Digital Asset Management

Preface

My interest in this subject started when I joined the broadcast equipment manufacturer, Chyron. For a few years I was the product manager for their playout automation and asset management product lines. These were one of the first applications that gave television broadcasters the means to manage the ingest, storage, archiving, and play-out of programmes and commercials using the video servers that had just been introduced. The use of video compression, and the availability of high capacity disk drives, meant that the server had become a viable replacement for videotape.

Before that time, television programming had been broadcast from a combination of automated videocassette libraries (usually referred to as cart machines) and manually ...