One of my clients was Widen Enterprises. Widen is a 60 year old company that started in prepress technologies. Unlike some print companies, Widen has not stood by and watched as startups scavenged their industry. Instead, Widen has transformed into an Internet digital asset powerhouse. Now they’re transforming the digital asset management industry.
You may have read some posts in the past on cloud computing. Much of my interest first came in working with BlueLock, a leader in cloud computing technologies who happens to be located right here in Indianapolis.
Problem: HD Video = Unaffordable Bandwidth and Infrastructure Costs
For companies attempting to break into high definition video on the web, one of the huge infrastructure requirements is the massive bandwidth needed to move the brilliant resolution down to the consumer. Widen has developed a couple of unique solutions through the use of cloud computing to serve digital assets.
Embed Links
Embed links is a simple piece of technology that Widen has incorporated into their digital asset management platform. It has some incredible benefits for marketers tasks for managing and publishing large amounts of large files like images and videos online.
Jake Athey of Widen provided me with some insight into this exciting technology:
Embed links for digital asset management are made possible by Widen’s adoption of cloud computing resources. This is what of course allows us to provide the infrastructure to match the demand. Also, we recognize some differences between our uses of embed links and YouTube’s. YouTube is a destination site for publishing videos and we realize that as an excellent medium for search and socializing aspects.
Our technology is quite different and provides a different set of value propositions. The Widen platform is the single source control point for managing the most current version of a rich media file ? images, audio/video, etc.
Widen technology helps marketers repurpose rich media content in formats appropriate for the channel in which it is to be used ? whatever that may be ? online or offline. Take video for example, the Widen system allows you convert a broadcast quality video to a web quality flv on-the-fly where we handle the storage and transformation of that single file.
Now embed links come into play when marketers want to display HD video online and don’t have the infrastructure to support a high demand of users downloading HD video. Those users consume the video file that is pre-converted and access it from the cloud via embed link. There are also several benefits from a file maintenance, rights management and brand control standpoint as well.
The ability to spread, track and manage resources is a growing problem for marketing departments who are developing and trying to manage strategies for utilization of HD Video and other digital assets. Widen is doing some incredible work in this industry, really changing the industry and providing solutions that are affordable to companies without all of the storage and bandwidth required. This is cutting edge marketing technology.
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