A joint project between the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA) and the European Broadcast Union (EBU) that will enable broadcasters to save money and work smarter has won the prestigious Judges' Prize at the International Broadcasting Convention, in Amsterdam. The IBC2012 Awards Ceremony will be held in the RAI Auditorium at 18:30, Sunday, September 9.
The Framework for Interoperable Media Services (FIMS) is an open standard for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for media that overcomes expensive, disruptive incompatibilities in IT-based broadcast production technologies.
IT-based solutions are supplanting dedicated video and audio equipment as broadcasters seek media format flexibility, extensive metadata management and cost reduction through the use of general purpose PCs and networks. FIMS allows media organisations to move away from the tightly-coupled architecture of existing systems to a loosely-coupled structure that takes advantage of modern thinking in the design of complex IT systems.
A media factory based on the concepts of FIMS and SOA delivers a flexible system that can readily adapt to future delivery formats and platforms.
The project has now successfully delivered the FIMS 1.0 specification, which is already operational at Bloomberg.
Brad Gilmer, Executive Director of the AMWA said: “The AMWA is extremely pleased to see the IBC recognize this project not only for what it is achieving, but also for the fact that it moved quickly. The industry is at a point where it needs relevant, business-driven specifications which are timely. We congratulate Bloomberg as an early adopter of FIMS, and we congratulate our partners, the EBU, and other FIMS team members. We look forward to others joining Bloomberg soon in implementing Media Service Oriented Architectures.”
Chairman of the IBC Innovation Awards, Michael Lumley, said: "IBC values sharing knowledge above all else, and in developing practical standards so quickly, the FIMS partners had to share their knowledge if the resulting standards were going to be robust enough to be useful globally. I am delighted that we can honour AMWA and EBU for their efforts in driving the FIMS project."
The Judges' Prize is one of a number of awards presented during IBC each year, and typically presented for innovative projects which have particular creative, technical or commercial imagination.
For a greater understanding of the FIMS project, AMWA experts and materials will be available at the Workflow Solutions Village in hall 9 at IBC, September 7-11.
