Digital Media Asset Management: managing and protecting rights

The first article in this series described the move towards all-digital media and the systems that produce, manage and distribute them, enabling all media to be stored on computer media. But to be able to find what you're looking for in a mass of digital data, you need to set up Digital Media Asset Management, or DMAM (or simply MAM, or DMM), i.e. the management of digital audio, photo and video media. To achieve this, additional data, or metadata, is associated with the data representing the sounds or images, to identify them and describe both the content and the container (format). Digital media can then be managed throughout a digital production-distribution chain, the functions of which have already been presented in , figure A .

For abbreviations and acronyms, please refer to the following sections .