In Broadcast - October 2020 - 52

52

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 10 - Issue 10 | October 2020

InMedia

MAM = Microservices
And More
Contributing Editor Andy Stout examines
the changing approaches to Media Asset
Management and the broadening scope
of the applications...

T

he MAM market is evolving at
the moment to mirror change
underway in the industry at large.
With video becoming more and more
prevalent and impacting a range
of new industries beyond its Media
and Entertainment heartland, so the
business opportunities for vendors in
the field are likewise widening. The new
customers are not steeped in broadcast
methodologies, however, which means
new approaches are required.
We are also seeing increasing
polarisation. On the one hand we
have the old school turnkey MAM
solutions of varying sizes which are
tightly integrated to a broad range of
other applications and systems but
require a certain amount of specialist

Alan Dabul, Primestream

knowledge to get up and running.
Increasingly popular, meanwhile, are
BIY installations - Build It Yourself that deploy a microservices approach
onto an API backend and allows users
to create what amounts to a bespoke
media supply chain, much of which
is typically anchored in the cloud.
In practise, users tend to want to be
somewhere between these two poles.
The year's events have forced the
industry to react swiftly too. In March,
Primestream
launched
Creative
Bridge, a new add-on to its flagship
Xchange MAM platform, that looks to
unify and accelerate content creation
workflows by supporting access to
tools including Adobe Creative Cloud,
Apple Final Cut Pro X, DaVinci Resolve,
and Avid Pro Tools.
A month later it took Xchange into
the cloud. "As the COVID-19 pandemic
began to have a serious impact on
media workflows, we introduced
Xchange Media Cloud. As a 100%
cloud-based version of Xchange,
this new platform brings powerful
workflow continuity to remote content
creators, enabling them to store,
access, produce, and manage critical
media assets from anywhere in the
world," explains Alan Dabul, Director
of Product Development.

Primestream's new Xchange Media Cloud allows for remote working from anywhere

Dalet Media Cortex AI service provides content recommendations for producers

Dalet has had a lot on its plate
over the past few months, notably
integrating the Ooyala Flex Media
Platform into its offering following
last year's acquisition. The effort has
been worth it though. According to Bea
Alonso, Director of Product Marketing
at the company, this has accelerated
its ability to offer fully cloud native
content supply chains built on a
microservices architecture, while the
company has also shifted its software
releases to a monthly cadence.
There have been other focuses
too. "After the global pandemic
hit, we have paid special attention
to ensuring our solutions facilitate
mobility and flexibility," she says. "As
a direct response to our customers'
remote production needs we launched
Dalet Galaxy xCloud, a dedicated,
cloud-hosted Dalet Galaxy five
system, managed by Dalet as a full
SaaS service. It supports workflows
for remote content production and
distributed editing teams, connecting
with on-premises infrastructure when
needed."
Alonso sees the evolution of AI/
ML having a particular impact on
production over the next 12 months.
As a case in point, there are new
features in Dalet Media Cortex (Dalet's
AI-driven production service) for
automatic subtitle and translation,
content recommendations and rough
cut editing based on script content.
This, she says, is saving users hours of
manual sifting through video rushes
and she sees that having AI tools well
integrated within your MAM will be
crucial.
"In any case, the era of extremely
complex enterprise-grade MAMs is

Bea Alonso, Dalet

gradually fading away," she adds.
"What matters now is agility when
it comes to implementation with
microservices-based architecture, so
that you can "pick'n'mix" the media
workflow services you need, whilst
integrating with third party tools as
well as home-brew developments.
Plus, the ability to subscribe to specific
content supply chain services based on
usage requirements, and scale up and
down as the business demands dictate,
will be key in our industry going
forward."
Microservices has also been at
the forefront of EditShare's recent
approaches, with the company taking
what it cheerfully calls a 'brutalist'
approach to implementing the
microservices and API architectures
that lead to what it likes to refer to
as Skinny MAMs. It's an architecture
that also lends itself to third party
integration across multiple asset
touchpoints in the supply chain, an
increasingly important aspect of the
business as users looks to create
seamless workflows across ingest,
craft editing and production.
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.dalet.com http://www.dalet.com http://www.primestream.com http://www.primestream.com
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