Media Management

Across the media industry, organizations are facing unrelenting pressure to decrease operational costs and maximize the ratio of creative output to expenses. However, inefficient processes, lack of integration between systems, and siloed technology deployments make it very difficult to increase efficiency.

To reduce media operations costs, organizations need an open, extensible platform that provides powerful process automation, easy access to all media assets and metadata, and proven performance in a multi-vendor environment.

Interplay | MAM greatly improves media operations efficiency by enabling you to:

• Automate processes
• Integrate and streamline workflows
• Share media and metadata universally
• Link media operations to business processes
• Use analytics to understand and improve your business

With Interplay | MAM, you can build efficient workflows and central archives that interlink every contributor, facility, geographic location, and application in the enterprise, enabling them to work fluidly with all of your assets and associated metadata.

Today’s large-scale media operations face many challenges that can restrict business agility. Content quality and monetization are limited because media often cannot be located. Siloed operations limit visibility to media and resources, reducing efficiency. Creative time is being consumed by non-creative tasks. And management has limited visibility into projects across the content lifecycle.

Your organization’s ability to succeed depends on how effectively you can mitigate these challenges. To be successful, you need a modular, customizable, process-driven system with a flexible data model and adaptable business process management that enables you to easily adapt existing workflows and implement new ones as needed.

Interplay | MAM offers a true service-oriented architecture that runs on the Avid MediaCentral Platform—an open, flexible foundation—enabling you to easily expand and customize your system as your business needs change. Regardless of the workflow challenges you face now—or may face in the future—Interplay | MAM can be tailored to support your business processes.

Interplay | MAM improves business agility by enabling you to:

• Make assets with their descriptive information and status readily accessible across the enterprise
• Increase creative output and accelerate time to air for existing and new content
• Quickly and efficiently act on new opportunities, such as launching new channels or distributing to new outlets
• Increase effectiveness by breaking down silos and enabling collaboration across the enterprise
• Create a stable work environment that appeals to top creative talent
• Make fast and more informed business decisions

Designed to grow and adapt with you, Interplay | MAM provides a highly scalable and flexible data model capable of handling any specific requirement, changes, or additions you need.

Robust metadata tagging and management are critical to realizing full asset potential across the value chain. However, many organizations suffer from inconsistent and incomplete metadata, which severely limits their ability to make the most of their archived media.

The ideal media management solution can manage, protect, and provide full access to media by offering the ability to browse, select, edit, and annotate metadata.

Interplay | MAM utilizes an exceptionally scalable and flexible data model, enabling comprehensive media and metadata management. The Interplay | MAM Desktop web application provides easy access to local or remote users using a comprehensive tool with a professional-grade, frame-accurate media player, enabling them to find, view, shot-list, and collaborate through an array of views.

Interplay | MAM facilitates effective metadata and archive operations, enabling you to:

• Manage and remotely access file-based content
• Quickly and easily retrieve, monetize, and preserve archived assets
• Eliminate repetitive re-keying and prevent lost media
• Reduce the need for maintaining shelf space and classic equipment
• Allow archive staff to focus on value-added tasks, such as metadata enrichment, instead of manual tape handling

Thanks to its powerful metadata capabilities, Interplay | MAM offers fast access to archived content, reduces media acquisition costs, and leads to better storytelling due to increased utilization of archive media.

Although the media value chain is changing, one thing remains clear—content is still king. In a market that is evolving rapidly and experimenting with new ways to engage audiences, high-quality content—with a great image and audio experience—is the strongest driver of audience engagement. To motivate increasingly sophisticated consumers to act, media organizations need to produce high-quality content that is created, finished, and distributed through a professional media asset management system.

Interplay | MAM enables you to:

• Find what you need, when you need it, to create more compelling content
• Leverage the combined assets of the enterprise to achieve more efficient operations and tell a more engaging story
• Allow creative contributors to focus on value-added creative tasks instead of time-consuming technical work
• Attract and retain a stable talent pool by creating a work environment that appeals to top creative talent

By providing fluid, efficient, and harmonized media creation workflows, Interplay | MAM helps you create compelling content, grow your brand, and increase market share.

As the new media value chain continues to evolve, so do the needs of media organizations. However, most current technology solutions on the market involve piecing together products from multiple vendors, leading to questionable compatibility and an unproductive workflow.

Interplay | Production manages and coordinates content creation, automates workflows, and empowers all contributors across the production and editorial ecosystem to easily work in parallel to complete projects faster. Running on the Avid MediaCentral Platform, Interplay | Production—in conjunction with MediaCentral | UX (formerly Interplay Central)—enables all contributors to access and edit projects and media using a desktop computer, laptop, or iOS device—at the facility or on the go. Tasks such as media movement, transcoding, and proxy generation are orchestrated in the background, while producers, editors, assistants, and reviewers around the world can find, arrange, edit, review, and annotate media—without wasting time looking for the right clip.

Interplay | Production provides an environment tuned for dependability and collaboration, where Avid products can integrate with third-party solutions from vendors such as Telestream, SGL, EVS, Front Porch Digital, Dixon Sports, and many more.

In addition to supporting all of Avid’s industry-leading Artist Suite creative tools, such as Media Composer and Pro Tools software and systems, Interplay | Production offers native applications that enable team members outside of the editorial or audio staff—such as producers, writers, and loggers—to work with material from a shared location and participate in the creative process.

Every facility has its own unique challenges and workflows. That’s why off-the-shelf, “one size fits all” solutions can’t fully meet your needs.

Interplay | Production can be deployed and customized to meet your specific workflow requirements. The system is available in several base configurations that range in size and levels of redundancy for “mission critical” on-air or deadline-driven environments.

Beyond these base configurations, you have a broad set of additional Interplay | Production Services options to choose from. You can add the workflows you need to get the job done, including options for capturing, copying, moving, transcoding, distributing, and archiving media. With these flexible options, you can build the environment that best suits your needs now—and add other options later as your needs and requirements evolve.

Transcoding media is a time-consuming, costly process. You need an ingest solution that minimizes the time between camera shoot to editing.

Media | Director works with Interplay | Production to orchestrate the entire process of ingesting media into production and nearline storage, enabling you to start editing without waiting for transcodes to complete. This powerful media ingest module for the Media Suite works with all AMA (Avid Media Access) supported file-based media formats when connected to ISIS or third-party storage. Ideal for reality TV, broadcast news, and other productions that command high volumes of footage, Media | Director eliminates manual prep work, enabling you to accelerate project turnaround time, lower production costs, and streamline your workflow.

Production is growing increasingly global, with volumes of media stored locally and remotely across multiple facilities. Editors in one facility often need to access material stored in another location.

Media | Index is a media search module for the Media Suite that accelerates and extends file search across multiple Interplay | Production systems—regardless of where the media is stored. It removes the complexities normally associated with remote access, enabling teams to search for, preview, and move assets collaboratively, whether the media is located in your facility or spread across facilities around the world. Its optimized, high-performance engine improves efficiency, enabling you to pinpoint the material you need fast and gain more time to create higher quality, more compelling content.

Production requirements can be hard to anticipate—they can change rapidly, often in the middle of a project. It’s crucial to have a production asset management solution that is easily scalable, so you can adapt quickly to changing demands and produce high-quality, timely media.

Whether you operate in a large enterprise facility with hundreds of users, or a smaller facility, Interplay | Production can be scaled as needed to accommodate any workgroup size. When used in conjunction with ISIS shared storage, up to 330 contributors can connect and collaborate concurrently. In addition, multiple systems can be connected together across the facility—or across long distances.

In today’s industry, collaboration is essential. In order to accelerate the creation and production processes, media professionals need workflows that enable them to connect with others across multiple rooms, facilities, and time zones.

Our cloud-based video production and storage solutions centered on Interplay | Interplay | Production and ISIS workflows enable editors, producers, loggers, and journalists to upload, access, edit, share, log, track, and sync media and projects in real time—anywhere in the world. When you combine these solutions with Media Composer | Cloud (formerly Interplay Sphere), you can take media production everywhere.

Audiences are consuming media on more screens and devices than ever before, so it’s important for broadcasters and media organizations to leverage technology to distribute finished content to multiple platforms quickly and efficiently. By connecting Media | Distribute (formerly Interplay Pulse), a media distribution module for the Media Suite, to your platform, you can automate and streamline publication to the web, mobile devices, and social channels, making multiplatform distribution faster and more intuitive than ever.