A company called SDVI Corp. is looking to solve this dilemma among broadcasters and other content distributors with an integrated Media Supply Chain Management Platform it calls Rally. It brings together all the disparate tools and infrastructure needed to prepare content for distribution, enabling supply chain operators to manage the entire system rather than a collection of parts. These managed supply chains can be deployed on premises and in the public cloud, enabling users to scale seamlessly and gain access proprietary and third-party applications via on-demand pricing.

Rally helps deliver a superior consumer experience by making media supply chains more agile to respond to market dynamics, more efficient to optimize resource utilization, and more intelligent to make faster, better decisions. It also helps users automate production, harness data to enrich user experience and engage new business models to drive reach.

"For content QC, a metadata-driven approach significantly increases the amount of content that can be processed and helps media companies meet the new demand,” said Geoff Stedman, Chief Marketing Officer, at SDVI corp., in Sunnyvale, California.

What’s needed, they say, is a “modern” media supply chain, which differs from a traditional one in that it moves the tools of production from fixed, on-premises infrastructure (the factory floor) to an agile cloud-based environment. This means media organizations can scale both infrastructure and production as demand fluctuates.

“When you move your media supply chain to the cloud, you gain game-changing fluidity and flexibility,” said Stedman. “Media supply chain management solutions allow you to leverage the versatility and scalability of the cloud to resize and retool media workflows. This allows users to adapt quickly to address changing technical and business requirements.”

With it, customers have been able to speed up content processing at less than 10 percent of the cost, reduce human involvement for ingest and a faster time to market with an 85 percent cost savings, according to a SDVI customer survey.

“Why build a traditional system for preparing media, with fixed capacity and limited applications, when SDVI Rally can build one for you on demand?,” said Stedman, referring to the Rally menu of software-defined micro-services.

At the recent 2022 NAB Show, SDVI showed its cloud-based Rally platform and all of its various task-specific components (micro-services), like Rally Core, Gateway, Insight, Applications Services, Access and Connect. Rally Connect is a content exchange service that simplifies the process of receiving and delivering content and metadata between business partners in a media supply chain—from content producers to content owners, content distributors, and aggregators. Rally Insight Data is an analytics service for media supply chains.

Using these tools, media organizations can seamlessly migrate to a more modern approach that embraces cloud technology to create a much more flexible, scalable, and responsive infrastructure.

At the end of the day, SDVI is bringing supply chain thinking and modern technical approaches to the space, backed by decades of experience in the media and entertainment technology sectors. The company is working with many major media companies, like Disney, Fox, and IBM, helping them transform their operations and infrastructure to become a source of competitive advantage. This frees up resources so they can focus on higher-value work to deliver a superior customer experience.

The key to it all is metadata and the artificial intelligence (AI) required to analyze and manage data for a better user experience.

“AI will play a critical role for TV stations that must distribute weather content to a wide range of digital platforms — each with different user expectations,” said Rodney Thompson, Senior Strategist, IBM “It allows content to be automatically produced, curated and posted across any number of platforms, easing meteorologists’ workflow so they can focus on storytelling and adding local context to keep their audiences informed and safe.”

The Rally media supply chain platform deploys responsive infrastructure and on-demand application services precisely matched to every project. As a result, the company says, organizations gain new levels of technical agility, resource efficiency, and process intelligence from their supply chains that they’ve never had before.

Visitors to the SVDI Exhibit booth at NAB in April saw how the Rally platform orchestrates all supply chain activities, including the activation and deployment of third-party technology. Users can do more than just manage assets, they can also manage the effort and resources required to prepare those assets for wherever they need to go. Access to the Rally platform, and to all content, is controlled by user rights available through SSO security and all content can be secured with encryption across the entire supply chain.

“With Rally, you can deliver a superior consumer experience by making your media supply chain more agile to respond to market dynamics, more efficient to optimize resource utilization, and more intelligent to make faster, better decisions,” said Stedman.

With tight integration of the automated and manual tasks required for supply chain processing and management, Rally empowers operators to work more efficiently and with the best application for every job. Rally also gives operators enterprise-wide visibility of the end-to-end supply chain, with data from every step to inform better decisions and optimize infrastructure utilization.

Over years, media organizations have evolved into large facility operators in order to meet the ever changing demands of media delivery. Every time they have to deliver content to a new platform, they need a new system. Every time advances are made in formats (think SD to HD, tape to file, or now, HD to UHD), they need to upgrade their systems. And every time this happens, their focus on content is gradually eroded as they spend more time and money worrying about the infrastructure they operate.

With the Rally Platform, SDVI is hoping to change that mindset while providing accurate, granular cost and usage data to enable users to better understand the true cost of content preparation, improve accountability with more relevant reporting, and make more informed decisions about taking on new projects.

“Enabling a cloud based media supply chain provided the scale, security, quality, reliability and time to market we needed for a global business transformation and the launch of HBO Max,” said Stefan Petrat, Executive Vice President, Media Technology Solutions at WarnerMedia.

The demand for content across all platforms has exploded, and the only way for providers to keep up is to automate their workflows as much as possible. For faster content processing, AI and machine learning tools are now capable of analyzing content for specific information that can be used to create metadata and guide their operations, both automated and manual.