Avid Interplay (discontinued) vs. CONTENTdm

The Avid eco-system is extremely reliable. There are multiple pieces working together to transcode, index, and archive media. Needing minimal maintenance and upgrades. Avid support is extensive and can be reached 24/7 at any time of the year. I recommend this product to any production team that wants a long term, reliable asset manager

Incentivized

CONTENTdm is well-suited for smaller organizations as a simple solution to present a digital collection on the web. If your need is complex and requires digital preservation as part of the workflow, it may not be the best solution.

Incentivized

• Quickly find video clips and view them right away
• Keep projects organized
• Can archive and restore media

Incentivized

• Constant URLs
• User interface is good
• Run by OCLC, not likely to disappear

Incentivized

• The same media can be imported more than once by multiple users, creating duplicates. A way for the user to be prompted that this media already exists before the import.

Incentivized

• As a digital asset management system, one would expect the capability of managing preservation, which CONTENTdm lacks.
• Lack of batch updating and other advanced metadata management capabilities.
• The usage statistics does not work, and the company is not planning to fix it, at least based the interaction with tech support staff. Customers were referred to use Google Analytics.

Incentivized

Final Cut Server was a mess and wasn't really supported by Apple anymore when we were last using it. Avid has good support and we know they're going to be around and support their products. It's also just a better fit for our workflow in terms of producing content, as well as archival and storage solutions.

Incentivized

We selected CONTENTdm because it had a good reputation, was used by many institutions, provided a good product, and supplied feedback and monthly reports. We are wondering about DPLA and if that will be the next evolution or platform.

Incentivized

• Media can used as it's being ingested for quick turn arounds in live events.
• Direct posting social media features within the app.

Incentivized

• It helped us to get started with our digital collections projects at a relatively low cost.
• As our needs grew, it became apparent that we needed something more powerful, and that provides better workflows and better statistics and is able to handle the whole life cycle of digitation projects.

Incentivized