A Media Asset Management (MAM) system isn’t just software. It’s the central nervous system of your entire content operation.
And yet, the industry is full of expensive MAM deployments that never live up to expectations. Systems that go unused. Libraries that can’t be searched. Cloud bills that are spiraling out of control.
Why does this keep happening?
In most cases, it’s not because the software is bad. It’s because organizations buy features instead of planning for how media actually moves, gets used, and gets supported day to day. They stitch together storage from one vendor, software from another, and cloud hosting from a third. When something breaks, no one owns the problem and your content stays stuck.
Before you sign a contract that locks your media library into a proprietary ecosystem, ask these ten questions to understand whether you’re buying a long-term solution or inheriting a long-term problem.
1. Do you have a Taxonomy strategy, or just a folder structure?
The oldest rule in data management is “Garbage in, Garbage out,” and it applies more to MAM more than any other system.
If you don’t define metadata rules before ingest, search will break the moment your library scales. Many teams confuse file naming with taxonomy. File names help people browse. Taxonomy allows systems, automation, and AI to work.
Without a strategy, teams fall into the “folder trap,” relying on deep folder trees that become brittle and impossible to maintain.
Critical Risks:
- The Silo Effect: Editorial, Marketing, and Archive teams often use different naming conventions (e.g., “Interview” vs. “INT”), making cross-department search impossible.
- Governance Failures: Metadata fields created without rules lead to duplicate values and “dirty” data.
- The Retro-Tagging Tax: Defining taxonomy after ingestion forces expensive, massive remediation projects down the road.
The BMG Approach: Define a business taxonomy before ingest. At BMG, this often starts with a Media Asset Management Consultation Assessment so structure is locked before the first file enters the system.
2. What is the real cost of “Cloud Egress” in your workflow?
Storing content in the cloud is cheap. Moving it back down to edit is expensive. Cloud pricing models are optimized for static storage, not the high-frequency, high-res downloads required by video production.
Finance teams often hate usage-based bills that vary month to month. A sudden crunch period, a product launch, or a reversioning cycle can cause egress bills to spike unpredictably, sometimes consuming up to 50% of your total cloud spend.
Operational Reality:
- The Hidden Cost: Editors unknowingly trigger massive charges when pulling camera originals locally to edit.
- Latency: Cold or Archive storage tiers may save cash, but they introduce hours of retrieval latency that can break production timelines.
- The Bill: For high-volume streaming and production workflows, egress fees can constitute up to 50% of total cloud spend.
Mitigation: Look for Managed Media Asset Management Solutions that use proxy-first workflows or hybrid architectures, keeping active, high-resolution media on-premises while leveraging the cloud for scale.
3. Who manages the system at 3:00 AM? (Support vs. Managed Services)
There is a fundamental difference between “Support” and “Managed Services.” Software vendors sell Tickets; Broadcast Managed Service Providers (MSPs) sell Uptime.
If your ingest fails at 3:00 AM, a vendor support contract typically means you can file a ticket and wait for a callback. A Managed Service provider, however, should proactively monitor storage I/O, transcode queues, and recorder status.
The NOC Value: BMG’s Network Operations Center (NOC) monitors the health of the entire ecosystem. We detect if a drive is failing or a license server is down before the user reports it. Broadcasters need operational continuity, not just software availability.
4. Is the AI tagging actually useful, or just a demo trick?
Artificial Intelligence is the current buzzword in Media Asset Management (MAM), but you must distinguish between “Demo AI” and “Production AI.” Generic models that auto-tag “person,” “tree,” or “microphone” are impressive in a sales demo but useless to an editor searching for “The B-Roll from the Q3 Town Hall.”
The Context Gap:
- Generic vs. Specific: Unless the AI is trained on your specific executives, your products, and your internal terminology, it produces metadata noise, not insight.
- Context Blindness: AI struggles to understand the reason a shot exists. It sees “people shaking hands,” not “Merger Agreement Sealed.”
Best Practice: AI should augment a human librarian’s rules to ensure metadata consistency, but it cannot replace the business context provided by a structured taxonomy.
5. How does it handle “Remote Editing” (Proxy Workflows)?
In a hybrid work environment, your Enterprise Video Operations must support editors working from home or satellite offices. The critical metric here is frame accuracy.
Common Pitfalls:
- Conform Errors: If proxies aren’t frame-accurate, relinking to high-res media in the conform phase will result in slipped edits and sync issues.
- VPN Latency: Editing high-res media over a standard VPN is notoriously unstable.
- Speed: Proxies must be generated and available instantly upon ingest, not stuck in an overnight batch queue.
Tight integration with NLEs like Adobe Premiere and Avid is non-negotiable. If the proxy workflow forces editors to jump through hoops, they will bypass the Media Asset Management entirely.
6. What is the “Exit Strategy”? (Vendor Lock-in)
The most dangerous cost in Media Asset Management is the one you don’t see until you try to leave. If you ingest 5 Petabytes of data into a proprietary database or storage format, how much will it cost to get it out?
Industry data suggests migration costs can exceed 30% of annual cloud spend due to egress fees and re-engineering.
Ask These Questions:
- Do we own the sidecar XML files?
- Is the metadata stored in an open format (JSON/XML) or a proprietary SQL database?
- Does the vendor offer a clear offboarding process?
If the answers aren’t clear, that’s a red flag.
7. Who creates and enforces the “Ingest Rules”?
A MAM without a gatekeeper quickly becomes a digital landfill. If users can drag-and-drop files named Sequence_FINAL_v2_REAL.mov into the root directory, your search strategy is already dead.
The Role of the Librarian: Automation is powerful, but automated ingest without Quality Control (QC) simply accelerates chaos. You need enforced rules for naming conventions, mandatory metadata fields, and codec standards. Whether this is an internal “Librarian” or a BMG
Managed Operator, human oversight is the only way to ensure metadata accuracy at the point of entry.
8. Does it integrate with your Single Sign-On (SSO) and Security stacks?
You might love the interface, but if the system doesn’t play nice with Active Directory or Okta, your IT Director will kill the project.
Security Non-Negotiables:
- SSO Integration: IT teams require centralized user management.
- MFA: Multi-Factor Authentication is mandatory for remote access and privileged roles.
- Audit Logs: You must be able to trace every download, view, and deletion for compliance and incident response.
A MAM that attempts to bypass Enterprise Security Standards will rarely survive the procurement review process.
9. How user-friendly is the interface for “Non-Editors”?
Editors aren’t the only users. Marketing, Sales, and Legal teams need to find clips, too. If the interface is too complex, these users will revert to emailing editors for “favors,” defeating the purpose of a self-service library.
Adoption is Key:
- Intuitive Search: Can a sales rep find a clip using Google-like terms?
- One-Click Actions: Can they preview, download, or share a link without opening an editing timeline?
If the UI fails the “Non-Editor Test,” your adoption rates will flatline.
10. Are you piecing together vendors, or buying an End-to-End Solution?
The biggest operational risk in Media Asset Management is integration. When the storage fills up, the database locks, or the server crashes, is it a “Hardware Problem,” a “Software Problem,” or a “Network Problem”? In a multi-vendor environment, you will spend weeks coordinating calls between them while your system stays down.
The BMG Managed Advantage: We provide an End-to-End Solution. BMG supplies the Hardware (Servers/Storage), the Software (MAM), and the Staffing to run it.
- Single Point of Accountability: One phone call resolves issues across the entire stack.
- Holistic Capacity Planning: We manage storage growth, compute power, and network throughput as a single ecosystem.
- Turnkey Operations: We install, configure, and maintain the physical gear alongside the application layer.
Technology is only part of the equation. Most MAM failures aren’t technical. They’re operational.
Successful systems are built around process, people, and integrated infrastructure that supports media from ingest to archive, day after day.
Before you buy software, make sure you’re partnering with a team that understands how media actually lives and moves.
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