In an environment where ‘content is king’, monetisation of every possible channel is critical to business success

searching, shot-listing, rights verification, editing, finishing, review and approval, playout management.

• Workflow Management. Since the platform serves a business purpose, it must provide the capabilities to build workflows customised to specific business needs.

• Standardised and Open Services. The Integrated Media Enterprise will not be a single monolithic solution built around products from a single manufacturer. Instead, it is a flexible solution allowing multiple vendors to integrate components together.

The Integrated Media Enterprise in practice

The IME provides a valuable framework for a more efficient workflow across production and distribution. But how are the elements that IME brings together used in practice across the various sectors of our industry?

Impact on news

Since news happens 24 hours a day, consumer expectations for up- to-the-minute coverage have created fierce competition among news organisations to be the first to break and update stories. This has shifted the focus from scheduled television news bulletins to a ‘web-led’ strategy. As a result, new sources have been introduced into the process, from search engines, news aggregators, and citizen journalists to social networking. As technology evolves, new delivery channels and video formats will be necessary, requiring news organisations to adapt quickly to new technology and deploy it without having to continually rebuild their facilities.

The Integrated Media Enterprise helps News organisations in several ways: • Integration of broadcast news and web content which provides a single platform for news acquisition, story development, story repurposing, and rapid collaboration between all staff.

• Geographical integration. Larger organisations have multiple production teams in different cities and countries. A unified framework provides efficiency and responsiveness by enabling task distribution and story sharing across the whole organisation.

• Archive repurposing. News gathering is an expensive process. An effectively managed and quickly retrievable archive enables stories to be created and enriched using assets from the archive, reducing overall programme costs. New web outlets in particular can quickly assemble rich background material on a story to drive traffic and improve audience retention.

Impact on sport

The explosion of pay sport channels and impact of major events like the Olympics and the Fifa World Cup have made sport a major driver of broadcast revenue and growth. Sport content owners possess archives of valuable assets with enormous monetisation potential. The Integrated

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Media Enterprise platform can enable them to easily identify and assess the value of these assets, integrate operations to enable different groups to monetise this content, monetisation a reality.

Impact on content owners

In an environment where ‘content is king’, monetisation of every possible channel is critical to business success. Content creators and owners are assessing how they can not only find their unique content niche, but effectively exploit it.

The ability to publish content through multiple channels simultaneously in the right format, with the right metadata, is the primary value an Integrated Media Enterprise offers content owners, allowing them to meet new business opportunities as they arise with minimal effort and incremental cost.

Impact on post facilities

Post facilities with many additional services in content management can now use the same Integrated Media Enterprise framework to deliver these services. Critical to this process is the decoupling of the physical setting and the user. No longer do clients need to come into the post facility to do their work. Cloud based services allow post facilities to not only deliver their services to customers anywhere, but engage the best talent to post-produce the content independent of where it is located.

Conclusion

Broadcasters, post facilities, content owners, and content creators are all asking the same questions. How do I reorganise my facilities, my technology, my workflow, and my business model to meet new and future challenges? In an environment of radical change, the answer no longer lies in a single product from a single company. The answer lies in the creation of an Integrated Media Enterprise that provides the ability to get a clear picture of what assets are available, what rights are associated with each asset, what those assets are worth, the proficiency to promote collaboration across the entire enterprise, and the capacity to rapidly respond to new business opportunities.

Adopting the Integrated Media Enterprise framework provides organisations with the flexibility and responsiveness to tackle not only today’s most pressing business challenges, but any future challenge or opportunity that comes their way.

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