We checked on Media Asset Management vendor Avid while at the NAB Show, since Avid Interplay MAM is one of the products we evaluate in our research. Key message is, as the title-mix suggests, not much has changed on the product side since version 4.0 was released in December, 2011. But Avid painted a vision (read: concept demos) of where they're going with the broader Interplay range and other tools for broadcasters.

A couple are worth monitoring since they could solve current broadcast pain points -- when they become available for stable deployment eventually.

Avid Interplay Sphere is a distributed content production system - meaning journalists can create, edit, and finish media assets from remote locations.  When other Avid tools begin to support the Sphere technology, you could have remote access to news room resources.

Avid's Multi Platform Delivery (MPD) technology was also previewed. All research shows that users are ditching the TV in droves and consuming content on alternate devices. This is really a make-or-break thing for broadcasters: if viewers disappear, so will advertisers too, breaking the back of broadcasters. So, naturally there is a lot of interest in following the users where they are going and serving content to them on these new devices/destinations. 

The current multi-platform delivery model in the media segment today is an after-thought and not elegant. So, Avid proposes an overarching "write once, publish many" model for video that in theory hides the complexity underneath from content creators.  It anticipates a process where journalists just use a single interface for TV, web, mobile, and social media.  In practice, there are some very tricky operational, technical and content challenges here.

Anyway, even though it's a long road from “demo to deployment,” these previews provides a rough glimpse of what you as a customer can expect to see come online in the marketplace, and perhaps use it in your own project planning.

Coming back to the present...

What’s also interesting to note is how vendors now position MAM to customers. Previously, MAM was positioned as “super software” that can completely transform the processes, systems, and operations of a media company. When it comes to  MAM, Avid now follows a more circumspect approach that focuses first on solving a particular pain point or optimizing a specific sub-process using the technology, and then perhaps expanding the scope of MAM deployment gradually. 

Probably a good thing for vendors to set more realistic expectations. If you're into anagrams, let's just say that "Avid Interplay MAM" can be rearranged to read "Am Avid, try me plain."