Ushering In The New Age Of MAM

The fact that the media and entertainment industry is undergoing seismic changes is not news. We’ve all experienced the initial jolt of a new technology when it emerges, and then brace ourselves as the aftershocks roll over us in waves.

What we tend to forget, however, is the seemingly endless time to develop and test the processes required to integrate new technologies into existing workflows. Some media asset management (MAM) vendors even claim that reducing project development time is an extremely difficult task. That’s clearly a concern for those requiring scalable, resilient and interoperable technology.

Surely, major challenges exist that impede the swift integration procedure, including timeframe reduction, incorporating new applications in a simple and stable manner, guaranteeing interoperability and data (media and metadata) migration between applications and ensuring all components can be timely upgraded and changed at a reasonable cost. But are they really insurmountable?

The solution to these challenges requires redesigning the integration services of MAM systems. The need to become media-centric platforms with easy-to-use integration and configurability tools that allow users to change processes and applications and adapt and grow as needs and technologies change.

Point To Point Integration Vs. Integration Platform As A Service

Automation is the future of business, serving as the driving force that swiftly and seamlessly integrates new applications into workflows or replaces those rendered obsolete. Integrating applications has two main classes: Point to Point (P2P) and Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS).

Historically, P2P integrations moved data from one application or system to another. The process was sufficient for smaller, less complex operations, but today there are multiple options for every type of application (AI, automation, QC, traffic and transcoder among them). When updating an application that is integrated with several applications, an update will be required for each of the affected P2P integrations.

As more complicated applications emerge and multiply, the industry is turning towards iPaaS, a suite of cloud services that enables development, execution and governance of integrations and connects any combination of on-premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within individual or across multiple organizations. iPaaS provides out-of-the-box critical integration functionality, replacing the traditional P2P method.

A media-centric iPaaS-based solution is designed to support projects requiring high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR), security, service-level agreements (SLAs) and technical support from the provider.

iPaaS-based integration is a more flexible architecture than P2P, as applications are integrated with the platform, which can consistently implement media and metadata migration processes between any set of applications. Therefore, only its integration with the platform requires updating. iPaaS products provide a much more streamlined solution by standardizing how applications are connected in an organization and how manual processes are automated across applications, even as applications are constantly swapped and added.

Media-Centric iPaas-Based MAM For The Media And Entertainment Market

iPaaS can be deployed in the cloud in three different ways: private, hybrid and public. Of all three, the hybrid cloud holds the largest share in the market.

MAM has played a very important role in the digital transition of the media and entertainment market. The business is changing, and MAMs must provide customers with efficient services on-demand and as needed. MAMs need to evolve to the hybrid cloud model to provide a smooth transition from 100% on-premise solutions to a progressive cloudization of operations.

iPaaS products are mainly oriented to IT integration processes where there is a metadata exchange between applications. They are not intended for media processing, essential in the media and entertainment market. None include integrations with the multiple applications and storage systems that are used daily in the production, archive, transformation, indexing and distribution of content in that market.

Today, interoperability and data migration have become key requirements. To continue leading the technology in the media and entertainment market, MAM should incorporate media-centric iPaaS technology (flexible, agile, redundant, resilient and scalable) to deliver the right services to the customers when they need it and, moreover, be able to implement efficient projects in weeks, not months, ensuring interoperability between applications.

Every day, customers are uncovering new applications to integrate into their processes or to replace others that have become obsolete. Customers expect immediate answers and simple solutions that they can implement themselves and that supports an opex model with easy-to-use integration and configurability tools that allow them to change processes and applications quickly and smoothly and be able to adapt and grow as their needs, technologies and viewer usages change in the future.

A media-centric iPaaS-based MAM is the solution to this new scenario that allows media and entertainment companies to adopt a powerful and holistic application integration strategy as they accelerate their move to direct-to-consumer business models.

Emilio L. Zapata is CEO of Tedial.