Effective, efficient management of all kinds of new digital content is becoming crucial for television groups and stations in the digital age. This clear, concise report addresses emerging technologies designed to capture, archive, retrieve, repurpose, and format digitally enhanced "rich" content. This publication is the first of its kind to examine the "digital assembly line" for content creation and distribution. Digital Content Management covers Media Asset Management (MAM) of the programming production processes that occur prior to distribution as well as Content Managment (CM) system that focus on the distribution process, the grooming, formatting, protecting, and tracking of digital material that is transmitted to third parties and consumers outside the protective enclosure of a digital production facility's firewall. When skillfully managed to work together, DCM technologies and systems will enable broadcasters to exploit new opportunities in the digital era and derive additional revenue from the valuable programming they now produce and will seek to expand in the DTV area. The report features detailed case studies of broadcasters, cable networks, film studios, and other organizations that utilize media asset management, content managment, or both systems in current operations. A concise summary of the emerging standards for DCM being developed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and the European Broadcasting Union and other groups is included. An entire chapter of the report is dedicated to the critically important issues involved in digital rights management (DRM), covering the basic concepts, processes and evolving standards that will be of ever-growing importance in the digital media world. Finally, Digital Content Management provides guidance on the emerging digital media world, it's software-based solutions and technologies for the creation and delivery of media content via various media platforms including multicasting, datacasting, interactive TV and content syndication to the Internet and emerging wireless networks. Also provided is a list of major system integrators, vendors and suppliers of the softward, hardware, and services to implement DCM, and influential standards groups in the DCM space.
Author: Joan Van Tassel