lifting. Video AI can identify various elements in video footage, such as environments, people, emotions, and highlights like logos or goals in sports events.
Using this data, precise metadata can be automatically generated, allowing editors to quickly search for and find the exact clips they need. Video AI can also create transcripts and automatically translate multiple languages from the original. These features can be used for searching material, creating summaries, and even as subtitles within the video file.
Such a system significantly reduces the amount of manual work and accelerates the production process. Moreover, it can increase accuracy, as AI analyzes material systematically and without error, unlike humans who can easily tire or make mistakes. While Video AI analyses don’t completely replace human creativity and artistic vision, they can serve as an efficient tool to streamline the process.
Facing challenges with media management in your company? Our MAM platform, Media Pocket, caters to the specific needs of media companies. Let’s discuss how we can streamline your workflows together.