Show Report: Video Processing Critical to Digital Asset Management

Dan Marshall mugshotGreetings 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.

Vancouver Olympics Streaming Brings New Meaning to Live Event Viewing

tickets to OlympicsIt's been a long, but worthwhile, wait since the last Olympic Winter Games.
I think this year is especially exciting due to how far we've come technologically in just the last four years, let alone since I was a kid.

I remember bending rabbit ears on my 7" TV, picking up a fuzzy CTV Broadcast of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.  Being a young hockey player and skier, I was addicted to the Winter Olympics from that moment on, and I've watched every Olympics since. 

The evolution of media delivery and consumption over that period is really remarkable, and the Vancouver games will bring more options than ever for tuning in. In the US, NBC has gone to an all-HD production for the first time.  They will be broadcasting 835 hours of content on their network.  In addition, they will be live streaming about half of that over the Internet, and providing video-on-demand replays of over 1,000 hours of events. NBC is teaming up with Microsoft to present the online streams using Smooth Streaming technology and Silverlight players, which presents an amazing step forward in video quality.

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