All-Star Panel Sessions at CCW 2014
The NAB-backed CCW held some impressive panels, and our own Stephane Guez (Dalet CTO) and Luc Comeau (Dalet Business Development Manager) participated in two of the show’s hot topics.
MAM, It’s All About Good Vocabulary – Luc Comeau, Senior Business Development Manager
The saying goes, “behind every great man, there is a greater woman.” Within the panel – “Content Acquisition and Management Platform: A Service-Oriented Approach” – there was a lot of talk about content being king. In my view then, metadata is his queen. Metadata gives you information that a MAM can capitalize on and allows you to build the workflow to enable your business vision. Done correctly and enterprise MAM will give you visibility into the entire organization, allowing you to better orchestrate both the technical and human process. Because at the end of the day, it’s the visibility of the entire organization that allows you to make better decisions, like whether or not you need to make a change or adapt your infrastructure to accommodate new workflows.
In our session, the conversation very quickly headed towards the topic of interoperability. Your MAM must have a common language to interface with all the players. If it doesn’t, you will spend an enormous amount of time translating so these players can work together. And if the need arises, and it usually does, you may need to replace one component with another that speaks a foreign language, well then, you are back to square one. A common framework will ensure a smooth sequence through production and distribution. A common framework, perhaps, such as FIMS…
The One Thing Everyone Needs to Know About FIMS – Stephane Guez, Dalet CTO
I was invited by Janet Gardner, president of Perspective Media Group, Inc., to participate in the FIMS (Framework for Interoperable Media Services) conference panel she moderated at CCW 2014. The session featured Loic Barbou, chair of the FIMS Technical Board, Jacki Guerra, VP, Media Asset Services for A+E Networks, and Roman Mackiewicz, CIO Media Group at Bloomberg – two broadcasters that are deploying FIMS-compliant infrastructures. The aim of the session was to get the broadcasters’ points of views on their usage of the FIMS standard.
The FIMS project was initiated to define standards that enable media systems to be built using a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA). FIMS has enormous potential benefits for both media organizations and the vendors/manufacturers that supply them, defining common interfaces for archetypal media operations such as capture, transfer, transform, store and QC. Global standardization of these interfaces will enable us, as an industry, to respond more quickly and cost effectively to the innovation and the constantly evolving needs and demands of media consumers.
Having begun in December 2009, the FIMS project is about to enter it’s 6th year, but the immense scale of the task is abundantly clear, with the general opinion of the panelists being that we are at the beginning of a movement – still very much a work-in-progress with a lot of work ahead of us.
One thing, however, was very clear from the discussion: Broadcasters need to be the main driver for FIMS. In doing so, they will find there are challenges and trade offs. FIMS cannot be adopted overnight. There are many existing, complex installations that rely on non-FIMS equipment. It will take some time before these systems can be converted to a FIMS-compliant infrastructure. Along with the technology change, there is the need to evolve the culture. For many, FIMS will put IT at the center of their production. A different world and skill set, many organizations will need to adapt both their workforce and workflow to truly reap the advantages of FIMS.
