 "MWRM In Broadcast Can Provide Up To 60% Total Time And Cost Savings")
Video transmissions have changed dramatically over the last decade. From what was once a closeted in-home experience, it has transformed into an on-demand anywhere-anytime-anything application that occupies considerable real time in our lives through our Smart TVs, computers, mobile phones, and innumerable portable gadgets. This has had wide reaching implications for the media industry in terms of technology as well as commerce.
An average broadcaster today has to balance two contrasting realities to make business work profitably. One is transitioning to digital, tapeless, file-based and IP workflows – simultaneously or in lock-step with each other – and the other is to manage the business side and make content available for a variety of screens, device types, and networks, on-demand and anywhere. These two imperatives are seemingly disparate, yet highly intertwined.
Due to limited budget and resources, companies focus on specific solutions that help them manage immediate needs and tackle one problem at a time. In doing so these companies solve a tactical challenge; however, they add more complexity and miss the strategic business necessity.
Frost & Sullivan, in its recent Market Insight titled Media Workflow and Resource Management: A New Roadmap to Revenue Growth and Reduced Complexity found that many broadcasting companies have implemented media asset management (MAM) to manage content assets within a highly collaborative production workflow, facilitate content discovery and production, and in doing so have experienced tangible benefits. Yet, the benefits of MAM are limited and its value proposition is much more magnified and holistic when it is part of a more encompassing solution such as a Media Workflow and Resource Management (MWRM) platform. A MWRM platform not only includes the critical MAM component, but extends its capabilities far beyond to integrate a wider ecosystem of internal and external stakeholders and multiple business processes for a broadcast enterprise.
Frost & Sullivan finds that MWRM can help broadcast programmers gain as much as 60 percent savings in time and cost, increase the number of avenues for video distribution with little or no additional cost and alleviate the day-to-day pain of departmental disconnect, resource delays, and avoid duplication of effort through the system.
Using a hybrid-cloud ecosystem, MWRM can promote collaboration among internal creative departments that execute production of the content and its play-out, as well as facilitate integration with external content suppliers. Internally it can extend towards billing and contract management systems while bringing in a widget based customisable dashboard that would also provide visibility to programming analytics. Such an end-to-end platform mitigates the risk of common and rampant operational inefficiencies, redundancies in process, duplication of effort, slip-ups in quality check (QC) and lack of information in the value chain.
Benefits of MWRM:
Promotes collaboration
Accelerates production with its streamlined workflow
Increases resource optimisation and operational efficiencies of an organisation
Provides a content company full control of end-to-end asset transformation – from creation to distribution to monetisation.
“Broadcast content companies today are ready to step out of their incumbent comfort zone of linear programming and are busy trying to carve out a digital strategy that empowers them to pursue strategic growth by marrying business, process and asset efficiencies with technology for success, say the authors Mukul Krishna, Senior Global Director and Vidya Nath, Research Director, Information & Communication Technologies Practice, Frost & Sullivan. Media companies now have fewer hurdles with MWRM than before as it helps to think around ‘What do I do with my video library’ to the thought process ‘How can I make more money from my video assets.”
“Many media companies today realise the benefits of content management solutions, yet are shy of investing in these. User confusion, home-grown legacy solutions and a fragmented market makes it difficult and challenging for companies to switch solutions, making it highly unviable in the long run. What the industry needs is enterprise-scale integration and a collaboration platform that is highly flexible, scalable, and reliable and secure, with broad network access, encompassing multiple user interfaces and, importantly, which can be measured as a service. MWRM promises to be all of the above,” concludes Krishna.
MWRM can be a powerful and effective tool for small, medium or large content organisations alike and help them better manage and future proof against constantly changing market and consumer demand. It allows an organisation to channelise its efforts towards creating new business models around applications such as video-on-demand, multi-screen delivery, and ‘TV Everywhere’ distribution. This opens new avenues for revenue such as targeted advertising, pay-per-use, or subscriptions. Being highly flexible it assuages the challenges of conforming to multiple standards across multiple media networks. Internally at an organisational level, it goes beyond MAM to connect the creative, legal, operations, marketing, and distribution functions, putting content at the centre of the enterprise.