System design for digital media asset management

Client-sewer computing is only now able to deliver genuine gains to broadcasters, publishers, creative agencies and production facilities. Media-centric industries revolve around media content, poorly served by relational DBMS technology These new users are entering the distributed computing domain just as media object technologies and commercial broadband services emerge from infancy. This paper dicusses the complex process of decisionmaking and system design for digital media asset management. The Cinebase Digital Media Management System will be described and used to illustrate critical points. Digital media server architecture must accommodate extremely large datasets, scaleable content retrieval and rapid network query response. Cinebase installations are currently in place containing 100s of Terabytes of media content, and 100s of local and remote users. Cinebase has recently been ported to ObjectStore by Object Design Inc (ODI). The presentation will discuss how, in combination, the Cinebase application and ODI extensions can be used to deliver a complete object management environment for production-quality content. US and European users include The Discovery Channel, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and ARKive, an initiative of the Wildscreen Trust to preserve film, video and image content on endangered species, delivering broadcast-quality content to film-makers, broadcasters and museums, and streaming Web content to schools. Wide area ATM OC-3 communities of interest, such as Sohonet and BT's MediaNet, enable organisations to collaborate in a supply chain or capture new channels for sale of digital media assets. Examples of these new workflows, and the technical issues complex networks raise for database architecture, will also be discussed.