DAM with a video spin

Digital asset management (DAM) is one of the most dynamic areas of software today, with organizations increasingly seeing its value in reducing costs and producing revenue streams. "These software solutions are now considered ‘must have’ products," says Mukul Krishna, who is with the digital media practice at Frost & Sullivan, "whereas previously, they were viewed as ‘nice to have.’ "

The large number of products in the market—about 400, according to Frost & Sullivan, is likely to cause users some difficulties. "No single product has more than 5 percent of the market," says Krishna. "Moreover, some products that claim to be DAM solutions really don’t have all the features that would qualify them for our definition of that category, such as a central storage repository."

The large number of options and the variability in the products presents a dilemma in terms of evaluation and selection (see sidebar). Nevertheless, organizations are convinced they must improve the handling of their rich media assets and are moving ahead with implementations.

The rapid growth in the DAM market is supported in part by the expansion of the use of video to communicate technical and business information.

"Video is a growing market in educational and corporate environments," says Krishna. "It’s a fairly small market right now, in the range of $70 million, but we expect it to grow at an annual rate approaching 30 percent, to over $300 million by 2013."

Leveraging video for education

The Utah Education Network (UEN), a consortium of Utah’s public and higher education systems, serves educational organizations statewide through its online resources, public television station and educational video materials. UEN wanted an effective way to manage and distribute its video assets, which include thousands of programs licensed through state education agencies and public broadcasting partnerships.

Along with five other educational institutions, UEN participated in an evaluation project to select a DAM system, and settled on TeleScope from North Plains. The features that were appealing included the fact that TeleScope could handle video in a manner comparable to its handling of other digital assets, brought up the files easily, had a user-friendly interface, allowed users to preview the files and was a mature product. In addition, North Plains was interested in working with educational institutions.

When UEN receives a video, many of which are from the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), the video arrives in tape format. The first step is to digitize it using Apple Final Cut Pro and video encoding software, and then load it into TeleScope.

"Once they are logged in to our secure Web site, teachers can search for videos that complement their curriculum activities," says Cory Stokes, enterprise learning services manager at UEN. "The digital file can then be downloaded, shown through a laptop with a projector, put on a DVD or loaded into a video-enabled iPod."

Stokes continues, "Many of our teachers are in rural areas, and the teacher would have to wait for the tape to be delivered by mail, or go to a district center to pick it up." TeleScope provides an easy way for the teachers to select and obtain digital video content.

Although UEN has not been asked to provide university lectures on video, TeleScope would support editing and managing such material. "A part of the interface that we do not expose to the teachers allows for defining clips from longer programs," Stokes explains. "Subject matter experts could indicate the in and out points for instructional segments, and could add metadata for each segment." The segments could be available for downloading on iPods.

With the emergence of podcasting, media-driven education will continue to grow. "This generation is media-oriented," Stoke emphasizes. "Students expect to learn through multiple media sources, including audio and video." He points to the value of demonstrations over descriptions in supporting more effective learning, and of being able to review explanations as many times as needed.

In the near future, UEN hopes to integrate TeleScope with Blackboard, a course management system, to provide seamless access to video for faculty building online courses. "TeleScope has a good set of Web service interfaces," Stokes says, "so we think that the integration is feasible."

Video is becoming pervasive, agrees Steve Sauder, CTO of North Plains. "Popular Web sites, such as YouTube, have made video a part of people’s daily lives, but managing it requires some special capabilities," he says.

In particular, Sauder cites the need to integrate with creative applications such as Photoshop. "Much of the relevant information about a file is generated during the creative process, and capturing it then is much easier than capturing it when the file is ready for archiving," Sauder explains.

Video via open source ECM

Sollan, which is based in Montreuil, France, helps clients manage their digital content life cycle, from creation to publishing. The company has built a video content management solution on top of Alfresco, an open source enterprise content management (ECM) system.