Media Supply Chain

The term Media Supply Chain has become a popular buzzword in recent years, defined as "The process of creating, managing, and delivering different types of digital media (video, pictures, etc.) from the point of origin (content creator/provider/owner) to a destination (end-consumer/clients)".

Much of what I have working on in the the last 20+ years has been implementing media supply chain solutions. Starting with Pathfire, thru DG FastChannel and ultimately Extreme Reach. While my role may have changed, as has the media being delivered and the technologies used to accomplish it, fundamentally the principles remained the same. However the degree of integration with other parties in the supply chain and the use of automation has grown significantly.

News Clip Delivery

Pathfire was a critical component of the supply chain for the affiliates of NBC News Channel, ABC NewsOne and CNN Newsource. The Pathfire Digital Media Gateway solution provided file based delivery of news clips from News Networks central media aggregation and editorial facilities to a dedicated server at each affiliate station. Affiliate journalists had access from their desktops to the library of clips which had been delivered to them, together with scripts and other metadata. They then had the ability to initiate transfer of clips into their local editing systems or their Play-To-Air servers.

The Pathfire system replaced a process based around scheduled linear feeds and greatly increased the immediacy of access to stories. These major broadcasters affiliate services were rebuilt around the Pathfire service and it was mission critical in their supply chain.

As Principal Engineer at Pathfire I was responsible for the implementation of the ABC and CNN systems. Subsequently as VP of Operations I had overall responsibility for the support and management of the Pathfire network.

Syndication Delivery

After successfully being used to deliver news clip for a number of years, broadcasters looked to Pathfire for delivery of syndicated programming. This was not however just a switch from shortform to longform files.

Nationally syndicated programming has embedded national (aka 'barter') Ads in part of the commercial breaks, and then black for the stations to insert their own Ads. This required a sophisticated solution which allowed the show to be built against a template to which media elements were then attached.

Now the supply chain had expanded on the origination side to include the program segments supplied by the production company (or from library) and the commercials to be inserted as the national Ads. On the destination side the supply chain now included direct integration with the station playout system.

Given the vast number of TV stations in the footprint of the Pathfire network (700+), each with a different degree of sophistication, this ranged from dubbing the received media out to tape, to a direct transfer (often with a transcode) into the stations playout system. Metadata describing the frame accurate timing would be transferred into the station automation system.

CBS/Viacom and Warner Bros adopted the Pathfire system as their primary respective syndication distribution methods, again replacing a system based around scheduled satellite feeds. To accomplish this, Pathfire Submission and Multicast Distribution backend systems were deployed at the CBS facility in New York and at the GDMX facility in Los Angeles. Ingest of media and show building/distribution remained the responsibility of the clients staff, while Pathfire was managing the distribution network, with multicast data being carried by clients leased satellite capacity from their own uplink facilities.

As VP Of Operations, this entire network which was delivering hundreds of hours of programming weekly was my responsibility.

DG Syndication Distribution introduced a 'full service' offering where all the media ingest and show integration was performed in-house, with delivery to the same fleet of DMG edge servers. Subsequently the distribution file format was changed to MPEG-4 which resulted in file sizes that were manageable for internet delivery and the satellite path was shut down.

Ads Delivery and the Transition to HD

While Pathfire had been delivering news and syndication as file based delivery over satellite, DG FastChannel had been servicing the supply chain for TV Ads using a similar technology, connecting Advertisers and Agencies with TV stations.

Ultimately Pathfire was acquired by DG FastChannel and I became primarily responsible for all the satellite distribution infrastructure which supported all the delivery paths. However given my domain expertise in the news and syndication delivery I remained heavily engaged with those parts of the business and the subsequent changes for HD.

Prior to the acquisition all syndication and news, plus the bulk of Ads were still SD - and an initiative was started to implement support for HD. Again, no small feat as there were multiple points in the supply chain which needed to be retooled to support HD, not to mention that the file sizes grew significantly.

Direct Response Customization and Delivery

DG also acquired the leading distributor of Direct Response (Infomercials). This business had its own supply chain with Generic Masters being provided by the infomercial producers. It then required the creation of customized graphics with 1-800 phone numbers and customized VoiceOver tags with reads of the phone numbers. Lists were provided indicating the numbers to be added to each version of the infomercial for distribution to different markets.

A legacy in-house developed solution was in use for the creation of customized SD infomercials as files, but this could not support HD and ran as multiple standalone instances. HD creation work was being performed using NLEs.

Having previously implemented Telestream Vantage to handle some file ingest and automate a lot of the Closed Caption insertion, I explored ways to leverage it for Direct Response customization.

I implemented a solution which utilized a combination a front end using an NLE and rendering in Vantage to create the files for Distribution. This allowed the creation of any number of customized versions of an infomercial (all with unique 1-800 numbers etc.) from a simple csv file.

This solution not only replaced the legacy SD file based solution but also provided for rapid transition to HD which allowed for significant growth of the DR business. This was a high volume operation and on a busy night the facility could customize and distribute approx 300 HD half-hour infomercial shows.

Workflow Automation

The adoption of Vantage for the Infomercial rendering was a major increase in its utilization. With all deliveries now being file based I turned to look at how we could leverage further use of automation and Vantage to decrease processing times, improve efficiency and ensure more consistent results.

I developed and implemented a media conformance workflow which would take just about anything from a client and create an XDCAM-HD 422 output with consistently conformed preroll, audio track layout and compliant loudness. The workflow also supported Closed Caption authoring and insertion. The introduction of this into the client media ingest process eliminated hours of manual labor, avoided the need to move large media files in/out of Desktop PCs and resulted in a consistent and clean source for the customization workflow.

Multiple other workflows were created to handle watermarking, proxy creation, QC etc.

A similar conformance workflow was implemented for syndication ingest process which similarly improved quality and repeatability and reduced the required labor.

Automation of Syndication Show Integration

The original Pathfire Syndication Distribution delivered multiple files to the edge servers which were spliced together using a transcoder running on the server. This was subsequently changed to delivery of a single spliced file.

I created a solution using Vantage which frame accurately spliced together all the source media elements based on instructions provided by new software used to define the show format. The resulting files were then ready for delivery via the ER Platform over the Internet.

This was a complex workflow which had to ensure that the show splicing always resulted in the correct audio channel mapping and layout from varying source elements. I was responsible for later refactoring the workflow to add support for second language and Audio Description, ensuring that each element of a show had consistent audio format and levels across all tracks.

Vantage Expertise

With multiple years of experience creating automated workflow solutions with the Telestream Vantage product I would consider myself an expert in this regard. I have a long standing relationship with the team at Telestream and there are several features in the product which are a direct result of my input.

Across many platforms and business units I have built scores of workflows to automate media processing. In addition to straight media processing I frequently made extensive use of metadata processing, XSL Stylesheets, API integration and leveraged Composition Markup Language to build complex conformance workflows. I strive to find ways of maximizing the capabilities of the product within licensing constraints.

I have created multiple automated workflows to prep content from suppliers libraries to meet the clients delivery specs and formats needed for various distribution channels and cash catalog sales. This frequently required conformance of the preroll, pulling black segments, adding rating bugs and V-Chip codes, applying watermarking, loudness analysis/adjustment and merging of Closed Captioning data.

Systems I have built and administered comprise arrays of up to 11 nodes running both on-prem and in AWS. Live Capture being integrated in the on-prem case.

Watermarking and Fingerprinting

I have extensive experience with the integration of watermarking and fingerprinting into automated workflows. I led the integration of Nielsen encoding for their highest volume Ads encoding partner. For the encoding of syndication content I managed the creation of some custom solutions built around the Nielsen SDK.

Other encoding and fingerprinting schemes I have integrated include Kantor/BVS, Roku and Project OAR.