Entone Technologies has unveiled an asset manager designed to automatically move titles to different server types and locations on a video-on-demand system based on usage and popularity.

That platform, dubbed Armada, marks a shift away from more manual, "best guess" asset management systems, and, according to Entone, aims to reduce operating expenses by up to 60 percent.

Managing VOD assets has become more and more complicated when operators have to store and move around thousands of titles, each with its own "popularity profile," said Mark Evensen, Entone's vice president of product development.

Such a system could gain favor among service operators as they begin to store movies, television and other on-demand fare on a variety of different storage media based on popularity. The trend these days is for new, highly used titles to be stored in random access memory (RAM), with library and less popular titles stored on disk-based SCSI drives. Entone's off-the-shelf StreamLiner platform can also support even less expensive SATA-based drives for titles at the far end of the "long tail" of content.