LEXINGTON, Mass.—Signiant has launched its Customer Advisory Board (CAB), bringing together a select group of customers to collaborate on product strategy, workflows and the evolving demands of media supply chains.

The Signiant Customer Advisory Board is designed to provide a structured, ongoing forum where the company’s customers operate at scale. The forum will allow them to share practical insight into these challenges and help guide how accelerated content flow is achieved across increasingly complex ecosystems, Signiant said.

The Customer Advisory Board creates a two-way exchange of insight. Participating customers gain early visibility into Signiant’s strategic direction, opportunities to explore new approaches to accelerating access and decision-making across their environments and the ability to learn from peers facing similar technical and operational pressures.

In parallel, Signiant benefits from direct, candid input from technical leaders and operations teams—insight that informs product innovation and long-term roadmap decisions.

“The Signiant Customer Advisory Board creates a structured forum where we can learn directly from the teams pushing our platform the hardest, while giving them confidence that their feedback is shaping how Signiant evolves as a long-term strategic partner,” said Sebastian Vos, CEO of Signiant.

More information is available on the company’s website.

LONDON—Fremantle has announced it has selected Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build what the companies are calling "a future-proof, scalable, global content supply chain platform that adapts to the evolving demands of the industry."

In announcing the deal, Jens Richter, CEO of Commercial and International at Fremantle explained that “a robust content supply chain that will cater to the dynamic business requirements of monetizing content is paramount, and we look forward to working with PFT and AWS to see what we can achieve together. This collaboration will provide us with the agility, visibility, speed and scalability required across Commercial and International, Digital and Global channels to streamline our media supply chain and digital processes.”

The platform will seamlessly unify Fremantle’s operations across markets, provide real-time visibility into content workflows, and enable faster time-to-market and commercialization of assets.

The companies said that the platform, which is being built on AWS, will use the latest cloud technologies, and will benefit from the scalability, security, and flexibility enabled by cloud computing. Fremantle will also use PFT’s flagship solution, CLEAR Smart MAM, as part of the platform, which is also built on AWS. CLEAR’s agentic AI capabilities will help Fremantle enrich content with contextual metadata, streamline workflows, and enhance efficiencies across its content operations.

“Our offering is designed to meet the most demanding needs of global content studios like Fremantle,” explained Ramki Sankaranarayanan, founder and global CEO of Prime Focus Technologies. “We’re thrilled to partner with them on this transformative journey and enable their vision of a modern, AI-powered supply chain that fuels creativity and revenue.”

Andy Stephenson, head of broadcast, media, and sport, UK, at AWS added that: “We are proud to support Fremantle on its digital transformation journey. By harnessing technologies like cloud computing and AI, Fremantle will be able to drive innovation across its business, scale quickly, easily, and securely, and extract new value from its content.”

The project will be overseen by Thalia Crone, global head of Media Supply Chain Operations, Fremantle. Fremantle’s Commercial and International division is responsible for maximizing the commercial value of Fremantle content. From selling content to international broadcasters and platforms, selling Fremantle formats, publishing content to digital platforms, and setting up and managing all Fremantle direct-to-consumer channels.

LAS VEGAS—As part of the Adobe Summit, Adobe has announced a number of major product developments that will help companies optimize their entire content supply chain with generative AI. 

As part of that effort, Adobe unveiled a set of products to help companies automate and optimize their content supply chain. Those include Adobe GenStudio, a new generative AI-first offering that lets marketing teams quickly plan, create, manage, activate and measure on-brand content and Firefly Services, a collection of generation and editing APIs.

“The world’s leading brands and agencies are partnering with Adobe to accelerate their content supply chain as they deliver on a mandate to drive greater efficiency in their organizations,” said Eric Hall, chief marketing officer, Adobe Experience Cloud. “Adobe is uniquely positioned to combine best-in-class applications across Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud with generative AI natively integrated for teams to boost productivity and deliver personalization at scale.”

Adobe also announced new workflow and planning capabilities. It reported that a major release in Workfront will provide every user a unified view into all activities across the marketing lifecycle, through highly visual marketing campaign calendars and dynamic briefs. This new planning module connects records from every marketing campaign such as assets, timelines, project status and performance metrics to ensure organizations plan strategically and accelerate campaign delivery.

In terms of Workfront and Frame.io, Adobe said that a new natively integrated review and approval workflow will streamline collaboration between cross-functional teams. Any time a marketer creates a project in Workfront, a parallel project is automatically created in Frame.io (where creatives share content and track feedback). Any comments and assets shared will instantly be visible across both applications.

In terms of new creation and production capabilities, Adobe announced new Firefly features with Adobe Firefly Services and Custom Models that fundamentally change how brands create and produce content to deliver personalization at scale. 

Custom Models enable enterprises to further train and customize Firefly based on their own assets, from products to characters to campaign and brand styles. 

Firefly Services are a collection of generation and editing APIs that can be embedded into any workflow and power the creation of hundreds of localized or personalized asset variations.

During the event, Adobe also outlined new capabilities in Creative Cloud for Enterprise. 

With Object Composites, creative teams can seamlessly blend products and objects into a variety of high-quality generative scenes, inclusive of tones, colors, lighting and textures—all in seconds. And with Style Kits, teams can create and share style templates to save and reuse Firefly prompts, reference assets and presets.

In addition, Adobe Express for Enterprise empowers marketers to self-serve in creating and editing on-brand content with speed and ease. With brand style controls and templates, creative teams can set color, font usage and lock elements such as images to ensure non-creative teams stay on brand.

In terms of new asset management capabilities, Adobe explained that the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets content hub will allow teams to easily distribute brand-governed assets across their organization, partners, agencies and more. Users can collaborate and share images, icons, illustrations, PDFs, videos and more, with a unified content hub for all enterprise use cases. Content hub forms a seamless connection point between Adobe GenStudio and AEM Assets, where any user can search for an asset and create personalized variations with Firefly in Adobe Express, the all-in-one content creation application.

With AEM Sites variant generation, Adobe reported that brands can take a single marketing asset and create numerous variations of copy that speak to different audiences. Teams can take a web page for instance and generate variants where the copy is personalized for target personas across different industries, job roles, age groups and more. With Edge Delivery Services, brands can deliver the fastest possible page load times, increasing SEO rankings, engagement and conversion. Document-based authoring in AEM Sites also allows the broader team to author webpages in Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

In terms of new reporting and insights capabilities, Adobe announced that with Adobe Content Analytics brands will be able to understand the performance of AI-generated content down to the attribute level. The system can analyze and pinpoint elements (colors, objects, styles) that resonate with target audiences. This provides a necessary feedback loop ensuring that AI-generated content also aligns with business goals.

Video consumption is at an all-time high. While this should be good news for the media and entertainment industry, the voracious demand for all content types brings major challenges to content owners and distributors. The diverse array of available consumption devices and platforms force media companies to work with a myriad of file formats, storage requirements and transport protocols, resulting in a highly fragmented media supply chain. 

In addition, understanding consumer habits and pivoting business strategy quickly to attract and retain new viewers is key to remaining competitive in the streaming wars. A broken, siloed media supply chain cannot provide such audience insights, hampering efficiency. 

If business and technical challenges weren’t enough, media companies are under increasing pressure to remain profitable while delivering more content to more viewers, often with legacy workflows that fail to meet the requirements. 

This is where a cloud-native, integrated media supply chain is critical to success - let’s explore why. 

A Media Supply Chain Under Pressure
With major shifts in video viewing habits and the relentless growth of content consumption (which started during the pandemic and have now become the norm), customer demand has forced media companies to reposition themselves as streaming-first providers. This compromises their legacy production and distribution workflows. 

Additionally, the cost of operating streaming services, often alongside linear broadcast or cable TV offerings, is extremely high. Media companies are expected to deliver more content to more outlets with the same traditional tools and processes, but unless they modernize and optimize their technology back-ends, they will struggle to deliver a profit. Typical pain points that exacerbate budgets include increased storage requirements, additional transcoding needs and extra resources to package and deliver content.

This is compounded by the increasingly squashed time-to-market: whether the business is producing or licensing new content, or reusing existing content for streaming, it needs to be delivered at lightning speed.

To put it bluntly: this rapid increase of direct-to-consumer streaming has broken the prevailing media supply chain. The traditional, on-premises, siloed approach to video production and distribution, with each step of the media supply chain happening within its own operational island, is now inadequate. 

Most companies have seen their media supply chain grow organically, with countless vendors addressing specific workflow segments. This fragmentation results in untapped library assets, complicated packaging tools and poor visibility, all leading to inefficient consumer delivery. Such convoluted technology implementations cannot respond quickly to changing audience demands, causing revenue loss. 

Why Implement a Cloud-Native, Integrated Media Supply Chain?

To evolve with speed, companies in the media and entertainment space need to connect the dots across all their traditional, fragmented silos. An integrated, cloud-native media supply chain achieves this by consolidating production and distribution workflows into a single platform. Your business will reap the benefits of:

• A holistic view of the content lifecycle: An integrated media supply chain connects each process and each team. Data flows smoothly to deliver continued, uninterrupted content workflows for an exquisite viewer experience. Businesses can gather key data across the chain and make strategic improvements quickly and often. 
• Scalability and flexibility: A cloud-native workflow can scale up or down easily, making it an ideal solution for companies of all sizes. 
• Efficiency and revenue opportunities: An integrated supply chain in the cloud can automate manual processes and reduce processing time with consequent dollar savings and increased profit. The ability to quickly set up new consumer offerings opens the door to additional revenue markets and growth opportunities.

Consider a real-life example. At this years’ HPA Tech retreat, a deep dive into James Cameron’s latest ‘Avatar: Way of the Water’ revealed that a whopping 1,065 unique delivery versions of the movie had to be produced for theaters alone. “We had to turn our operation into a 24/7 support model,” reported Walt Disney Studios VP Technology Mark Arana. 

The team had to build a new system to create and track all of the versions and portions of the versions over multiple vendors around the world. They also had to develop a new DCP mastering tool in the cloud. But developing in-house solutions is only possible if you have a big budget and unlimited human resources. The alternative is to find the right technology solution: a centralized platform for storage, mastering and distribution to manage the entire process efficiently and profitably. 

The Key to Media Supply Chain Success
If you can relate to some of these issues, it’s likely that your media supply chain needs some help. Integrating your existing workflows and teams into a single platform sounds ideal, but how do you succeed in the process? 

First, when considering a cloud-native workflow, look for a vendor-neutral solution that can handle the diverse file formats, storage environments, and transport protocols required for media asset processing.

Next, you’ll benefit from finding a technology partner who can design and implement a suitable solution for your business, addressing all your pain points while reducing the number of steps needed to manage and deliver your content to viewers. Typically, there are three key areas that need to be addressed ahead of implementation: where your content is today, the quality of your metadata and how to efficiently package and distribute it all to a range of audiences.

A cloud-native workflow should be easy to use, requiring minimal technical expertise to implement and manage. Lastly, a scalable solution that integrates with existing systems and workflows is crucial to ensure a smooth transition.

Two decades of evolution from broadcast to streaming have put increasing pressure on the traditional media supply chain. At the same time, this transition has given technology and media companies the chance to come up with solutions that help them remain competitive. 

Now is the perfect time for your media business to stop bleeding revenue through its broken supply chain. The future of media asset processing lies in a cloud-native workflow that can revolutionize the industry and unlock new opportunities for growth. 

SUNNYVALE, Calif.—SDVI will feature its latest media supply chain optimization developments, including net-zero emissions, and new additions to its Rally platform at the NAB Show, April 23-27, in Las Vegas.

Making its first public showing will be Rally Insight, a data analytics and visualization service, introduced in fall 2021. Rally Insight offers interactive charts and dashboards to bring supply chain data to life. Rally Insight helps supply chain operators quickly identify issues in their supply chains, find areas in need of improvement and better grasp how their infrastructure is being used, SDVI said.

SDVI also will highlight its partner ecosystem at the convention. A total of 50 application services will be available on demand via the Rally media supply chain platform. Fourteen new partners have joined the platform since the beginning of the year, it said.

The company also will spotlight its Net-Zero supply chain efforts, a part of its sustainability program. The program offsets emissions from the operation of the Rally platform and the emissions of third-party application services running on the platform to achieve carbon neutrality, it said.

See SDVI at NAB Show booth W4711.

More information is available on the company’s website. 

SUNNYVALE, Calif.—The cloud-based media supply chain technology provider SDVI has disclosed new usage data that highlights the accelerated move media companies are making to cloud-based technologies. 

SDVI is reporting that its Rally media supply chain platform processed over 300 million jobs in 2021, representing a 102% increase in usage over 2020. Those jobs were performed on a total of 32.6 million hours of content as it passed through Rally-managed supply chains. 

Continuing the trajectory established in the first half of the year, the doubling in jobs processed by Rally illustrates the dramatic shift among media businesses toward cloud-based media supply chain infrastructure to drive efficiencies and increase business agility, the company said. 

"These metrics show an acceleration of cloud usage across the global media industry," commented Josh Stinehour, principal analyst with Devoncroft Partners. "The technical and business data that a platform like SDVI Rally captures makes it possible to better understand how technology operations are contributing to the business goals of a media organization." 

"In the dynamic media market, media companies need the competitive advantage that comes with flexible, automated media supply chains in order to meet ever-rising consumer expectations for more content," said Lawrence Kaplan, president and CEO of SDVI. "As the numbers show, the amount of content being processed is astounding, providing even more evidence that virtualized, cloud-based media supply chains are really the only way to meet this ever-growing demand." 

Comcast, Discovery, Sky, Paramount, and WarnerMedia use Rally in their operations. 

Further details of job activity in SDVI’s Rally platform include: 

• Analysis jobs (using Rally's media analysis engine to extract and catalog metadata) increased 173% to 38 million jobs.
• Evaluation jobs (using Rally's decision engine to interpret metadata and make supply chain determinations) increased to 145 million jobs, which equates to 145 million supply chain decisions made automatically without human involvement.
• Processing jobs (using Rally's Application Services) are led by the top four categories of audio and video transform, QC, AI/ML tools, and captioning services. Transform continued to be the dominant category, representing two-thirds of all Application Services jobs. Interestingly, caption jobs grew more than ninefold as multi-language delivery requirements have grown to be a meaningful share of the supply chain work required.
• Export jobs (using Rally's data mover to transfer content to a delivery endpoint) more than doubled compared with 2020, driven by the need to deliver more content to more endpoints.

Along with automated jobs, Rally also managed 675,000 manual work orders, which represent actions needed by operators to address exceptions when flagged by automated processes, SDVI said. Of the 2.8 million long-form assets that passed through Rally-managed supply chains in 2021, 74% were handled without any human touch. 

From a sustainability perspective, Rally continues to utilize compute resources more efficiently. In 2021, Rally's use of cloud compute resources per hour increased by only 7%, while the content hours processed increased by 76%, resulting in a 39% reduction of compute resources per content hour. Rally did all its work with the same amount of cloud compute resources as would have taken 12,940 dual-quadcore-CPU servers running in customer datacenters. This work will also be completely carbon-neutral, as earlier this year SDVI introduced a program to offset all emissions and operate Rally-managed supply chains with a net-zero carbon footprint, the company reported. 

Finally, to support both increased usage and new use cases, SDVI added 12 new applications to its portfolio of Rally Application Services during 2021, bringing the total number of applications available on a consumption basis to 48. 

Further information about SDVI and the company's Rally platform is available at www.sdvi.com. 

PARIS, DENVER, SINGAPORE & SYDNEY—The video delivery solutions provider ATEME has announced the launch of Pilot Media, a cloud-native solution that offers improved media supply chain efficiencies and makes it easier to deliver content to more places. 

Pilot Media is designed to facilitate the migration of production and operations to new service models in ways that enable content owners, broadcasters and service providers to harness the power of the cloud in whatever capacity suits them best, the company reported. 

Pilot Media uses a manage-by-exception approach that enables business logic and metadata-driven automation for media capture, ingestion, management, enrichment, storage, and publishing. This reduces operational overheads throughout the media supply chain, the company said. 

The product also features a simple drag-and-drop workflow builder to support flexible operation models and management insights, with dashboards updated in real time from overall operations or specific workflows.

“Viewers today have more options than ever in terms of what content to watch – both on TV and on their personal devices,” said Jean-Louis Lods, vice president of media supply chain solutions at ATEME. “With this, content and service providers are facing fierce competition. We are excited to launch Pilot Media to the market as in doing so we are not only enabling our customers to compete more efficiently and maximize ROI by reducing their operational costs, but we are giving them the opportunity to create new revenue streams, for example by launching a D2C OTT service or through rapid onboarding for distribution.”

More information is available at: https://www.ateme.com/.

SEATTLE—Amazon Web Services has reached a multi-year deal with Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) that will power MGM’s media supply chain with AWS cloud technology to help distribute its TV and film content across multiple platforms.

The new MGM media supply chain will use AWS compute, serverless, storage, machine learning and media services. MGM will build a data lake on AWS using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to provide up-to-date content rights and ownership information and connect to a microservices architecture that will simplify and automate workflows and processes throughout the media supply chain.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert will be used by MGM to automate the processes for preparing and delivering MGM content, optimizing video for viewing on any screen, per AWS. The AWS Lambda serverless compute and AWS container services, meanwhile, will assist with the transfer, process and packaging of video for all media channels on demand. Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Glacier and Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive are set to provide MGM with secure content and data storage and archiving. 

There will also be the addition of Amazon Rekognition, a machine learning technology that can analyze content, as well as create and tag specific video frames with metadata.

MGM is also slated to use AWS analytics services like Amazon EMR and machine learning service Amazon SageMaker to predict content viewing and sales trends.

“Our new cloud-based media supply chain will give us increased visibility into owned content, the ability to better inform our sales teams and faster processing of licensing deal that will help us deliver more content experiences to viewers and grow new revenue opportunities,” said Doug Rousso, executive vice president and chief technology officer, MGM.

For more information, visit aws.amazon.com.  

WASHINGTON—Digital media supply chains are helping to meet consumers’ demand for content from anywhere at any time on any device. But what do you need to know about this next-generation media supply chain.

TV Technology covers that in its latest eBook, “Guide to Next Gen Media Supply Chain.” The eBook examines how far artificial intelligence/machine learning and the cloud have impacted media companies’ ability to manage and thrive in the multiscreen world, as well as looks at what’s ahead.

TV Technology is now offering the “Guide to Next Gen Media Supply Chain” for free download.

OTTAWA—Artificial intelligence (AI; which includes the subset known as machine learning) is making its way into next-generation media supply chains; speeding up outcomes while reducing workloads for human operators. Here’s a snapshot of what’s being done today, and a look at how close AI actually is to supplanting humans in supply chain management.

SPEED UP SEARCH

Sifting through footage is one of the biggest time-wasters for video editors, but it’s a task many face as they try to serve content to many platforms; be they broadcast, web or mobile.

TVU Networks has harnessed AI to speed up this process through its Media-Mind Service, a smart media supply chain platform that works with an on-premises MediaMind appliance, using facial and speech recognition AI engines to create time-based metadata. Reporters, editors, and producers are able to automatically discover the relevant clips in their video production system through the integration of MediaMind’s API or TVU Search web portal based on the story they are working on.

“In the old way of doing things, editors could spend up to two hours searching through footage to create 10 second clips for mobile phone viewers,” said Paul Shen, TVU Networks’ founder/CEO. “With time-based indexing and real time searching technology, MediaMind can reduce production time of these clips down to just five minutes. This has actually been achieved by one of our customers using our AI.”

FASTER DISTRIBUTION

Signiant’s SaaS (Software as a Service) platform, which underpins the company’s Media Shuttle and Jet products, is currently being used by more than 500,000 users around the globe to move petabytes of high value video content every month, according to the company’s Chief Marketing Officer Jon Finegold.

“We have recently added machine learning (ML) capabilities to our underlying transport architecture to analyze historical and current information about network conditions, to select the most optimal mechanism for transmitting content over IP networks,” he said.

Signiant Jet, its newest SaaS product, incorporates this ML-aided transport capability. Jet provides automated system-to-system content file transfers; whether one-to-one or one-to-many locations. Basically, Signiant Jet is using ML/AI to make optimal routing decisions at extremely high speeds; adjusting these decisions on the fly as it monitors changing network traffic conditions. It is akin to having human operator constantly watching the progress of available distribution channels; constantly switching feeds to the ones that are flowing best.

THROUGHOUT THE PRODUCTION

Incorporating AI throughout the entire media production chain is at the core of Dalet’s Galaxy five media asset management and workflow orchestration platform. In this instance, AI is meant to provide media organizations with an agile supply chain that can help them respond quickly to fast-moving production needs; whether it’s in the fast launch of a new online channel, refreshing news clips on a fast-moving story, or repurposing archived content on new platforms.

“There are many ways in which Dalet Galaxy five’s AI-augmented Dalet Media Cortex can help,” said Luc Comeau, Dalet’s market director for MAM. “Dalet Media Cortex can recommend video and audio clips as the user creates new content. It can also automate creating searchable references to the content; automating closed captions/subtitling, and even translating this text into other languages.” As well, Dalet Media Cortex can help a user map out their production process from beginning to end, and aid with distribution once the content is done.

“Our AI can support the timely distribution of multiple content streams, in line with their deadlines and destinations,” said Comeau. “I liken it to managing trains, where you have limited tracks and different trains needing to arrive at different times, on time—and all must be dispatched on schedule.”

AI’S ‘APPROPRIATE ROLE’

The examples above illustrate how AI/ML is being used today to enhance media supply chains. But not everyone is convinced that AI belongs in this process; or, at least, the quality of AI that exists today.

Brick Eksten, CTO, Playout & Networking for Imagine Communications describes AI in its current development in the media supply chain at “Level Zero.”

“We’re trying to get software to emulate the human thought process when we humans don’t even really understand how the human thought process works,” Eksten said.

To outline his point, Eksten pointed to the current state of self-driving cars. “They’re teaching a car how to drive by measuring everything in the world. That’s ridiculous. I drive by classifying rules against observations. I don’t need to know that a tree is two meters away. I just need to know that a tree is big and I probably shouldn’t run into it.”

In saying this, Eksten has no issue with AI being used to speed up mundane tasks and provide human operators with options: “This is AI’s appropriate role.” But he questions AI replacing humans in any kind of decision-making role; including selecting video clips and possible narratives.

“The point is that AI in its current form lacks the forward looking insight and creativity required to emulate human intuition.” Eksten said.

LAS VEGAS—PBS has announced that it is working with Eluvio, a developer of software for managing and distributing large form content and GrayMeta, a provider of AI/ML technology, on a proof of concept for a dedicated blockchain environment that could allow PBS member stations to optimize their collective connective resources and utilize machine learning, metadata and microservices to create more efficient workflows and services. PBS made the announcement at the 2019 TechCon in Las Vegas.

“We’re working to create a blockchain fabric that stations would be able to opt into and utilize it in a dedicated environment within the PBS member station community in order to efficiently use various services,” said Renard Jenkins, vice president PBS Operations, Engineering & Distribution, adding that such services could include transcoding, datamining and excess resource sharing, for example.

Jenkins said PBS has been working with Eluvio and GrayMeta on the proof of concept for the last six months and that Eluvio CEO Michelle Munson presented various ideas and possible use cases during her keynote at PBS TechCon.

“We showed station representatives what we are working to architect and present to them for their input so we can move forward together,” he said.

At the conference, PBS officials updated attendees on its efforts to develop a new media supply chain that uses advances in cloud, networking and datamining to help them better manage the creation and distribution of content to multiple platforms. Jenkins and his team have spent three years planning and developing new workflows that will take advantage of the cloud as well as the move towards virtualization, and microservices enabled by SaaS (software as a service).

PBS’s relationship with its member stations is different than the relationship between a network and its affiliates or a commercial station group and its member stations. While a commercial station group may adopt a common platform from a single vendor for all of its stations, PBS’s stations are more like a federated structure, with each station its own entity with its own solutions.

“Even though we have different systems and different problems that we’re trying to solve, we are all essentially in the same boat in regard to what we have to do,” Jenkins said. “But what we do, we’re all marching along the same road together.”

Jenkins and his team examined every element along the content creation process from acquisition, editing, QC and transcoding to delivery and broke it into three phases:

Media Gateway, a cloud-based single point of entry for all media that also allows for other processes such as transcoding and compliance within the cloud. Media Bus, which is the “orchestrator” that controls and manipulates the movement of content; and Media Distribution, which would cover linear playout, OTT, B2B and B2C delivery out of a single plant.

PBS reviewed 339 proposals for the media gateway and media distribution segments and will announce the final vendors at the NAB Show, according to Jenkins. “We’re still in the design phase for media orchestration,” which he said will probably be announced in the fall. Jenkins expects to launch the gateway “within the next two to three months.”

MODERN DAY MEDIA COMPANY

Duane Smith and his staff at Oregon Public Broadcasting have also been working on new digital workflows for the past three years. Their goal, according to Smith, who is the vice president of technology for OPB, was to transform their network from a broadcast-centric facility to a facility that addresses the new multichannel, multiplatform world of today.

The planning was “part of a larger strategy about, how do we organize ourselves to be a modern day media company and not just a broadcast company, because a lot of our limitations derived from the fact that our entire infrastructure grew up around the broadcast world, and while that’s really good for over the air, none of those systems play in today’s media consumption landscape,” Smith said.

Smith’s task is to unite OPB’s nine production units around a standardized workflow flexible enough to handle the increasing myriad of tasks in the content creation process.

“The heart of our system is the media asset management system,” Smith said. “All the content is going to be registered there, all of the editing, all of the metadata is going to be added as required. And for all of those distribution points, we figured out how to abstract them down to a ‘checkbox.’”

The goal, according to Smith, is to create a workflow agile enough so that when new content creation methods are added, they don’t have a negative impact. “We didn’t want to have to disrupt our internal workflows to get content to a new platform,” he said.

The project consists of five “milestones,” according to Smith. “We’re about a month away from the end of milestone one, which is all the integration; the asset management system is being integrated with our CMS, our television automation and radio automation,” he said. “I think there’s 17 integrations we’re dealing with right now.

“Every aspect of content creation in our organization is going to be completely different,” Smith added. “There’s not one person or one process that is not being adjusted and standardized in a way that streamlines the process because a lot of our workflows and processes are left over from the days of analog.”

[Read: PBS Adopts Spec To Streamline HD Delivery]

Smith expects their new system will go live in phases starting in August and hopefully wrapped up by the end of September.

PREPARING FOR NEXT GEN TV

At Arizona PBS, CTO Ian MacSpadden has been working with the Pearl TV Group in the Phoenix Model Market project to test ATSC 3.0. As a member of PBS’s ATSC 3.0 engineering advisory committee, he and other engineering directors and CTOs from PBS are learning how to best educate broadcasters on the potential benefits of the Next Gen TV format as well as recommend best practices on how to implement it.

The promise of 4K/UHD over the air via ATSC 3.0 is one of the most attractive benefits of the standard. MacSpadden and his staff at the Phoenix-based PBS station were among the first stations in the area to shoot in 4K for their local programming. This gave the Pearl TV Group a valuable trove of high res content.

“We were one of the first stations in the market shooting and mastering, experimenting in 4K production, mastering in 1080p with HDR,” MacSpadden said. “So the Pearl Group was very interested because all of the rest of their participants were news stations and none of them are shooting in 4K.”

Handling such data-intense files though presents its own set of challenges, according to MacSpadden.

“What we’ve learned is that even though we’re shooting and mastering in 4K sometimes just getting that content to a station for air can be a challenge,” he said. “Our editors were trying to figure out how to do an HDR downmix and save it off into a file from their edit platform in a manner that the folks at the Pearl TV stations could read. We eventually found a commonality in that they were using the AJA KiPro Ultra 4K record and playback device.

“We’re still trying to work on tweaking a file to do a direct export and this will be a challenge for whatever platform stations use,” MacSpadden continued. “These are all things we are learning along the way as we figure out how to create ATSC 3.0 content through the entire production chain.”

Developing new content for devices beyond the living room TV set has prompted MacSpadden and his staff to more carefully plan ahead before production.

“This year, we’re actually trying to say, ‘OK, we’re also targeting the digital end when looking at the components of when we go out to shoot these shows; how do we put together digital sidecar content that will be these minute and a half to four minute exlusives that will be available on the web, to subscribers, or other distribution chains we decide to have available,’” he said.

MacSpadden compared learning a new content creation workflow to a new exercise routine.

“You have to get the muscle memory in place,” he said. “I need to make sure I’m covering all my bases and exercise all the muscles that I need.”

Over the last few months, the narrative elements surrounding the needs, concerns and technology plans of media companies have started to converge into common themes. One very clear message is that media companies are struggling with the constant growth in the number of outlets they are required to deliver content to.

While, on the face of it, this growth is a good thing, a very real issue is that each new outlet requires that some portion—often a very large portion—of their back catalog needs to be repurposed in some way to make it suitable for the outlet in question. More and more of an organization’s technology investment is directed at creating a media supply chain that offers greater flexibility in throughput and efficiencies in processing. This doesn’t always directly refer to pricing—the efficiency may present itself in a reduced time to market in provisioning a new outlet for use. For many companies, though not all, the logical solution is to move the media supply chain up into “the cloud” and make use of the well-understood advantages that such architectures promise.

This migration has already taken place for many organizations, and others are in process. This is particularly true for those companies who obtain most, if not all, of their program masters from external production companies. In these scenarios, the original masters are already located “in the cloud,” so the ingest operations and the master storage are actually already in the cloud. Now they need to have the rest of the content supply chain follow the media.

After spending years looking into the relative pros and cons of several supply chain scenarios, we find that there is one simple truth: for any viable solution, you want to put the processing where the media is. If a company’s source material and delivery destination are in the cloud, then it doesn’t make any sense to process the material anywhere but in the cloud. The scalability of cloud processing, along with the idea of consumption pricing for the infrastructure and processing make this a “no-brainer” decision—especially in the mind of the CFO, for whom consumption pricing and the ability to move the expense over to the op-ex budget are like catnip.

But there is subtlety to be considered here: the cost to download the media back to an on-prem system or even over to some other media company (the so-called “egress charges”) if you need to perform some of your media processing “on the ground” can be substantial. Don’t forget that in general, we’re talking about high bandwidth mezzanine files in many cases, which prohibits the use of significant compression on the material. The cost of transfer back to the facility has to be factored into the overall solution’s cost/benefit equation. Again, to be clear, you need to have the processing where the media is.

It's NOT just about transcoding

While it is true that transcoding/packaging of the media is a substantial part of the process of prepping for a new outlet, it is far from the only issue. In any on-premise workflow, graphics are added/removed/altered, dialog is replaced, legislative advisories are added/removed/replaced, promos are inserted, branding snipes (animated graphic elements) are added, and much more. In many cases, these additions and alterations are performed by an automated “bag and tag” edit function running largely autonomously.

What media companies really need is the ability to have all of the tools that they use on-premise to create a property available to them in the cloud—including the workflow automation engine that ties all of these processes together into an efficient, cohesive whole. Transcoding alone simply does not suffice. For example, more and more outlets require IMF packages as the mechanism of delivery. These are not simply transcoded copies of the original master (which may have been made many years ago), but program segments that require significant processing in order to create the multiple components that make up an IMF deliverable. It’s not just transcoding!

It's also not just an application running on a virtual machine

The simplest approach to “cloudifying” a processing solution for many customers is simply to run up a number of virtual machines on some cloud platform and install instances of the monolithic application that they’ve been using on-prem on those machines. While it is indeed a simple way to get started in a cloud-based solution, it fundamentally disallows several of the most favorable aspects of cloud-based compute—on-the-fly scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing.

Such an approach only offers the same method of scalability as the on-prem solution: purchase of sufficient permanent licenses to cover your greatest throughput needs. That is just not tenable in any real-world scenario. An intelligent processing platform must ideally be based on a microservices architecture, so that the individual actions in any workflow can be scaled through standard cloud management means (of course, the automation engine must be “cloud aware” also for this to be achievable).

Do you still need on-premise media processing?

Many discussions on cloud-based media processing seem to be making the point that the only solution moving forward is a 100 percent cloud-based architecture. This is simply not the case. There are a number of scenarios where cloud-based processing—and particularly processing hosted by a public cloud provider—is not preferable or even feasible. There are data ownership provisos in many source agreements that prevent material from being housed on a public cloud platform. There are also some scenarios in which an on-prem platform can actually be more cost effective than a cloud approach—mainly those where the “run rate” business is well known, and there is less need for “bursts” of processing.

For many media organizations, the solution is to go for a hybrid approach—cover the run-rate business, or a significant portion of it, with on-prem processing—but with a “safety blanket” capability to process in the cloud where it makes most sense (process where the source material is), or when the company has a burst of work which cannot be fulfilled with on-prem processing within some pre-determined time constraint.

Many CFOs find this approach to be attractive too, as it makes pretty strong financial sense. Indeed, this is the approach that other industries have adopted as they’ve made the transition to cloud-based processing. The secret here, though, is to ensure that both on-prem and cloud-based workflows can offer all of the same capabilities with no exceptions and hopefully with the same interface. Once again, it’s not only about transcoding. ALL of the processing steps and options need to be available in both scenarios for this approach to be successful.

Solutions where you want them, when you need them

The choice of where the media supply chain should be located is, as previously stated, largely predicated on the location of the media to be processed. This will naturally vary from company to company—and may actually vary within an individual company based on the details of source masters and the company’s strategic and tactical goals for present and future operations. I believe that the hybrid approach is the one that will make sense to many organizations and I would encourage companies to seek solutions with this level of flexibility as they consider the challenges that lie ahead.