But hosting the media was only part of the problem.
We learned early that storing content is relatively easy. Organizing it and making it findable is much harder. That took us into data repositories, business intelligence and database architecture. We worked extensively with taxonomies, metadata and database structures designed to establish relationships between enormous amounts of information. What is this asset? Where does it belong? What is it related to? And, perhaps most importantly, how will somebody find it five or ten years from now?
When the Platform Catches Up
For years, there were good reasons for organizations like Viewmark to build and maintain their own streaming infrastructure. We could control how assets were encoded, stored, categorized, presented and delivered. But technology changes. Google has become extraordinarily good at one thing that sits at the heart of everything we've been talking about: finding things. And YouTube has gradually evolved from a website filled with individual video uploads into a sophisticated global media platform. That evolution made us reconsider a fundamental question:
What part of this problem does Viewmark still need to solve itself?
Maintaining our own streaming infrastructure simply isn't where we can add the most value anymore. YouTube already provides the massive delivery infrastructure, device compatibility, search, streaming technology and global accessibility. More importantly for us, it provides an increasingly useful ecosystem for organizing and discovering media. Rather than continuing to devote resources to recreating the delivery layer, we can concentrate on something we've always considered more interesting: the information architecture surrounding the content.
From Streaming Repository to Digital Asset Catalog
So we've been slowly moving Viewmark's own digital streaming assets to YouTube, organizing decades of material into what we're calling the Viewmark Digital Asset Catalog. And this isn't simply dumping old videos onto a YouTube channel. A theatrical video, for example, might simultaneously be part of a production, a particular performance, a scene, an original song, choreography, a cast, a venue, a festival and a particular moment in Viewmark's history. Those relationships can be expressed through consistent titles, descriptions, playlists, keywords and metadata. In other words, we're applying some very old Viewmark thinking to a very modern repository.
Our official identity on youtube is @viewmark, giving our audience a simple and consistent home: youtube.com/@viewmark We secured the word mark "Viemark" well over twenty years and continue to maintain it as a trademark of our brand image. For more information visit the USPTO website at https://www.uspto.gov/
The Address Doesn't Have to Change
There's another lesson we've learned from decades of technology: platforms change. Addresses don't have to. That's why we've retained our own permanent media address: media.viewmark.com We've placed a permanent 301 redirect there pointing to the Viewmark catalog on YouTube. Today YouTube provides the infrastructure behind our streaming collection. Years from now, should the technology change again, the Viewmark address can remain the same. That's an important distinction.
We're not giving YouTube the identity of our archive. We're using YouTube as the infrastructure for it. There is something wonderfully full-circle about the whole thing. We've gone from data repositories and business intelligence structures, to developing taxonomies, to hosting and delivering streaming media for large businesses, to managing an increasingly substantial archive of our own theatrical and creative work. Now one of the world's largest technology companies can handle the streaming infrastructure. That leaves us to concentrate on the part we've always found fascinating: Store it. Describe it. Categorize it. Connect it. Make it findable. We've been doing that for a very long time.We just don't need to own the streaming server anymore.














