Multimedia components vs SDL media Manager or any other video hosting tool

Question

I want to understand advantages of using either SDL Media Manager or any other DAM solution over using multimedia components in SDL Tridion

1. Business editor can add required video files in CMS Multimedia component and can publish it to CDS side.
2. This comes with Versioning mechanism (SDL Tridion component versioning)
3. Publishing size of multimedia asset is configurable in configuration file.

What all other advantages DAM or SDL Media manager provides? What are the key factors that should consider while using SDL Media manager or any other DAM solution?

Answer 1

I see three main advantages in using the combination of using SDL Tridion and SDL Media Manager:

1. Media Manager distributes assets to a CDN out of the box. This gives good reliability if you have a global audience. Tridion does not offer CDN functionality out of the box, although it is of course perfectly possible to architect and build a similar solution by using only SDL Tridion.
2. Media Manager offers good video players and tools for rendering videos and for instance integration with video and subtitles, where Tridion does not.
3. Offloading binary assets through Media Manager means that requests for binaries to your Tridion website will not be passing through your web application. This greatly reduces load on your Tridion powered web servers.

Further considerations:

• Tridion's Blueprinting model and versioning model is hard to integrate with any DAM. This means that a lot of thought has to be given to the Localization strategy: how will you deal with translated content? For example, in Media Manager it is possible to fetch assets in a distribution based on labels. This can be tied to localized Tridion Components, but cannot be done out of the box.
• Combined the point above and barring any deeper functional integration between Tridion and Media Manager, you will always have editors working in two different environments, with each their own quirks. In that sense, of any DAM and at this point in time, the Media Manager solution is the most intergrated option.

Answer 2

Media Manager offers the ability to separate your concerns as discretely with a video as you could with web content.

In particular, Media Manager allows you to separate the raw asset from a collection of assets, and the presentation of those assets as well. It's along the lines of Component:Asset :: Page:Program :: Template:Outlet

This is invaluable in a video production workflow because it means that video producers don't need to worry about skinning a player. And because the program allows you to add, edit, and remove audio and subtitle tracks, it means that the video producer isn't concerned with translation tracks, either.

Media Manager probably isn't unique that it can deliver a video solution for all modern browsers and

A key factor that I believe deserves consideration is whether you will have a need to manage multilingual video content now, or in the future. If you will, Media Manager will be just about the best video solution you could use, on account of its ability to separate the concerns.

Answer 3

I'd suggest the key factors are business reasons and finding a good fit for a given organization. Mainly, an organization might consider SDL Media Manager if:

• Benefits of a "cloud solution." It wants the ability to start at any size and scale both on the media management and distribution sides.
• It already has other SDL software (like Tridion) -- notice we have Media Manager distributions on SDL Live Content, SDL.com, etc.
• Wants media management capabilities, but prefers not having to own all of the details (current media formats/encoding/resolutions, subtitles, channels, social media platforms, etc.)
• Media is important to the organization and/or it struggles with the time-intensive parts of media management (captions, file formats or encoding, browsers, making changes after publishing, etc.)

SDL Tridion treats Multimedia Components as containers for binaries where you have the flexibility to handle the hosting, application maintenance, and markup however you want. It's perfectly capable of handling media for the Web in the form of videos, images, audio, and downloads.

I'd say SDL Media Manager complements Web Content Management, especially when you need "richer" experiences, with the following advantages:

• As Frank describes, it comes with an already-built content model. Out-of-the-box you get types of media, fields, and even presentation. And like Tridion, Media Manager has its own web service for interacting with this content model programmatically.
• Delivery is on a CDN as Raimond mentioned
• Uploading items gets you automatic encoding (converted and sized) for Web, Mobile, and HD resolutions
• Client-side interaction is managed with client-side code (HTML, JavaScript, and styles). In this sense maybe it's not better, but just different from "typical" Tridion templating approaches and APIs (which also include HTML, but focus more on Web Application logic, Java/.NET, etc.).

Finally, Media Manager is more of a Media Asset Management than a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. DAMs tend to help manage the raw source files and creation of media assets, but they don't always have publishing or distribution capabilities (this is where External Content Libraries lets Tridion compliment DAM systems). Media Manager adds delivery and distribution as a managed service.