Cantemo Portal™ is a media asset management solution, targeted at managing processes surrounding the ingestion, annotation, cataloging, collaboration, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets. The main strength of the product is the support for processing audio, video, and image files, however it is designed to manage essentially all file formats. Typical use cases for Cantemo Portal™ include basic post production management, archive front end, distribution and sharing platform, advertising, and news gathering. Historically they have partnered with Vidispine where deeper MAM functionality has been required.

ARCHITECTURE: Cantemo Portal™ can be installed on-prem or in the cloud (Enterprise Edition only, on AWS or Rackspace cloud). The server is Linux based and can be installed on any hardware that can run Linux. The user interfaces are web browser based. An open API is supported, which is used by Cantemo own Apps and Themes. The player is claimed to be frame accurate. No mention is made of microservices, the database(s) used, or security.

INTEGRATION: Cantemo Portal™ seems to have a relatively small number of third party resource integrations, listing mainly storage (Backblaze, Object Matrix, Quantum), and other solution vendors (telestream, tools on air, vidispine). No mention is made of a plugin approach, nor of real-time monitoring, nor support for scripted integration.

AUTOMATION: The Cantemo Portal™ Rules Engine enables the setup of custom automations and the creation of advanced rules and workflows. Rules Engine is built on the Activiti workflow engine, which is a free, open source, Business Process Management (BPM) system. It allows for complex business processes to be modelled with visual diagrams, and executed directly from those definitions. Custom scripts are supported. No mention of real-time workflow monitoring.

METADATA: Cantemo provides a metadata design tool to define and modify schemas, with a virtually unlimited number of user-defined metadata fields. It can automatically extract and make searchable embedded metadata, such as XMP or closed-captioning. It can host multiple metadata schemas in the same repository and supports inheriting metadata from parent assets. Metadata translation to other languages is supported. User defined hierarchies are supported. No mention of advanced metadata (taxonomies, logging/temporal, spatial or thesaurus).

USER EXPERIENCE: Cantemo Portal™ Themes infrastructure allows tweaking or completely remodelling the user interface for each user or group in the system. The UIs therefore can adopt customised style and layout.

ANALYTICS: The Dashboard in Portal provides a quick overview of tasks and system status etc. This can be customised by adding from a library of Cantemo widgets, arranged in different columns, and additional widgets can easily be developed by third parties as plugins.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: At the time of this review, the marketing for this on-premise Cantemo Portal media platform does not mention AI, but it is referenced in the cloud platform made by the same company, iconik (see that review later in this document)