History of Media Supply Chain Workflows

Over the course of my career, I’ve changed the way I look at media technologies, as the industry itself has changed the way it implements technology. In this blog I look at the major changes of the last couple of decades. [blog.mindrocketnow.com]

When I started out in this industry, as analogue was being replaced by digital, each broadcaster had its highly secure data centre consisting of racks of highly specialised opaque boxes, all connected to each other with thick braids of cables. The role of the broadcast architect was to understand all the configuration possibilities of each of those boxes, and how to connect them into chains that represented the workflow you were trying to implement. 

The first revolution was to replace all of the highly specialised opaque boxes with general purpose computers. These were more occluded boxes, because whilst the hardware was general purpose, the software became even more configurable and required new programming skills to chain into workflows. Fundamentally, those workflows were the same, and built into the same racks, just cheaper to buy.

The second revolution is well underway, and was born of a desire to stop capital spend on new boxes every year, and to prefer annual operational spend on someone else to do that for us. So those broadcaster data centres are now all shuttered and workflows are now in the cloud. Creating the chain now only requires mastery of one or two programming languages, but also of the myriad of APIs for all the software components. And because those APIs can be improved at a much faster rate, the possibilities to do interesting things in those workflows has increased at a much faster rate also.

At its simplest level, the workflows have remained the same throughout all of these three revolutions. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on VOD for TV, and the playback workflows within that. (I’m not going to get into associated and important workflows like marketing, revenue assurance, operations.) Let’s get into it!

Simplified broadcaster workflow

The role of a broadcaster is to market their catalogue as widely as possible. To do this they focus on making programmes applicable to the market:

• Choosing titles that will be popular, then putting the corresponding master assets into the workflow

• Making sure they conform to technical quality standards

• Making sure that they conform to legislative taste and decency standards

• Enriching with metadata (enrichment assets) that makes the asset more attractive, such as creatively written synopses, artfully composed imagery, dubbing in local language by local talent, creatively written subtitles

• They also look at enrichment in a broader sense, such as marketing titles locally in cooperation with service providers

• Insert ads

• Finally, the asset is exported in a form that can be imported by service providers, at negotiated cost, at an agreed schedule

Simplified service provider workflow

Service providers are sometimes the same broadcaster that provided the VOD asset, other times they are MVPD (multichannel video programming distributors), or perhaps content aggregators. All have a similar role to broadcasters, to market their (aggregated) catalogue (to consumers) as widely as possible, with the addition of implementing an attractive business model:

• Making partnerships with broadcasters that are popular

• Making sure the VOD assets that are provided conform to technical quality standards, and are timely

• Further conform the VOD assets to conform to platform technical standards, e.g. different bit rates, packaging

• Insert/ replace ads

• Enrich the metadata to reflect the business model, including: DRM method, tagging for revenue accounting

• As each consuming device might have a different preference for how it consumes the asset, the asset is exported once more

• Ingest the associated metadata (enrichment assets) into a catalogue and making it discoverable

• Promote the title both technically e.g. on the home screen of the app, and also non-technically e.g. in marketing literature

Simplified consumer device workflow

In many respects, the end consumer holds the power in the value chain. They determine the value of assets by asserting their choice of what to watch. They also provide one of the two sources of money in the value chain by buying stuff. To do this, their workflow consists of:

• Discovering content to watch, which is usually done by viewing associated assets, e.g. the next programme in the programme guide, “watch next” recommendations, marketing literature, ads

• Buying the content (even free content goes through the same authentication/ authorisation/ accounting process)

• Playing the content (which encompasses the technical processes of unpacking, decrypting and presenting images)

• And I’ll separate out viewing as oftentimes the viewing is on a different device to the playback, which can also insert/ replace ads i.e. smart TVs

• Watch the ads, watch the content

What next?

This business has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades, unsurprisingly as technology as a whole has changed dramatically. Broadcast generally follows, not leads, and at a comfortable distance, in order to sweat every last drop of amortisation from investments. So it’s relatively easy to make predictions - just look at what’s going on elsewhere. Here are a few of the trends happening in other industries which will wind their way into broadcast at some point.

Intelligence at the edge

A relatively new website architecture pattern is the Jamstack (JavaScript + APIs + Markup). The idea is that the website application itself is static, and as much intelligence as needed is associated with the content. That means the website can be distributed over a CDN and doesn’t need to be built for each visitor individually.

For media workflows, as some of the intelligence can only be implemented when you know the target, it means pushing out some of the conform/ enrich/ export steps from the central cloud to the network edge. This becomes possible as CDN providers implement cloud processing features at cloud prices.

Dumb apps

Putting intelligence at the edge means being able to deploy dumb apps. Maintaining apps fast becomes a profusion problem. The Now TV app is available on Apple, Android, Xbox, Roku, Samsung smart TV, LG smart TV, Amazon Fire TV as well as its own range of hardware. Each of thes hardware platforms comes with their own app store, and each app store has its own foibles. Each release can take 2 weeks to approve, so many companies employ release managers to handle the negotiations with the app stores to assure that they will pass first time. Even so, it takes a lot of resource to manage 8x approvals in parallel.

It’s very attractive to only need to deploy a new release once a year, to reduce the app store submission headache. This requires finding clever ways of making the app dumb. Web browsers are very complicated pieces of software that are almost invisible to surfing, and this is the direction that video apps need to go.

Intelligent content

As the app gets dumber, the content will need to get cleverer. Entire features of the app will need to be delivered as content. Content will self-aggregate as web pages with hyperlinks can, so that enrichment assets can be viewed at consumption time. And content will change after publishing, no longer remaining static. Just like the recent Cats movie, you’ll be able to see version 2.0 of your favourite movie as it reacts to real audience reaction.

What do you think of my predictions? Let me know in the comments!