Greetings from Los Angeles, where the inaugural west coast DAM show kicked of yesterday at the Hilton Universal. This is the first time Elemental has participated in a conference like this. Now, why would we exhibit at a niche event more related to storage than encoding? Actually, this is an extremely interesting event for Elemental. Here’s why.

Digital asset management (DAM), in a sentence, is the capture, management and enabling of rich content. Rich content comprises video types, still imagery and compound documents, such as PowerPoint. Video types are now the largest segment of rich content under management today.

A major component of DAM is how a user processes video assets for distribution to multiple devices, and manages and tracks these assets no matter where they may end up.

Createasphere, started as HD Expo in 2001, is the organization that puts on the DAM shows (there will also be one in New York in September). The Createasphere team has done a great job and attendance has surpassed expectations. I think this is indicative of the growing need to manage digital assets, including the distribution and management of video content. This is where Elemental fits into what I refer to as the video supply chain.

The attendees I spoke with confirmed this. At some point, anybody with video has to prepare assets for distribution to multiple points, including post-production, archive infrastructure, broadcast, mobile devices and the Internet. Now, I was under the impression that this event would be attended primarily by broadcasters and content producers, but to my surprise, most of the folks I spoke with today were other companies dealing with tracking video assets and trying to monetize this content while developing strategies to reach more viewers. Providing access to content via IPTV and mobile TV distribution is pivotal to these strategies.

An example of a company with this kind of requirement is Herbalife. Herbalife produces hundreds of hours of video consisting of sales training courses, product overviews and company updates. The company wants to develop a video supply chain that makes this content available to any employee, contractor or affiliate business – anytime, anywhere. Herbalife would also like the option to stream video in certain cases, such as the "CEO's Weekly Address." Sounds like a need that could be met with Elemental’s GPU-based transcoding horsepower.

I also spoke with post-production houses, content delivery networks and studios that are trying to understand how best to monetize assets. It was interesting to note that the creation of multiple video outputs, in particular for adaptive bit rate streaming, is a huge value add for the customers of all key players in the video supply chain. Elemental's products support the creation of mutliple formats and mulitple bit rates better than any other solutions available today.

So, after day one of this new show, we’ve met some really cool companies and obtained promising contacts from a market segment that I honestly did not expect to meet. From my perspective, with so many opportunities, the challenge is identifying where Elemental best fits in the video supply chain.

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