digital asset protection feature
Business process graphical designer enabling full content tracking.
The answer is that responsible facilities have to provide a certified audit trail of where the material goes and who accesses it. Even viewing material in the machine room is a risk - who knows what is plugged into the feed on the jackfield - so every access must be noted and recorded.
Some talk about watermarking and similar solutions as the protection for content during production. In fact it provides no protection at all: it just shows, after the fact, where the leak occurs. Having to sign digital content out against a personal log-in identity which is entered into the audit trail will at least give the casual pirate, or the tempted freelancer, pause for thought. Transport services from companies like Signiant can move the material securely from place to place. But if you are serious about tracking your stewardship of the material you should be compiling an audit trail which involves recording the security settings when you hand the material over & receive it at the remote site. The best place to maintain that audit trail is along with all the rest of the metadata which is associated with the content. A good asset management system will allow you to add this information, automatically when you can, to build up a complete picture not just of what the material contains but where it has been and which individuals have viewed or worked on it.
Distribution
As the piece of content is completed and moves into distribution, so the same asset management system will once again be tracking the information required to manage its protection. Again, security is as critical an issue as operational convenience.
It is common, for example, for broadcasters today to outsource their playout to specialist centres. Each facility will be providing playout services for a large number of broadcast channels, some of which may be in direct competition. It is important that the operator can demonstrate that content is secure when under its care, by demonstrating through the audit trail who has accessed it and why.
Those playout facilities depend upon a high degree of automation, ensuring that content is
moved from ingest to playout to online distribution to other delivery platforms as smoothly and seamlessly as possible. That can be achieved with a rules-based system, which depends upon the right metadata being stored alongside the content.
It is widely reported that the biggest reason for content to be rejected by the iTunes Store is because of errors in the XML metadata rather than anything to do with the media itself. To be able to automatically generate successful packages for Apple, Amazon and others depends on the right information being entered and tracked through the asset management system, which in turn will ensure the correct content protection is added to the right encoding.
Good management
The conclusion, then, is that implementing the right content protection technologies at each stage of the process is just one part of the challenge. It is equally important to know what you have done to keep track of previous accesses and to use intelligent metadata to drive future processes.
That puts the media asset management system in a new light. It is a vital tool in the tracking and securing of content. At TMD we have implemented Mediaflex, our content management solution, for major broadcasters and producers around the world.
At Discovery Communications, for example, Mediaflex tracks tens of thousands of pieces of content moving at any time through the production centre at Silver Spring in the US. Every time something is used the log-on details are added to the metadata, so the security team has a complete picture of who has had access - and everyone knows this, contributing greatly to the drive for protection.
So my message is that it is right that the creators and backers of content should earn a fair reward for their efforts, and that content protection technology is the best way we currently have to achieve that. But protection needs to be seen to be done, which means using good asset management techniques to track it from camera to screen - or rather multiple screens and multiple formats.
www.ibeweb.com l january/february 2011 l ibe l 35
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44