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Getting the best digital media management solution means getting the solution you need—not one that’s built for someone else’s business. To meet businesses’ varying requirements, the solution needs to be flexible: the applications and services must be built on an architecture that provides the best technologies available, and that can easily integrate with complementary technologies as well as a business’s existing systems.
Through a combination of service-oriented architecture, web services, and application programming interfaces (APIs), content providers, broadband media sites, and mobile businesses can take advantage of interoperable services that meet their business model’s requirements. These “open” technologies provide the most thorough, efficient way of managing, publishing, and getting revenue from their media now and in the future.
Use what you’ve already got
Companies who have existing systems for managing their digital media don’t want to gut their investments and start over. Ideally, the resources you’re already using should be part of the framework to which you can add new systems that will help build your business. The easiest way to get new tools into this framework is to add applications that are built to integrate with others via open methods. Using APIs, you can import metadata automatically from a digital asset management system, validate consumers against a customer resource management system, and publish video players with a web site content management system. So keep what you’ve already spent your resources on, and simply add new tools as you need them.
Add the best technologies available
When adding new digital media publishing tools, you not only need services that integrate with existing systems; new tools should also provide bridges to other technologies your business may need down the road. Vendors who focus on a specific area of expertise can give you tools that deliver richer functionality when they’re integrated with an open system. For example, it’s much easier to integrate with content delivery networks (CDNs) like Akamai or Limelight Networks if your publishing solution uses a server object model to distribute content. In this model, servers can be defined to refer to a web or streaming media server, an Internet CDN, or even an enterprise CDN. The server object model effectively provides “CDN independence.” You can switch CDNs by creating a server object for the new server, and moving the files to the new CDN by simply changing the server reference. All of this happens without interrupting the consumer’s access to media, giving content owners more flexibility in their business than they’d have managing their files manually via FTP.
Digital rights management (DRM) is another area where open integration is necessary for digital media businesses. DRM protects content, tracks usage, and controls how end users buy media. If your video publishing solution is open, it can easily interconnect with Windows Media DRM and other DRM tools such as Widevine’s Cypher PC to secure multimedia content. The business tools in your media publishing solution should allow you to apply the copy protection rules you require to get the most revenue out of your content, no matter what devices consumers are using.
Advertising management systems are also important to consider. If you plan to keep using your current third-party tools, your media publishing system should be able to work with leading ad campaign management systems such as DoubleClick and Lightningcast to dynamically incorporate ads into your media, or quickly adapt to the campaign management system you choose.
Keeping up with the new
To satisfy consumer desire for the newest content and the latest features, digital media businesses need to be able to add new services quickly. New technologies that help businesses keep up with consumer appetites will get to market faster when they easily link to existing complementary systems, and solutions built with web services are the ones that can most readily meet the demand.
Consumers are quickly choosing the web sites they frequent to view their broadband media, and this is a main reason that digital media syndication is growing so rapidly. Content providers syndicating their media to aggregators like broadband media sites and mobile businesses will reach their intended audiences only if their media publishing tools ease the technical bottlenecks of distribution agreements.
Tools that successfully connect content owners to distributors must be built on an architecture that allows the two parties to easily apply business rules and support a wide range of file formats. In addition, the syndication method has to be modular so it can be used for new syndication deals. Then content owners can get their media out to their audience on iTunes, MSN Video, YouTube—and the next big outlet, whatever consumers decide that will be.
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