In Broadcast - November 2012 - 38

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

N E W S

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 14 - NOV/DEC 2012

InFILE
Demystifying Service Oriented Architecture Cont.
user interface paradigm. Similarly, a graphics pop-up from a vendor like Vizrt can appear, offering just the templates the journalist needs for captions. When the journalist needs to cut video the pop-up is opened and the browse resolution pictures and audio are cut alongside the script. Once the edit is complete the journalist simply closes the popup. The EDL is passed over the SOA to the Conform Engine, which is essentially a headless instance of Premiere Pro which communicates with the data and content buses and publishes the ﬁnal video. If it needs more ﬁnessing, then a craft editor can pick the ﬁle up to work on it. SOA is as relevant to metadata as it is to content and control. “With today’s keen commercial awareness, content owners and broadcasters need their asset management systems to be much more than simple libraries,” said Tony Taylor of TMD. “They need to integrate media services from ingest through transcoding to cloud storage and content delivery networks, and they need to synchronise rich metadata with multiple databases.” TMD offers the Unified Media Services toolkit which allows systems integrators to build SOAs, pulling together products from multiple vendors. Ian Cockett of Pebble Beach Systems expanded on Taylor’s comments on multiple databases. Drawing on his huge experience in playout automation, he said “I have seen installations where the same data is stored in ﬁve or six databases with different ﬁeld names and different ﬁeld lengths. Modifying systems such as these to add new features is extremely difﬁcult and time-consuming.” Pebble Beach has moved towards serviceoriented interfaces based on web services to allow its products to form part of complex networks in an SOA environment. The extension of making a device ready for SOA integration is creating a device which can itself provide a number of services which pop up as required, loading and then clearing. The Selenio platform from Harris is a good example of a device which bridges the real-time video and IP worlds. The Kayak workﬂow platform from Digital Rapids is designed to provide transcoding services, loading the software it requires as needed and sharing processing with the cloud when demand is high. Quantel has developed a SOA architecture for its RevolutionQ, one of the talking points at NAB this year. This is a distributed server platform that offers potentially unlimited amounts of storage online, based on off-the-shelf hardware for high cost efﬁciency. The SOA underpinning makes it easy to integrate with other systems as well as allowing for its own internal connectivity. said: “We have implemented production FIMS services, enabling an eight times increase in overall content production and delivery. By leveraging an SOA approach with FIMS services we have been able to reduce our overall integration time by 70%, taking a typical transcode integration which would have averaged four to six weeks down to three days.” That is a tremendous productivity bonus, of course, but more importantly it means that media businesses can be more agile. If someone has an idea for a new service or even a new channel, then if a trial system can be on air or online in just a couple of days it makes experimentation easy. It also makes it more likely that you will beat the competition to market. The service oriented architecture is a major change in thinking for the broadcast system engineer, and such a change is always a challenge, particularly in an industry as wellestablished in its traditional ways as ours. But once people get their heads around the concept then the beneﬁts are clear, particularly as vertical integration delivers a business view of technical operations. Paulo di Casola of Swiss broadcaster RSI concluded: “The ability to deﬁne key performance indicators is a big benefit. It means we understand where there are capacity constraints or spare capacity. Because we can look at both system and business activities we can look at commercial decisions like how long does it take to produce a piece of content, and what does it cost.” That is critical information in our highly competitive media world. ■

FIMS Emerges
SOA depends upon every device in a system communicating on a common data bus. It would be highly advantageous, therefore, if there was a standardised way for adaptors to talk to this data bus. The Advanced Media Workﬂow Association recognised this need, and with the participation of the EBU it formed an initiative called FIMS, the Framework for Interoperable Media Services. They did an excellent job in selling the idea to the industry, and very quickly the project was actively supported by both broadcasters from around the world and by virtually all of the vendors in the sector, led by IBM and Sony. Version 1.0 of the speciﬁcation, along with software adaptors and test systems, was published in February of this year. More significantly, the first FIMS implementations are now in place. Bloomberg Television, along with its technical partner Triskel, have actively adopted FIMS and built systems using it in their main production bases in New York, London and Hong Kong. Bloomberg’s Roman Mackiewicz

IPV Process Engine – strips down tools to the core functionality

all the system manager needs to do is check that the adaptor still works, or modify it. As the adaptor is likely to be just a short piece of XML, this is a relatively trivial task. At the user level, it means that just the required functionality pops up, and appears in the user interface that particular person ﬁnds familiar. There is no need to go off into some other system to ﬁnd extra data or perform a particular task. David Cole of IPV explained that “users can create their own workﬂows simply by writing and implementing MXF code, making it highly ﬂexible and readily scalable. Rules can be set up, for example, to add pre- and post-roll content for online versions of content”. RSI, the Italian language broadcaster in Switzerland, has implemented an SOA based infrastructure developed for them by Sony. Paolo di Casola of RSI pointed out that it was vital “to reduce the impact on our users: creative people should focus on being creative”.

SOA In Use
To quote a practical example, IPV has developed an application called the Process Engine, which uses good SOA techniques like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and REST (Representational State Transfer), and is aimed at news operations. CNN is a major user. It recognises that journalists today need video editing capabilities, but they do not need the full functionality of a modern editor. Indeed, giving them all that functionality is likely to reduce their productivity while they pay for it. So IPV created a cut-down version of Adobe Premiere Pro which appears as a pop-up in a newsroom workstation. It has just the tools needed for quick desktop news editing, within the newsroom’s

Bloomberg claim an eight-fold increase in content production and delivery via FIMS

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In Broadcast - November 2012

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