Why do you need a MAM system?

To begin with, let’s first define the concept of a MAM. A Media Asset Management (MAM) system is a tool that manages, organizes and catalogues any type of assets of a company in a centralized way, with the possibility of associating them one or several files and customized metadata to ease the content searching, retrieving and distribution tasks.

At this point, to fully understand Media Asset Management (MAM) technologies, we need to have a clear knowledge of what media assets are and why it is key to have a MAM tool to manage them. So, what is an asset?

In its most basic definition, an asset is a resource. Let’s see some examples. For any person, an asset could be a house, a car, definitely any good that someone appreciates and wants to keep in a safe place, use for gaining a profit, sell or even share with others. In the industry, assets are goods or values on which every business depends for its daily work. For example, in a building factory the assets could be the workers, the raw material, the machinery, etc.

Obviously, every company has different ways of keeping and taking care of its assets. In the broadcast sector, an asset could be a movie that you buy from some producer; an advertising campaign that you generate for selling more units of your product; news stories created by journalists in the newsroom; ingest of raw footage for editing… Now even closed captions and subtitles, too, have become primary assets.

All these assets need to be managed as well, placed in a safe location, with specific permissions, specific metadata to have a complete description of them and of course, they have to be ready for being searched and distributed at any time and from anywhere. In fact, in a multiplatform world like the one in which we live nowadays, an asset sometimes is a more complicated concept. For example, instead of an asset being just one single episode that needs to go on air at a specific time, it could actually be several episodes or an entire series.

Generally, all assets need to be managed and protected, in order to extract the most value from them. That’s why it is key for companies to count with the best and most advanced systems to handle and correctly manage their own assets.

Now going back to talking about MAM systems, what advantages does the use of a MAM
give to companies?

• Precise media files cataloguing using custom metadata fields.

• Advanced Searches based on search rules/criteria to have quick access to any media content, at anytime and anywhere.

• Increased Interoperability. The MAM system is the core of every deployment. That is why it is extremely important to rely on an open system that can be integrated with third-party technology and be customized to meet any specific requirement that users may have.

• Increased revenue since more content quality and more efficiency in the management of resources make audiovisual companies more profitable.