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Media Asset Management systems are a fundamental element of the broadcast media supply chain. Although systems for news, delivery, production and archiving have many shared core technologies, each has evolved its own nuanced functionality to fit workflow demands. Many vendors offer different applications accordingly. This guide explores the fundamental principles of Media Asset Management system design and implementation with a firm eye on production and archiving... but many of the standards and best practices discussed here apply across all MAM systems.

Media Asset Management systems can become more complex as they evolve. The key to achieving long term success lies in a solid understanding of the underlying technology, design principles and terminology. Careful consideration of the scope of the system and following established standards and protocols which will streamline future expansion is critical.

Managing assets becomes a bigger and more complex task as the scope and scale of ingested content increases. AI provides leverage when wrangling these huge quantities of media assets but knowing what happens under the hood of an asset management system is key to deploying it successfully.

At the outset, the production lifecycle starts with content being ingested into the workflow. The media might be shot by a crew on location, in a studio or provided by another organization. User generated and machine rendered content is being introduced more often.

Each source has different specifications for format and containment. When they arrive, they must be unpacked and assimilated into a common storage infrastructure so they can be used by the entire production team.

In the distant past, managing the assets for a production came down to hiding a pile of cardboard boxes full of unlabeled tapes under a stairwell. Later that pile of boxes was dusted off, the cobwebs removed, they were unpacked and the contents logged in a database. Astonishingly, the production team then found sufficient unused footage to create a new series of programs without needing to dispatch a film crew to shoot new material. An unsurprising apocryphal story perhaps, but it did allegedly happen at the BBC.

Automated Metadata Extraction

Fast forward to today and there has been an exponential growth in quanitity and types of footage being acquired, it is no longer humanly possible to scan and log everything manually. Technology is evolving to fill the gap. Automation can extract such metadata as is embedded in the footage by modern cameras. A second pass analyzes the content for semantic meaning. A lot of useful information can be deduced automatically:

• Coding format, frame rate, image size, video standards (PAL/NTSC/Interlace/Progressive/pull-down).
• Facial recognition makes educated guesses about the identity of people in the frame.
• Voice recognition can back that up to reduce uncertainty.
• Scene detection can record useful bookmarks where cuts occur.
• Background music recognition can potentially identify rights and licensing issues.
• Where previously finished programs are being ingested, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques can extract burned in text, slates, title screens and end-credits.
• Copyright ownership and creation date can be extracted from the end credits. Sometimes that text is very small and moving quickly. A human eyeball can discriminate this and read the text but OCR may struggle.
• Sub-title streams can be extracted and stored as Video Text Track (VTT) files. 
• Geographic location detection when there is no camera GPS data is possible with reverse image searching techniques.

Off-air recorded programs should contain embedded Electronic Program Guide (EPG) metadata. This can be parsed with a data detector to infer various properties. The conventions of EPG data are generally followed very well although there are occasional uncertainties, formatting oddities, typographical and spelling errors and outright mistakes. I wrote a data detector a few years ago and extracted these properties in an off-air recording system:

• Broadcast channel.
• Broadcast date and time.
• Program or series title.
• Whether audio description was included.
• Whether there were subtitles available.
• Whether the program was BSL signed.
• Whether an alternative broadcast in HD was available.
• Episode name.
• Sometimes the episode number was available.
• Square bracketed dates ([YYYY]) at the end implied that this was a movie.
• Given the movie name, links to IMDB, Wikipedia and Amazon could be synthesized.
• Cast names and director were sometimes available.
• The remaining text often outlined the program content as a short description.

Reconciling this against a database of known broadcast schedules (see BBC Genome) provided additional metadata.

A useful metadata feed into the asset management database is possible without human intervention. Manual inspection and moderation is important for quality assurance until it is proven to be accurate and reliable.

Different Kinds Of Asset Management

Over the last 25 years or so, various terminology has evolved to describe asset management systems. From a technology perspective, asset managers are all made from the same basic components. Let’s pause for a moment and summarize some terminology that is relevant for media management.

The differences between a DAM and a MAM are subtle. A DAM may provide more functionality than you need and be more expensive than a MAM. But a MAM might not support all your needs. Choose carefully.

What About Analog Media?

We tend to focus on asset management in the context of digital media. There are significant quantities of analog media stored on video tapes and film which also need to be cataloged. They could be managed in the same databases but need to be clearly marked as being stored offline. Physical media requires a locator description different to the file system paths for digital assets.

Analog (or Non-Digital) asset management describes these legacy resources:

• Paper-based documents in filing cabinets.
• Physical asset (equipment etc).
• Classic libraries with shelving systems.
• Film vaults.
• Analog tape vaults.
• Maintenance regimes and records.
• Rolodexes.
• Wall calendars.

Migrating these into a digital storage system with a metadata database is not hugely complex and there tends to be less analog material to deal with anyway. Digitize the essence to make a proxy digital asset or describe where the physical items are with a location descriptor. That might be a room number or a shelf identifier in a large library. Librarians have been doing this for years with card indexes cataloging book collections with accession numbers. Dewey Decimal filing codes on the book spines ensure they are placed back on the correct shelves.

Metadata Standards

There are a few metadata standards relevant to digital content management amongst many others for a large range of topics.

Our primary focus is on the lifecycle of media assets for creating broadcast or streamed media. No single schema will cover everything. For full coverage, multiple schemas are necessary but these can be linked using Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) techniques.

It may be useful to look outside the broadcasting media walled garden and consider content specific standards. If a natural history documentary program is being created, then knowing about metadata standards such as the Access to Biological Collections Data (ABCD) schema is helpful. A program about space exploration might make use of a resource database built with the Astronomy Visualization Metadata (AVM) schema.

By incorporating external knowledge-based metadata into the workflow, additional checks and balances can be applied automatically. For example nomenclature and terminology used in subtitles can be reconciled against subject specialist resources and errors highlighted for correction before deployment.

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) provides a useful list of metadata schemas with descriptions and links to resources:

Amongst others, DCC describes these schemas which are particularly relevant when building digital media asset management solutions:

In Part 2 we move on to designing end to end workflow.