"PBCs are reusable software components that constitute the fundamental building blocks of a composable enterprise."

Media and Entertainment organizations are grappling with the constraints of legacy technology and the pressing need to accelerate their digital transformation efforts. The imperative to modernize and enhance legacy systems is a central driving force in the M&E market. Business managers often aspire to offer innovative digital services, but they are encumbered by legacy technologies that prove costly to update and disruptive to replace.

A pivotal catalyst for digital transformation within the M&E market is the necessity to replace or upgrade legacy Content Management Systems (CMS), Digital Asset Management (DAM), and Media Asset Management (MAM) systems that were predominantly acquired in the past decade. Presently, these systems pose a substantial hurdle to progress in automating the multifaceted processes essential to the M&E industry. Their inflexibility and sluggishness hinder the creation of new services and the swift integration of an expanding array of cloud applications.

In today's business landscape, M&E enterprises seek to maximize automation wherever feasible. Therefore, when they invest in an asset management solution, they aim for software defined workflows that can seamlessly transition between on-premises, cloud, or hybrid deployments. Equally significant is the desire to expand the range of tools available, enhancing flexibility to design workflows that align seamlessly with current applications and any future tools that their teams may embrace over time.

Composable Technology
Why opt for modular application architecture? In the context of  (M&E) enterprises, applications have grown in size and complexity, which can make them challenging to manage, update, and innovate. Modularity is the approach of breaking applications into discrete components that can be managed independently, yet seamlessly integrated into the larger system. 

This modular approach is the foundation of composable digital technologies, which simplifies the advancement of digital transformation for companies without adding bureaucracy or exacerbating existing inefficiencies. The benefits of a modular architecture are manifold:

• Enhanced Manageability and Scalability: Modularity reduces complexity, making it easier to cater to the evolving needs and expectations of business users.
• Team and Technology Autonomy: Organizations can allocate projects around specific business functions, fostering efficiency and process optimization.
• Resilience: In a modular architecture, functional isolation allows for fault containment.

Modern applications must be inherently modular, enabling companies to create and evolve experiences and services at a pace that was inconceivable just a decade ago. The flexible coupling of modules minimizes service dependencies, resulting in improved value when purchasing, building, expanding, or configuring services. This shift in the economics associated with digital transformation enhances the new digital experience.

Packaged Business Capabilities
The ability to rapidly create business-ready applications and solutions empowers us to design and adapt new services on demand by harnessing the technological capabilities of a media application integration platform, partner integrations, and key customizations. These are pre-composed solutions.

Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs) represent applications or services tailored around specific business functions. They are software components embodying a well-defined business capability, readily recognizable by business users, and suitable for reuse in the creation of custom-assembled products, applications, and services.

The intrinsic modularity of PBCs positions them as foundational elements for applications or solutions, akin to aggregations of microservices. Microservices serve as the framework for designing, building, and deploying modular applications, and PBCs encapsulate these application services. This confluence is especially advantageous for companies that demand high levels of flexibility, security, agility, and transparency.

Leveraging PBCs to construct cloud-native applications furnishes Media and Entertainment (M&E) organizations with an expeditious and cost-effective means to modernize services and systems integral to their operations. PBCs offer an array of advantages, including:

• Addressing common business challenges;
• Facilitating cross-functional decision-making;
• Accelerating scalability and time to market;
• Mitigating dependence on single suppliers, and
• Encouraging the adoption of best-in-class solutions available in the market.

Furthermore, the combination of multiple PBCs can give rise to composable applications, often referred to as "smartPacks," enabling companies to offer comprehensive end-to-end services without making substantial investments in new systems.

The current user interface technology, coupled with the composability of PBCs, elevates the application experience through straightforward plug-and-play actions. This approach reflects a no-code paradigm in software development, permitting the creation of applications without prior expertise in traditional programming languages. Citizen developers or those with limited programming experience can assemble applications using PBCs and graphic workflow designers.

PBCs present a solution that enables businesses to incrementally introduce new digital services at a pace that balances customer demands with budget constraints. These building blocks can be targeted at specific business functions and deployed independently. PBCs carry minimal risk and disruption, allowing companies to modernize specific components within larger systems.

PBC-Based Modernization
In typical large on-premise installations, vendors often deliver various point-to-point integrations and custom functionalities for customers, resulting in each installation being unique. Over time, managing multiple versions of such software becomes increasingly challenging.

Investing in expanding the functionality or integrations of legacy systems, which are reliant on the provider, is generally an unsound business practice. A more advantageous approach is to temporarily integrate the legacy system with an application integration platform, specifically an iPaaS designed for media. 

This approach opens up opportunities for the customer to evolve their business by temporarily halting the development of the legacy system and incorporating necessary new products and workflows. This strategy ensures business continuity while allowing the gradual phase-out of the legacy system in the future.

To ensure the business continuity of M&E organizations, it is imperative to establish an integration strategy for legacy systems, particularly in the context of many CMS, DAM, and MAM systems. One immediate question arises: Can a monolithic application serve as a (PBC? The answer is affirmative, provided that the application offers an API organized into functional blocks. Each of these functional blocks corresponds to a distinct PBC, readily identifiable by a business user. It's essential to understand that this is a temporary solution to facilitate the organization's digital transition towards a composable architecture.

M&E organizations face major challenges around modernizing legacy applications, replacing manual processes, and implementing new digital services. But complete system replacement is expensive and time-consuming. And pre-built applications are rarely tailored to the specific needs of organizations, leading to costly modernization. It's time to consider a new approach based on PBCs that allows M&E organizations to use lightweight application building blocks to deploy new services or incrementally replace entire applications. 

PBCs play a pivotal role in expediting the digital transformation of M&E organizations by enabling incremental innovations. There are three primary modernization approaches that companies can consider:

• Legacy Modernization: Many companies operate with legacy systems that would be too time-consuming and costly to entirely replace. In such cases, PBCs can be employed to substitute and upgrade functionalities within a larger legacy system.
• Legacy Enhancement: When companies are content with their current systems, they can introduce PBCs to expand existing functionalities. This enables companies to offer new end-to-end services without significant investments.
• New Modern Applications: In situations where companies have manual processes that need automation and have resources available for new developments based on microservices, PBCs can replace traditional workflows with modern applications. Additionally, this approach accelerates the transition to the cloud, either partially or comprehensively, based on the company's preferences.

The imperative to modernize and enhance legacy systems serves as a prominent driving force in the M&E market. Fortunately, PBCs offer a practical alternative, enabling companies to modernize quickly and incrementally. The specific functionalities of PBCs and their mix-and-match reusability to create composable applications can significantly assist companies in their digital transformation, reducing development time and modernization project costs.

We have discussed the challenges faced by M&E organizations in terms of legacy technology and the need for digital transformation. We have also emphasized the importance of modernization, flexibility, and the integration of new technologies. To accelerate digital transformation, we propose an agile and composable integration platform, based on PBC (no-code iPaaS for media), for the creation of media services that will pave the way for continuous and future-proof innovation.

At the root of the recent attention given to artificial intelligence is what is known, at a global level, as the “digital transformation.” Although predominantly utilized in the context of business, digital transformation (DX) has broad reaching impacts to many areas not the least of which are the television media and entertainment industries. DX is reaching the public and business sectors, numerous organizational activities, business process management (BPM), social media, and institutions ranging from government through education.

This industry-wide digital transformation is fueled, in part, by the increased focus and capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and by the applications of machine learning (ML). DX, AI and ML are augmented services either in the cloud or occasionally on premises. AI touches applications available from resources including the Apple iPhone, Google AI, IBM Watson, and a growing set of others.

INTELLIGENT SERVICES

Multiple new services applicable to broadcast, news and sports are using AI as part of their content creation, recognition, assembly, and distribution engines. In the video industry, according to companies such as TVU Networks and Veritone, we are now experiencing a sea change in the way video content is searched, produced, distributed, and consumed. Cognitive computing is transforming the way we use and generate video. Video customization, a frequent output of AI, is enabling individuals to see continued augmentation in how video is consumed and where or how it is being distributed.

Functionally, workflows utilizing AI begin at the point files are ingested using smart content management features that extract metadata using prediction engines. The AI-based engines determine flow, subject matter, relevance, plus other attributes which then generate relevant search components with high accuracy. AI is at the top of the compute-centric food chain (Fig. 1).

Other applicable AI-based services include advertising verification and sponsorship efficiency to track and verify brand name mentions, logos and characterization. For news purposes, AI techniques will categorize stories, interviews, breaking news and features – at both the local and the national level. For sports, player recognition and accumulated play or scoring data is used to self-generate melds of the game or statistics with better relevance than humans can – and do it in real time.

BEYOND SIMPLE RECOGNITION

AI is not just about facial recognition or venue classification or text/speech interpretation. AI utilizes machine learning, but it is not data mining. For media applications, AI is a key supporting agent in search-engines which engage sophisticated machine language-based algorithms to, for example, catalog images and sound for applications of metadata extraction or collection. Reducing the amount of manual human interaction needed to sort or tag images and sound is both supplementing and adding new value to archives and catalog platforms – and AI now allows those applications to go much further.

Indexing – previously a manual post ingest task - can now begin the instant that the video ingest and production processes start. Based on derived metadata, indexing allows real-time search to be built immediately using AI. And that information can be instantly shared (permissions pending) with others including users and other AI-based databases and libraries.

BASED IN THE CLOUD

Many of these new indexing platforms are built entirely on a cloud-based model. Using voice and object recognition, both live and pre-produced video clips can be indexed right down to the exact frame. Where once the sophistication of automated indexing amounted to scene change detection alone, today intelligent resource supplements can use information collected from other analysis to ascertain, e.g., people in the frame, voice or action recognition of non-visible speaking humans, if the objects in the scene are animals, building, automobiles, etc., and where the scene was shot based upon databases and interpretations from other images. All this at a reliability in the 80-85 percentile on a first pass; and even better accuracy on future passes.

AI allows services to build libraries of information that “learn” from previous identifications which in turn improves accuracy and speeds up the indexing and cataloging time with each task. The more the systems see, collect and validate the content, the better and faster the solutions get. Fig. 2 identifies the more common applications of AI for US companies in 2016 and those applications are expanding rapidly.

THE APPEAL FOR BROADCASTERS

AI for broadcasting exploits the efficiency of employing machines that can interpret and understand audience demands by using data management and filtering techniques poised to analyze content for specific themes and then create original content applicable to the individuals, locations and interaction of those people and placed in the images. These applications are particularly useful for taking raw/live content and boiling it down to rough cuts that can be stitched together for rapid release to OTT or mobile devices.

AI concepts literally “open the floodgates for how programs are produced and distributed,” according to Paul Shen, CEO of TVU Networks. Removing heretofore “human-delegated” barriers from the production process, digital and broadcast programming departments can create a single centralized search engine for raw materials such as live or recorded feeds, across all channels.

Furthermore, the integration of AI helps media companies better target specific audiences with more appropriate programs and advertisements – not unlike what we’re experiencing with social media such as at Facebook and Twitter. These entities are all utilizing varying degrees of AI and ML.

CONNECTED STRATEGY

Digital transformation aides in creating and optimizing new capabilities by leveraging the possibilities and opportunities of new and emerging technologies. However, the DX journey needs a staged approach defined with a clear roadmap. Stakeholders need to envision a connected world that is beyond silos, with a strategy that tears down internal vs. external constraints and appraises end goals that will continue to move as DX becomes the “de facto end-point” position going forward.

The IoT is also helping drive this connected strategy concept whereby systems previously confined to developing high level designs, architectures, and plans are now shifting to media and content. The capability to fine tune operational activities for business or manufacturing are now being applied to everyday consumer products such as smart homes, intrusion security and autonomous vehicles. With the explosion of content being generated and an overall demand to see more, faster and better; AI must be applied to broadcast, media and entertainment in order to satisfy that thirst.

BEWARE OF HYPE

Unfamiliar terms bring new “marketing” opportunities filled with anxiety that can yield to confusion. DX, one of the latest buzz words, is no different. As with any emerging and/or disruptive technology, there are tendencies to look or select those tech companies’ who offer “sexy” products or claim to answer ‘all your needs’ in a single offering. Just be weary, because, generally speaking, digital transformation should be considered “industry-agnostic,” and it is likely to encompass many offerings in multiple scenarios.

DX should start with business goals, identification of challenges, an exploration of current and future customers or needs, and then apply those findings to the context of the organization.

Digital transformation usually happens at different speeds. DX creates new partnerships which mutually leverage their collective synergies to produce a sum value which is greater than their individual parts. DX can merge disruptive entities (technologies and organizations) into harmonious entities. But beware, simply selecting a single offering without understanding and anticipating the overall impact to the organization (and its partners) can be detrimental to the success of the DX challenge. Some providers have indeed been “disruptive” in the sense of forcing bigger players to adapt or decease – that is only part of the agenda.

Potential adopters of AI-based solutions can learn from the new start-ups as well as those technology success stories we then hear about. We are only beginning to see the depth and interaction which AI and ML can bring to workflows and operations like media asset management equipped with automated content recognition or content assembly.

Karl Paulsen is CTO at Diversified and a SMPTE Fellow. He is a frequent contributor to TV Technology, focusing on emerging technologies and workflows for the industry. Contact Karl at kpaulsen@diversifiedus.com.