copy written for SDVI
The exponential rise in demand to distribute content out of
the archives to multiple platforms in the right format with the right metadata
and on time is stretching the capacity of most supply chains.
As more platforms launch and existing platforms expand into
more and more international markets, it is the content teams who take
responsibility for fulfillment. They are charged with making sure every title,
every localized version, and every piece of metadata from often vast content libraries
goes where it needs to go. Yet time-to-market pressures don’t get any easier.
One of the more notable recent deals was with A+E Networks
(co-owned by Hearst and Disney) and Discovery. Both companies recognized the
value of offering consumers the best selection of programming carried on the
new SVOD service Discovery+ when it launched on January 4, 2020.
Unscripted library content from A+E Networks’ catalogue were
to be carried on Discovery’s new streaming platform.
“Our team is focused on making our archive more agile and
able to fulfill any deal that comes along,” says Dave Klee, VP of Strategic
Media Solutions, A+E Networks.
Impossible deadline
“When we looked at what needed to be done, we realized it
would not be possible with the resources we had internally at either
organization,” says Josh Derby, Group VP of Advanced Technology and
Development, Discovery. “We had to figure out a way to do a fast and effective
business-to-business connector between our two companies to make it
work.”Discovery’s existing process was tailored to production companies
delivering a handful of assets, such as a new episode of a series each week.
For this, it offers an application called Discovery Producer’s Portal.
“Content producers can upload files via Signiant or Aspera
and then enter the metadata about those files manually via the app,” explains
Derby. “That works really well for production companies delivering a few assets
at a time, but when you need to deliver a large number of assets in a short
time that gets really labor-intensive.”
They calculated that a manual workflow, just about possible
with their existing setup, would take 30-60 days for a team of five working
around the clock. At that rate, A+E Networks and Discovery would miss the
all-important launch deadline.
Fortunately, both companies used Amazon Simple Storage
Service (Amazon S3) for storing their content archives, and they shared a
common supply chain platform in SDVI Rally and therefore a common
ecosystem language on which to build a solution.
“Our existing relationship with A+E through the SDVI user
community is what enabled this project,” Derby says. “A lot of the folks who
use SDVI have common questions and pro coding tips for the Rally environment.
We were able to use this as a springboard to coordinate this project.”
SDVI Rally is a cloud-native media supply chain platform that deploys all the applications and infrastructure in AWS to create a dynamic, responsive media supply chain. AWS has extensive experience providing the supply chain infrastructure that media companies need to support ingest, processing, packaging, and distribution of media content. Together with SDVI, this solution provided the technical capabilities that Discovery and A+E Networks needed to achieve the agility and efficiency required to meet the deadlines.
With a deep understanding of each other’s internal supply
chain grounded in Rally, A+E and Discovery teams were able to plan, adapt, and
design a B2B supply chain with Rally configuration on their respective content
systems. “There was a lot of give and take on both sides,” Derby added.
A+E Networks, for example, needed to upgrade its version of
the SDVI file movement to match that of Discovery, which had already upgraded.
Both companies had different ways of handling captions so A+E provided caption
de-embedding code for Discovery to test and integrate with its existing code to
make files extensible and parsable.
The breakthrough was facilitating direct contributions from
A+E Networks’ systems to Discovery via API.
“We’d already done some work on this but when A+E agreed to
be the beta tester of our direct contribution API the project really took off,”
Derby says.
One of the reasons Discovery doesn’t conventionally perform
bulk uploads is because its supply chain system needs to know the contextual
identity of everything coming in the door. The new API was designed to reach
into its contractual system and automatically assign those assets a unique
Discovery identity.
“When you upload through Producer’s Portal that
automatically happens so there’s no mystery on ingest but if you are dumping a
bunch of files in an Amazon S3 bucket that’s not the case,” Derby says. “We
were able to get the A+E system connecting to our assets with the API which in
return assigned each asset a Discovery identity token. From there, we were able
to set up a bridge between our respective Rally systems and our Amazon S3
storage buckets that made the content copying and workflow setup possible.”
Remarkably, the time from testing the supply chain to firing
across assets in earnest took just a week.
“When you’ve put all the work in and then you open the
floodgates and see it all go into the system as planned it’s a really powerful
feeling,” Klee says.
The first payload was pushed live from A+E Networks to
Discovery+ in December with the workflow now in regular use for bulk content
transfer.
“We implemented that full initial load between the silos in
about 13-15 hours,” Derby reports. “It came through like lightening once we had
it connected because we were doing all cloud-to-cloud transfers.”
This first engagement centered around media files (video,
audio, still images) but both companies are looking to automate more and more
of the deliverables such as scripts.
“We’ve been working back and forth with Dave and his team
and also expanding to cover captions and subtitle files,” Derby says. “Most of
the metadata we’ve exchanged so far has been technical, but we are moving
toward using the Rally interconnect as a way of exchanging descriptive
metadata.”
Rather than the best part of two months using manual
processes, the entire library was transferred in five days.
“Not so long ago, even transferring a few hundred titles at
the same time would have seemed a very big deal, but with cloud integration and
file management systems like SDVI we can do this in just a few hours,” Klee
says.
He continued, “We want to get to a point where you have a
list of titles, you click a button, and off they go. While media is very close
to that point, the metadata is more complicated. We’re working on the next
steps to streamline that side of things.”
No comments:
Post a Comment