Broadcast Tech p28
Media Asset Management systems are gaining increasing functionality as file-based workflows and multiplatform delivery becomes standard across the industry.
You
could ask ten different users and a dozen different vendors what they
understand media asset management (MAM) to be and you'd get different
answers. MAM used to simply connect storage to a layer of software
with information about its contents but asset management has become
fundamental to pretty much every part of production, post and
distribution.
This
creates its own problems, not helped by the way different MAM system
vendors market their product. Where does a MAM stop and a PAM
(Production Asset Management) start? Or a GAM (Graphic) for that
matter? Others use terminology like media logistics or workflow
orchestration. Is
MAM a library management system or a end-to-end content lifecycle
platform?
“Vendor
driven categorisation of MAM is meaningless,” declares Petter
Ole Jakobsen, CTO at Vizrt. “Our view is that MAM is changing
from the task of storage to one of getting content from in-point to
out-point in the fastest way and also to store it for eternity.”
Service
providers have pressing need to launch channels quickly and to
repurpose material for outlets including OTT on-demand and catch-up,
create international versions, box sets and promos to support it all.
That means knowing where content is and getting access to it fast.
“Service
providers used to come to us and say 'we
want some intelligent storage for our content and to deliver it to a
single point,'” says Lesley Marr, COO,
Deluxe Media Europe.
“Now the requests are about the whole supply chain delivering to
multi-platforms and not about one area or piece of kit.
“These
are not new requirements but demand has massively increased as
services have become outsourced and aggregated,” she says. “ITV,
for example, has a VOD platform it manages in house, linear playout
managed by Ericsson, content preparation managed by Deluxe, and
global content produced and distributed by a range of providers. How
do you tie all that together and get some intelligence in the supply
chain in order to find an asset?”
A
few year back MAM vendors had strengths in particularly business
areas or workflow, whether that was around news, production,
programme prep or archive - to the extent that some facilities ended
up with multiple MAM systems or, at the very least, a lot of
overlapping technology that brought about a notion of siloed
cultures.
“A
siloed approach is typical of the way software has been developed in
the broadcast industry,” says Tony Taylor, CEO, TMD. “There can
be no argument that the future will be around file-based workflows in
data centre environments. This depends upon metadata: acting on it,
reacting to it and enriching it as it passes between and through
facilities.”
If
smart MAM is better understood as metadata then gathering it starts
at the camera, journeys through the production stage, incorporates
mastering and formatting into deliverables such as DPP files and its
retrieval from archive afterwards.
“MAM
is moving further away from technical standards and deeper into the
business domain where each organisation is different,” says Nick
Ryan, CTO and co-founder, Nativ. “In terms of metadata, MAMs
generally aim to support over-arching metadata standards (for example
EBUCore) whilst also trying to provide mechanisms for flexible custom
schema definitions. Rights data is even more complex and standalone
rights management systems are needed and hence integration starts to
play a part.”
A
layered approach
It
may be helpful to conceptualise a multi-platform workflow in terms of
layers. At the bottom are hardware like servers, encoders and
transcoders, and the content delivery networks. Above that is a
control layer, which tells the hardware what to do with each piece of
content. Above that is the business layer where executives examine
the economics of the operation to make commercial decisions. In the
middle lies asset and workflow management.
“Put
simply, a CEO should be able to look at one screen – familiar to
them because it is in the enterprise management layer – and make a
decision to, say, put a particular programme on iTunes,” says
Taylor. “That decision should pass automatically to the workflow
management system which will draw on the technical metadata to
determine precisely which processes are required, and implement them
at the right time, again fully automatically.”
Vizrt
says
its latest developments will extend reach into the control room for
video management ahead of playout and into post with deeper Adobe
After Effects workflows.
“MAM
is no longer about news or sports programming, it is also about
promos and playout and live production,” says Jakobsen.
“It doesn't make sense to have a number of different video
management systems when the goals is to get to air really quickly.”
Is
it desirable, though, to implement a one-size fits all MAM when such
a system is probably not going to be 'best of breed' in all areas?
“A
MAM that claims to do everything won't be doing anything to 'best in
class' standards,” says Ryan. “QC, transcode, format
conversion... these are all things where specialist vendors come into
their own. Integration allows for existing infrastructure to be
migrated gradually: customers don't want to hear that investing in
new MAM capabilities means that several other tools they have
invested in and standardised on will no longer be used.”
This
doesn't mean that the service as a whole can't appear to the end user
as one system and is where workflow orchestration together with
integration come to the fore.
“Focusing
on a single system interface may not be the most best approach,”
advises Ryan. “Users across the organisation in operations, legal,
technical or craft edit need to access the system via an interface
that is appropriate and familiar to them.”
Taylor
says its “ridiculous” that the media industry can think about
multi-platform delivery in anything other than a single workflow
environment: “Conceptually, you are delivering your content to your
audience. It is one concept, so how can it be anything other than one
workflow environment?”
Broadcast
engineers have always chosen the right set of functionality and
performance for a specific installation and this is unlikely to
change. “As we move into the IT-centric and Cloud era, we have to
find ways to maintain and simplify that choice,” argues Taylor.
Some
MAM vendors make a virtue of a service-oriented architecture that
allows their software to easily hook into that of third party
storage, edit, QC or playout systems while maintaining consistent
metadata.
“The
new
generation of MAM feature centralised catalogues and a core
infrastructure that have workflow and task-specific tool sets for
each business area enabling media organisations to deploy a single
MAM for individual parts of the business or enterprise-wide,”
argues Ben Davenport, marketing director, Dalet.
“The
ability to integrate tools from a range of vendors is perhaps the
most critical element in any installation,” he says. “The tool
set requirements are significant and also constantly changing. The
industry may talk of 'swiss-army-knife' media processors but there is
very rarely a single tool that will handle all requirements and even
more rarely one that will do so well.”
With
workflows this complex what clients
seem to prioritise is
transparency. “They need to understand where they are in the
process,” says Marr.
box:
What is an asset?
The
notion of an asset has changed. With linear delivery, an asset often
equates to a single episode of a series and the challenge is to
ensure that the individual asset passes through the workflow in time
to go on-air. In
a multi-platform world, the thing being monetised may actually
represent a number of episodes or an entire series.
“The
nature of the workflow therefore changes quite significantly with
concepts of 'bulk' work orders and grouped encode and distribution,”
suggests Dalet's Davenport.
The
traditional assets of MAM encompassed video, audio and images. Now
closed captions and subtitles have also become primary assets.
“Considering
all the ways in which captions could enter a workflow and all the
manners in which legacy captions could be stored, the tool set
required just to handle this critical piece of ancillary data is
massive,” says Davenport. “The role of a smart MAM is to make
this underlying number-crunching completely transparent to users,
ensuring that they can focus on business level and creative
activities.”
No comments:
Post a Comment