Primestream have been providing media asset management solutions for 20 years. Their previous offering, FORK, is well established in some countries. At NAB 2019 they presented their new generation of solution marketed as "Dynamic Media Management". This review will focus on this new solution, although it is not clear if this has been deployed with any customers yet. This latest generation of Primestream technology has three key products. Xchange is the media asset management and workflow platform, Media I/O is a baseband capture and transcode import portal, and ReviewHub is a review and approve portal. Strengths include integration and user experience. Weaknesses metadata, analytics and AI.

ARCHITECTURE: Xchange can be deployed on single and multi-site environments and provides a web browser based UI. Although the main marketing doesn’t mention cloud deployment capability, a case study with TATA describes a deployed cloud version of Xchange on TATA cloud. Media I/O is a desktop application that facilitates the management of both SDI and IP (HLS, RTSP, DASH, NDI, and SMPTE IP) streams. ReviewHub has a web browser UI. No mention is made of the underlying technology (microservices, databases etc).

INTEGRATION: Primestream has integrations with over 100 leading manufacturer systems, although it is not clear if all these integration have migrated from FORK to Xchange. Xchange is closely integrated with Adobe Premiere, Apple FCP X and Avid NLEs as well as extended integrations with the wider Adobe Creative Cloud suite of products. It has APIs integrated with AI platforms.

AUTOMATION: Workflow Manager™ is a new add-on module that provides a graphical workflow design tool. It is not clear how flexible and customisable this is (is there a preset library of nodes, customer built or scripting support?). Their marketing promotes workflow solutions for capture, production, management and delivery. Real-time workflow monitoring is not mentioned. Real-time monitoring of the workflow status is not mentioned.

METADATA: While marketing references adding markers with descriptive comments and sub-clip video or live feeds to facilitate easy search and retrieval of relevant content, no mention is made of a metadata design tools, let alone more advanced and customisable metadata capabilities (taxonomies, thesaurus, spatial, tagging etc).

USER EXPERIENCE: Dynamic Media Management provides a new generation of user interfaces from Primestream that reflect latest styles. A Workspaces module is promoted as enabling the building and customizing of UIs and the UI based and flexible permissions are used to control exposure or hide parts of the UI.

ANALYTICS: Very little information is provided on any reporting and monitoring capabilities in the new Dynamic Media Management solution. A System Monitor module is claimed to provide up-to-the minute storage statistics, including capacity, connection quality, as well as transfer history.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: No reference to AI integration or application was found in the Primestream marketing material at the time of this review.