In Broadcast - October 2013 - 70

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

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 24 - OCTOBER 2013

N E W S

InMEDIA

Achieving True Archive MAM – Finally
By Martin Junek
Commercial
Director, Provys

E

70

ve r y ye a r m o s t of th e
broadcasting experts travel
to IBC and/or NAB. The show
organisers do their best and
divide exhibitors by specialisation
to make it easier for visitors and
to protect them against running
literally miles from hall to hall. But
there are solutions which give the
visitors a hard time. MAM (Media
Asset Management) is one of them.
Since different manufacturers
develop different MAM systems
from different perspectives, they
showcase these solutions in
different halls.
Production and post-production
equipment manufacturers
concentrate their development on a
comfortable media creation, editing
and processing. Low-resolution
copies, key frames, time lines and
production process supporting
functions are natural and evident in
such systems. Most probably there
would be a limited metadata set
and therefore searching functions
will be useless. Sharing of content
would have large possibilities in the
production process but a weaker
support for playout or archive. We
may call this group of solutions
“Production MAM”.
There are automation designers

and system integrators who develop
MAM systems to serve their speciﬁc
requirements. These solutions
would be great for preparation and
timely delivery to playout servers
or generally for content exchange.
Often they could serve perfectly
in the news environment. There
would be probably less features
on the creative side of media
processing but more functions
on formats, coding, wrapping, or
transfer. Some people may call it
“Automation MAM”.
There is also another approach to
Media Asset Management. Media
Assets consist of content and rights
to use it. The content itself is then
comprised of essence and metadata.
The systems handling metadata
and rights are called Broadcast
Management Systems. They usually
cover many more ﬁelds of media
business, including programme
planning, or advertisement sales.
Metadata set is always a basis of
a content manager. Professional
content management systems
were developed soon after reliable
database software was available, so
they have a relatively long history.
By adding a media layer to such
solutions, we get so called “Archive
MAM”. One of those companies
that develop such systems since
1990s is Provys.
This IBC revealed many great new
developments again. Those who
satisﬁed their engineering appetite
on essence generation solutions
in halls 11 and 12, could then ﬁnd
some ingenious achievements in

Provys MAM optimises system performance

hall two. Speciﬁcally those visitors
who witnessed some of Provys’
demonstrations, found how a true
MAM system penetrates every
corner of a broadcast management
solution. Do you wish to view some
essence which has a disputable
rights status? Just one click in your
rights management module and you
see what you need at least in low
resolution. The same applies to other

modules. Do you need to transcode
or quality check some content?
These would be demanding tasks
for computing power, and Provys
MAM would prioritise the jobs and
optimise the performance of your
system. There were many more new
features on show at Provys booth
this year. And they have a common
denominator: orderly and faultless
broadcast operation.

Staying On Course – Power Is Nothing Without Control
By Roddy Pratt
Technical Director,
Rascular

A

nyone who has a fondness for
TV advertising – particularly
the 1980s and 90s – will know the
slogan “Power is Nothing Without
Control”. Pirelli wasn’t wrong. While
it may seem an obvious point, like all
good advertising the succinctness

Helm runs like clockwork

of the expression encapsulates
the problem and not just for
tyres. Given the power of modern
processing, the cost-effectiveness
of memory and the imagination
of many software engineers, the
development of powerful, featurerich broadcast systems seems to
be only gaining in pace.
But this presents a genuine and
growing problem: it’s all very well
having this abundance of features
and power but if control is provided
by a tiny, multi-menu screen on a
box or via a complex, software panel
that’s hard to use and difﬁcult to
learn, are you really making the best
of that technology choice? Are you
being allowed to create the promised
multi-device workﬂows that can be
instantly accessed, even by entrylevel operators?
It’s not only about live playout
control but also about the
creation of complex, repeatable,
background workﬂows that need

to be accessed at the touch of a
button: speciﬁc audio encoding at
ingest, for example, that involves
multiple devices.
We all know that broadcasters
have suffered from deskilling in an
era of rapid channel growth. It’s
far, far easier and cheaper to train
operational staff on a single control
interface without multiple panels
than have to teach them every,
single device. Not only that, but
this approach allows new workﬂows
to be created as facilities change
even though the devices themselves
might be sat at the back of a MCR.
This is why we developed Helm
and have continued to develop
it. Helm allows customers to pick
best-of-breed systems – be that
branding devices, routers, video
servers, VTRs, multi-image display
processors and modular gear, or
any combination–from a range of
different manufactures and provides
a single, integrated, user-deﬁned,

PC-based control/monitoring
surface for operators. This allows
users to control channels, or pods
of channels, from a single screen
using bespoke, pre-deﬁned buttons
for complex workflows.
The latest development, ofﬁcially
launched at IBC2013, is Helm
Clockwork. This application allows
users to create scheduled events
where simple or more complex
workflows can be triggered
automatically at a pre-defined
time of day, freeing up operators
to concentrate on other vital
tasks. Clockwork–via the creation
of a simple Helm panel–allows
broadcasters and playout providers
to schedule a huge range of different
events. These “events” could include
switching a router, triggering a server
to record an incoming feed, or the
automated control of audio ingest –
the list goes on. Another example
of Rascular ﬁrmly adding power
to control.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/?first=Phillip&last=Izzard&search=Go https://twitter.com/inbroadcast http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpzEatLsHdE&feature=youtube_gdata_player https://www.facebook.com/InBroadcast http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/inbroadcast/id468652679?mt=8 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.branded.inbroadcast&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5icmFuZGVkLmluYnJvYWRjYXN0Il0. http://WWW.INBROADCAST.COM http://www.provys.com/ http://www.rascular.com/helm
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