Authored by Tom Ohanian and Featured in Post Magazine
August 2007
The Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry is experiencing an unprecedented transition of processes and adoption of technology as it seeks to fulfill the many demands for content that exist today. Fundamentally, the M&E industry is facing a supply chain issue-how content is ingested, processed, and distributed.
From "film" to "television" to "consumer video", the M&E industry is adopting all forms of digital media. Images are captured digitally-on everything from professional disk-based and solid state memory-based cameras to cell phones. Content is mastered for HD, SD, terrestrial, satellite, broadband, mobile, and portable (e.g. iPod). All required image resolutions, frame sizes, media formats, and frame rates, combined with the accelerated time-to-market make it crucial to implement a digital media distribution supply chain.
The digital media revolution-the "what, when, where I want my media"- has resulted in the adoption of file-based workflows. It's not cost that's driving this adoption-it's time. The entire process of digitization will be transformed to a file-copy over high-speed networks: a network copy of 40 minutes of DV25 in 2.5 minutes versus real time digitizing.
A digital media supply chain puts irreplaceable original content on a network. That content, traveling on both wired and wireless IP infrastructures, requires "control mechanisms". What content should have priority position on the network? How much of the network resources should a piece of content utilize as it moves? Is it secure? What systems are used to prepare content for distribution?
The Four Steps You Need to Know:
Security
Any distribution system requires mechanisms to protect the data in-transit. The presence of a centralized certificate authority (CA) and the use of digital certificates and public key / private key infrastructure are critical in setting up trusted pairs and groups of authorized servers. Also, media encryption levels should be selectable up to 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption System).
Business-Driven Transport Acceleration
A common method of transferring data between computers is via file transfer protocol (FTP). There are several issues inherent to FTP that limits performance. Further, the amount of latency in a network link can have significant impact on file transfer times.
Wide area network (WAN) acceleration technologies use various methods to address latency. Employing UDP (user datagram protocol) over IP networks is a common solution to accelerating data transfers. Network provisioning-specifying how much of a provisioned network link should be used for digital media transfers, is important.
The ability to assign rules-based pricing and scheduling to the delivery of digital media content is extremely important. Tools are needed to set what percentage of a provisioned pipe should be utilized, what priority position digital content should receive against others in transit, and what delivery windows need to be serviced.
Automation
Workflow automation is critical to the M&E industry. Automating digital media workflows is a key component to moving digital media. As content moves, it must often be transformed and processed in different ways. For example, a very common file-based workflow is: content is ingested and stored in a specific folder; that content is then moved to a centralized transcoding system; the resulting encoded file types are then moved to their appropriate destinations. That entire workflow-from ingest to distribution-can be an automated workflow solution. Further, integration with common media applications and solutions can be delivered as Web services via SOAP or as part of a service oriented architecture (SOA).
Central Management
The coordination and orchestration of all digital media movements is best accomplished as a centrally managed solution. Scheduling, routing, asset tracking, reporting, billing, network bandwidth utilization, security authorizations, etc., can be administered with all corporate best practices. A centrally managed distribution system enables administrators to change any policy parameter and affect the global network of servers that are used to actually move the content.
Final Thoughts
Placing your valuable digital media on a network and moving it through processes and to destinations is critical to enabling a digital media supply chain. Moving media must be well-coordinated, secure, accelerated, and automated based on the needs of the business.
Tom Ohanian is the Chief Strategy Officer at Signiant. He is an Academy Award® and two-time Emmy® award recipient.
The complete article with diagrams can be downloaded in the form of a PDF.
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