The SONY Media Backbone NavigatorX is the Sony media asset management and workflow solution. While above average in our assessment on architecture, integration, automation, metadata and user experience, its strength seems to be it analytics capabilities, particularly with its business intelligence dashboard that offers a graphical view of KPIs based on the full audit trail of automated actions and manual tasks. This includes tracking processes, resource usage, number of jobs, and failed jobs, and the identification of trends. Missing from marketing material at the time of this review though was any mention of AI and its application. This might just be an oversight, but it helped reduced he overall score.

ARCHITECTURE: Media Backbone NavigatorX has a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and web browser user interfaces. It is assumed that the platform is deployable only on-premise as no mention is made of cloud or hybrid deployment capability. Multi-site support is also not mentioned. No mention is made of the underlying architecture, and database is mentioned in the singular.

INTEGRATION: Media Backbone NavigatorX has third-party service interface adaptors for integrating with traffic/scheduling, transcoders, accelerated file transfer, AQC, watermarking, HSM and MAM systems. Sony also highlights integration to leading NLEs. No mention is made of any support for integration through scripting (enabling customer self-service approach).

AUTOMATION: Media Backbone NavigatorX provides a graphical workflow design tool (newly introduced) and underlying engine. This is focussed on transcoding, file renaming, file movement and automated email communication. Process monitoring is through the text-based Task Navigator. No graphical monitoring user interface was seen at NAB, nor shown in Sony marketing material.

METADATA: Media Backbone NavigatorX provides a Metadata Dashboard for edit the metadata, and states that schema supports the Dublin Core scheme. Sony claims its database (singular, but not named) can manage up to a million assets. The platform can import and export metadata files as side car XMLs.

USER EXPERIENCE: The NavigatorX user interface has a modern look, although the style is a bit dated. Sony claim to provide an extensive set of tools to control user access to functionality. Functionality offered includes quick and advanced search, browsing proxy or hi-res video with subtitle support, version control, and cut-only storyboard editing.

ANALYTICS: Media Backbone NavigatorX is provided with a Business Intelligence dashboard that offers a graphical view of KPIs based on the full audit trail of automated actions and manual tasks. This includes tracking processes, resource usage, number of jobs, and failed jobs, and the identification of trends. This is a configurableSony user interface rather than an open source one. No mention is made of automated activity based on this tracking.

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