Continuing my thoughts from attending NAB earlier this month, digital asset management continues to increase in relevance as media companies face challenges for distributing content across multiple channels. My business alma mater, HP, entered the space with its acquisition of Autonomy. The Autonomy Virage MediaBin is force to be reckoned with. I was intrigued by the demo as it automatically generated metadata from the audio and video that was playing. This key feature allows users to reduce time-consuming asset tagging and focus on defining unique metadata to simplify future asset retrieval.

Like other vendors such as OpenText or North Plains, HP's asset management solutions focus on enabling creative teams to develop, manage and deliver engaging content using video, audio, images and text. And, of course they want to do it quickly and easily. The incremental value provided by HP comes from the Autonomy Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL). IDOL not only extracts key concepts to facilitate asset tagging, it also cross references assets with other forms of relevant data. This includes asset elements such as topics discussed, speaker/artist identity and gender or emotions contained within the conversation. Therefore assets are ingested and stored with a greater range of tagging and metadata, simplifying future access for creation of news stories, ad campaigns or marketing programs. 

Seeing is believing and in watching the demo, I could see how “smart” this solution is. The auto-tagging capability was mesmerizing to watch. Broadcast media, as well as advertising and publishing companies, face increasing challenges when it comes to ingesting, storing and retrieving assets to create on-air, print, online or mobile app content – all with to goal of monetization. Managing workflow is a baseline requirement with asset search and retrieval as a critical element.  As the saying goes garbage in = garbage out.  HP Autonomy may actually be figuring out how to dispose of the garbage and simplify asset management.

What's your perspective?