Bill and Ted´s vision of a new world order [media asset management]

A problem or indeed an opportunity is rapidly arising caused by the quantity of media oriented data that is, it seems exponentially increasing and circulating through the computers, storage systems and networks of all companies. Particularly relevant are those that are media/content aligned. The paper argues that the effective management of these “assets” and the effective distribution of the information to those that need to have access to it is one of the biggest challenges/opportunities that is around right now. To be able to observe and utilise these assets quickly and effectively means big savings in time and money. It also means further commercial benefit is realisable from assets where none existed before and the users of this information will find the whole process far more enjoyable which should lead to even more inventive use of the information. To efficiently manage those assets requires a system with an understanding of the myriad of data types (e.g. D1, YUV, tiff, targa, Quicktime^TM, JPEG, MPEG etc.) and their relationships with each other (e.g. are they derived from or related, do they have copyright or documentation associated etc.) The system also needs to understand the concept of `real-time´ in a video, film or audio context and be able to generate such streams to the designated workstation, output channel or desktop. This paper proposes and discusses the solutions that are available to deal with the above outlined scenarios