Outsourcing Product Development, India

A commercial television company operated out of multiple locations with local play-out facilities at each station. The existing facilities had old infrastructure of physical assets in the form of cassettes and tapes which were unmanageable in the long run, because of the exponentially increasing data. The company decided to switch to a tape-free production studio with centralized play-out. They also planned a back-up system to be installed at another facility to take over the centralized play-out in order to enable business continuity. The two facilities were also required to be inter-connected with an IP network. Celstream was entrusted with the responsibility to carry out the above mentioned tasks.

Among the several challenges, those related to DMAM were:

• Media assets would continue to reside on their respective servers and also move around. For example, the hi-resolution video could be on one of the multiple video servers, or in the archive. It was not possible to have all the assets ‘under the control’ of the DMAM solution.
• Each asset had several components - hi-res, low-res (browse and edit), metadata, story-boards, EDL etc., all stored on their native devices that needed to be linked together and tracked as they were modified to create versions or moved around.
• Some parts of the workflows were distributed across multiple locations. The assets needed to be searchable and accessed from remote locations.
• The impact of infrastructure failure needed to be localized. For example, failure of the Internet link should not impact access to local assets at each location.

Celstream set up a development team that possessed domain expertise for the requirement analysis. The team understood and recorded requirements as follows:

• Broadcast studio operations like Ingest, Censor, Review, Edit and Archive
• Interfaces of the audio, video, editing, transcoding and archive devices
• Specific requirements towards back-up, databases, SAN Storage and system availability

Based on these requirements, the team devised an optimized solution to meet the customer's DMAM needs.
The Media Management solution provided includes:

1. An integrated Media Management System built with a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on industry-proven technologies and standards.
2. Independent asset linking and tracking components with DMAM storage databases and services for each location, with cross-site linkages. This allows independent access to the local asset database, even when faced with network failures, while allowing collaboration between locations.
3. Asset transfer services that can move media between video servers and archive, as well as perform operations such as creation of low-res copies for browse and edit, high resolution video QC, transcode between video formats, extract metadata and conform EDLs to hi-res video based on the source and destination device types. For example, transfer of hi-res video to a browse server would automatically create a browse quality video, whereas to an edit station, would create a time-accurate browse quality video. These transfers automatically update the DMAM repository for the affected assets.
4. Assets re-purpose capability through integrated metadata query and asset retrieval based on the type of component requested and its current location.