Success requires managing assets across the entire content value chain
May 22, 2007 1:00 PM
IPTVU: Isn’t the essence of what drives this end-to-end media management the availability of metadata?
CL: It’s all about how we extract and deal with the metadata that’s created during the entire production process. How do we deal with the low- and high-resolution content that’s created? How do we get a clear view of the media or provide media asset management across all of the content that’s created?
Some of that content will be stored in a traditional video storage system, but the high-resolution content companies may choose to store in an Oracle database or just have it cached. Either way, the main point is to get a view of that content. The business benefit is you have a complete transparent view of 100 percent of content in the product catalog. Then providers can start to look at how they can exploit that and truly begin to optimize what they have.
Of course, the next issue stemming from that is intellectual property management.
IPTV: Could you please elaborate?
CL: Intellectual property management is going to be a huge area over the next couple of years. Certainly working with the telcos and the communications companies in general, that is something they really have not thought about as much as they should.
I think stories in the media like Viacom suing Google is certainly bringing that issue to life.
We are working with Sophoi, an intellectual property management software provider, to help broadcasters exploit their content and get them to the stage of saying, “Not only do I have a clear view of all the assets I have in my catalog, but I also have a solid understanding of the various rights associated with them. Where, when and how they can be sold.” Then broadcasters can begin to make business decisions about what is the best way to distribute and sell content. That is a Holy Grail for broadcasters and media companies in general.
IPTV: How is Oracle specifically approaching the IPTV market?
CL: Regarding the telcos, we have a service delivery platform (SDP) geared very much toward telecom companies. One of our customers is Telenor, the largest telecommunications operator in Norway. We’ve helped Telenor develop, map and distribute content.
Typically, the situation is that they’ve bought up rights from studios, production companies, etc., and they want to be able to distribute their content over their pipes to their customers.
We help them do that by providing the asset management system. A critical advantage of doing that is solving one of the main problems telecommunications companies have had, namely the length of time it’s taken to develop new services. That’s something our SDP is very much designed to help with. It can drastically reduce the time needed to develop and deploy new services.
Traditionally, telcos have bought up content rights and have acted as a distribution pipe. In terms of the intellectual property rights, they have to pay a sum of money to the content owner, and that’s pretty much it for the financial transaction.
The next step is where telecommunications companies want to become content players in their own right, and that’s where they buy up exclusive rights to be able to distribute content across a number of channels. Suddenly, they become responsible for administering the royalties for that content, which can be a huge headache for everyone, but particularly for new incumbents like telecommunications companies that are not experienced in this area.
So they will be faced with the need to administer and manage highly complex, differentiated content from diverse content providers with very specific requirements depending on the type of channel.
That’s where it becomes extremely complex, and that’s where they need a solution like Sophoi. So what we offer for the telecommunications companies is this: Our Service Delivery Platform, which is based on our flexible architecture philosophy, enables them to manage and distribute content and deploy services pretty quickly. The next phase of that is to start adding applications like intellectual property management via Sophoi so that they are able intelligently to start slicing and dicing that content for particular channels and demographics. That’s where the technology becomes a facilitator of new business models — rather than being something that restricts those — which has been the case with some up until now.
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