TransMediaDynamics (TMD) is a 20-year old, well established manufacturer of media asset management solutions for the Media & Entertainment, Archive, and Parliamentary & legislative markets. TMD’s flagship product is MediaFlex is a very capable solution with a global install base, scoring well in most technology categories, but the lack of any depth to analytics and no mention of AI in its marketing material at the time of this review reduced its overall score. Anecdotally, Mediaflex is not an out-of-the-box solution, but requires significant level of services from TMD to meet specific customer projects - so delivery projects can be relatively long.

ARCHITECTURE: Mediaflex-UMS (Unified Media Services) is a scalable, cloud native platform supporting a range of applications. Deployment can be on-premise, in the cloud or hybrid of the two. Multi-site deployment is supported. The solution is built on an Oracle database platform, with no mention of other databases or underlying technology in the marketing material. It is not clear if the UIs are browser-based or require client software.

INTEGRATION: TMD cites a large portfolio of technology partners to whose systems they have integrated with. Adobe Premiere (with TMD panel) and Avid NLE integration is promoted. It appears though that TMD does not offer an open API for third parties to integrate with (testimony to the lack of productisation).

AUTOMATION: Mediaflex-UMS includes a graphical BPM workflow tool that was launched at NAB 2018. This offers a library of over 50 frequently used media management and content preparation tasks that users can configure to create templates for specific business processes. Marketing material does not indicate any support for building your own actions, tasks or scripting business logic, nor is it clear how real-time monitoring of workflow progress is presented.

METADATA: At the heart of every Mediaflex-UMS system is MetaServer, which provides the core database environment and a highly efficient, extensible data model. A base data model is provided as standard that can be extended. Supports custom thesaurus, advanced search capabilities (including “Sounds like” and “About” expressions). The marketing material is not very informative on the UI for metadata design and management.

USER EXPERIENCE: The TMD user interfaces appear modern in their style. The level of Mediaflex UI configurability for different user types appears very limited, although with their developer-heavy deployment this can probably be customised. TMD launched their Chameleon UI in 2018, a simplified browser-based UI that can be configured for different users - aimed for raising work orders and basic asset management.

ANALYTICS: TMD claims that its analytics system maintains a full audit trail of everything the MediaFlex does and that this information can be formatted into custom-designed reports to show workflow efficiencies, potential bottlenecks, and identify the most effective utilisation of technical, financial, and human resources. No graphical analytics user interface was on show at NAB, nor can be found on their web site though.

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