Stone, papyrus, paper.. the history of recorded information suggests that a physical medium has the best chance of long term survival. It’s a problem that Hollywood studios continues to grapple with by retaining archival film prints of movies in the knowledge that, contrary to digital, optical or cloud-based formats, it will safely last a century. The BFI’s Master Film Store in Warwickshire is a giant fridge capable of housing 450,00 film canisters – the sum of UK film heritage. Most film releases also receive a digital back-up, usually on LTO, from which the data requires periodical migration to new tapes. While LTO could feasibly last several decades, work is afoot to find a longer lasting format which doesn’t require human intervention, potential technical read/write obsolescence or run the risk of data decay.
In the world of mobile television production trucks, most companies offer two basic types of vehicles: sports and entertainment. If you inquire about renting a truck, most companies will send you a list of the equipment on board and a flat price.
Forensic watermarking is the key to combating OTT stream piracy. Anyone who has attended a seminar on video security over the last year cannot fail to have noticed that content redistribution over the Internet is set to overtake traditional control word sharing as the biggest single piracy threat to premium content. This has been borne out by events, with some OTT premium sports services finding that as much as 50% of their “customers” do not have a legitimate subscription. Instead they have either bypassed security controls directly or accessed a pirated stream that they may have paid for, or that may instead carry advertising.
WinMedia, vendor of content management software for broadcasters, and Orange’s media services company Globecast, have agreed to integrate and distribute each other’s technologies. The tools to prepare, plan and playout the content encompassed in WinMedia solutions have been combined with Globecast’s satellite delivery platform. Six leading TV channels in North and West Africa already use this package.
Media Asset Management (MAM) systems are revolutionizing the way media enterprises manage and optimize their content life cycles by delivering revenue, efficiency, and creative gains, yet understanding how to financially justify new projects remains a challenge for many organizations.
As counterintuitive as this may sound, to actually determine what you need in a digital asset management system, you have to start at the end. So in other words, the most important questions to ask when trying to determine what goes in to your asset management system, is ‘What are you trying to get out?’ Let’s start at the beginning, which of course is really the end…of the process.
There are around seven and a quarter billion people in the world today. You can go to worldometers.info and watch the total rise. What does this mean for us humble folk who used to work in broadcast?
Determining the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) required in order to measure media workflows is no different than for other workflows. Attempting to set standards and measure these without a thorough understanding of the process will result in incorrect results regardless of whether your workflow is for a doctor’s office or a post suite.
