What is Video Asset Management? | Video Asset Management: Digital Asset Management Explained | Shade

With the rise of digital video content, it has become increasingly important for organizations to be able to manage and distribute their video assets effectively.

Video asset management (VAM) is a process used by organizations to manage their video content by organizing, storing, and distributing digital video files in a secure and efficient way. VAM enables businesses to create, manage, and share video content across different platforms and devices, while ensuring quality, compliance, and accessibility. VAM systems do this by providing features such as metadata tagging, asset search and retrieval, and access control.

VAM is different from traditional digital asset management (DAM) systems, which are designed to handle static media files such as images, documents, and audio. Video files are more complex and dynamic, requiring more storage space, bandwidth, and processing power. VAM systems are specialized to handle the challenges of video production and distribution, such as transcoding, streaming, metadata extraction, captioning, and analytics.

Keep reading to explore how VAM works, why it is so important, and learn about some of the best video asset management systems out there.

Why is Video Asset Management important?

Video Asset Management is essential because it enables businesses to leverage the full potential of video content. With VAM, organizations can:

1. Improve Efficiency: By centralizing all video content in one place, VAM makes eliminates the need to search for videos on multiple devices or cloud services, saving time and effort. This makes it easier for teams to manage and collaborate on projects, and leads to improved efficiency and productivity.
2. Streamline Workflow: Video asset management systems provide tools that can automate tasks such as transcoding, video editing, and metadata tagging. This helps streamline workflows, reduce manual labor, and increase efficiency. VAM systems typically include tools for searching and tagging videos based on keywords, metadata, and other relevant information. This makes it easier for team members to quickly find the videos they need, without having to manually sift through a large library of videos.
3. Enhance Collaboration: VAM solutions provide collaboration tools that enable teams to work together seamlessly, regardless of their location thanks to the centralized storage aspect. They typically include version control features, which help to ensure that team members are working on the correct version of a video. This can help to prevent confusion and errors, and ensure that all team members are working towards the same goal.
4. Reduce Costs: With VAM, businesses can reduce the costs associated with storing and managing large volumes of video data. VAM solutions make it easier to reuse existing videos for new projects. This can help to reduce the need for creating new videos from scratch, which can be time-consuming and expensive. By using a video asset manager, businesses also eliminate the costs associated with manual labor and travel.
5. Ensure Security: VAM solutions provide robust security features that ensure video content is protected against unauthorized access, theft, or loss. These systems typically provide access controls, which allow businesses to control who can access their video content. They can also encrypt video content during transmission and storage. This can help to prevent unauthorized access and ensure that video content is only viewed by authorized personnel. This is especially important for businesses that deal with sensitive or confidential video content.

How does Video Asset Management work?

Video Asset Management involves several steps, including:

1. Ingestion: Ingestion is the process of uploading video content to the VAM system. During this process, the VAM system automatically generates metadata that describes the video content. This metadata can include information such as the video title, description, keywords, and other relevant information. The metadata helps businesses to organize their video content, making it easier to search, retrieve, and manage.
2. Cataloging: Cataloging involves creating a catalog of all video content stored in the VAM system. This catalog makes it easier for businesses to search and retrieve their video content. The catalog can include various search criteria, such as the video title, description, keywords, date, and other relevant information.
3. Storage: VAM systems store video content in a centralized location, making it easy to access from anywhere. The storage can be on-premise or cloud-based, depending on the needs of the business. Centralized storage reduces the need for local storage and enables team members to access video content from anywhere with an internet connection.
4. Distribution: VAM solutions provide tools for distributing video content to different channels, including social media, websites, and mobile apps. The distribution tools can help businesses to reach a wider audience and improve the effectiveness of their video marketing campaigns. VAM systems can also provide tracking and reporting tools to help businesses measure the success of their video content across different channels.
5. Analytics: VAM solutions provide analytics tools that help businesses track the performance of their video content and optimize their strategies. These tools can provide insights into metrics such as views, engagement, and conversion rates. The analytics tools can help businesses to identify what is working and what is not working with their video content, enabling them to make data-driven decisions to improve their video marketing strategies.

Choosing an Asset Manager

Video asset management is applicable to a wide range of industries and businesses, including media and entertainment, marketing and advertising, corporate communications, education, and even government. Overall, video asset management can be used by any business or organization that creates, manages, and distributes video content as part of their operations. As the demand for video content continues to grow, VAM will become increasingly important for businesses looking to leverage the full potential of video.

That being said, video asset management is especially big in the media and entertainment industry right now. It plays a crucial role in organizing, storing, and sharing digital assets among artists and departments. With the growing complexity of assets, studios require more than just a simple file management system and choosing the right asset manager can save significant time and money.

At Shade, we provide a comprehensive digital asset management solution that addresses scalability, customization, security, accessibility, support, and more. We’ve put some serious thought into building a “studio-caliber” system and we’d love to get your feedback on it.

If you’re interested, check out this notion document here or chat with us here!