CatDV is a media asset management system that consists of a “suite of products, providing a scalable, cross-platform, media asset database that can handle a very wide range of file types”. The solution is targeted at Sports, Post Production, Corporate, Education and House of Worship. With what appears to be an old architecture, we believe limits the solution to on-premise deployment, limits resource integrations, no workflow or metadata design tool, and limited analytics, CatDV is not enterprise scalable and not suitable for unifying a multi-site supply chain.

ARCHITECTURE: CatDV is deployable on-premise only, as a standalone desktop app or on servers. It is available in Pegasus, Enterprise, and Workgroup levels of configuration to fit the media organisation size. Hybrid solutions are mentioned, but only to access cloud storage. CatDV deploys custom UI technologies, including rich desktop clients, accessible web & mobile front-ends, iOS apps, and apps that operate inside partner product s. It supports Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases. A web services REST API is supported.

INTEGRATION: CatDV has a relatively small portfolio of technology partners covering archiving, NLE, transcode and accelerated file transfer. It has direct integration with leading AI vendors, AI analysis aggregators and on premise partners. A plugin approach is mentioned. No mention of resource status monitoring or audit trail support, nor of custom integration through scripting.

AUTOMATION: CatDV does not offer a graphical workflow design tool. Instead it offers a portfolio of predefined workflows that can be configured using the CatDV Worker Node tabular user interface. These include Logging & Tagging, Review & Approval, Transcoding & Proxy Generation, Production Management, Archive and Print. Basic monitoring of the progress and status of these are provided. Defining of custom actions is supported for the top of the range solution (Pegasus).

METADATA: CatDV supports a relatively wide range of metadata types and provides tools including extracting technical metadata, schema creation, logging fields, event marking, scene detection, and auto suggest fields. While much of these are claimed to be user-definable and customisable, there is no mention of a metadata design tool, nor of more advanced metadata (user defined hierarchies, thesaurus, taxonomies etc).

USER EXPERIENCE: CatDV user interfaces (Desktop, Networked Client, Webn Client) are varied in style and layout. A lack of animation and nice ways of revealing functionality makes the UIs seem dated. No mention is made of UI configuration capabilities.

ANALYTICS: While the marketing description for CatDV networked clients states “full audit and reporting capabilities” and “sophisticated asset usage analytics” no further description is provided, nor any analytics UI presented.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: CatDV has direct integration with leading AI cloud vendors (Microsoft and Google), and AI engines (Veritone aiWARE platform) providing AI-based logging and tagging to assist searching and locating assets.