An examination of the different strategies content producers can deploy to optimise their content storage as it becomes digital. This paper looks at the cloud, hybrid clouds and local storage and suggests ways of reducing costs whilsst maintaining accessibility.
Into The Cloud – A Template For The Future Of Video Management
A white paper by Iolo Jones, CEO of TV Everywhere
Introduction
The methods and the technologies used by the video production industry have not substantially changed since the advent of non-‐linear technologies and the demise of film in the mid 1980s, but a profound change is now happening that has widespread implications to anyone involved with the TV and video industry and those increasingly using video within their marketing and communications strategies.
The key change is predilected by the way the core assets (TV programmes, video productions, audio productions) are produced, managed and distributed.
In the past, the production process was based on physical assets: tapes, CDs, DVDs. However, such is the pace of change that new formats such as Blu-‐Ray have barely had an opportunity to get to market before an even newer distribution models disrupt the technology. So, the current model is based on a world where digital assets are held as files (or ‘documents’) and these are moved and copied throughout the production process resulting in the need for new processes, hardware and software. However, even as this is happening, we are moving into yet a new model of production that involves virtualising assets so that there may only be one copy required.
Already there are distributors such as Netflix and Spotify who operate under this model – no file is physically transferred to the viewer – rather, they access the content as and when they need it. Now imagine extending this into the production and distribution process: this is commonly called the ‘cloud model’.
Another major shift is in rights management: managing rights for physical goods is fundamentally different to managing rights for virtual material, and this in a far more complex world where the number of rights available has increased exponentially with new platforms and devices.
This document examines the implications of these changes and outlines some strategies and technologies for addressing the challenges ahead for any organisation making substantial use of video as part of its business, marketing or communications.
As with any fundamental shift in the working practices of an industry, the moves from analogue to digital to cloud brings with them problems and opportunities.
The problems are to do with logistics and complexity.
The opportunities are to do with efficiency, cost savings and increased sales as well as improving governance.
The Problems
• The need to communicate more with video across multiple platforms, devices and portals
• Sorting out all stuff in the filing cabinets, in the tape store and on the K: drive of the network
• Scaling my data storage
• Bringing redundancy to our assets
• Getting this huge file to the Sydney office when it’s too big for email
• The approval process for materials
• Getting material out to social platforms in near real time
• Finding things!
The Opportunities
• Making more money from better exploitation of our assets and rights
• Improving our workflow
• Savings costs on duplication, couriers
• Providing accurate audit information on our assets and rights
Trends Before going any further it’s worth looking at some of the trends that are driving change.
• Scale – one of the most significant trends in the video production industry has been the advent of large scale distribution using online delivery: distribution on one domestic channel or on a DVD sent out by the marketing department are things of the past. New distribution opportunities open up new business and marketing opportunities.
• Cost – the cost of both producing video content and distributing it has fallen tremendously over the past decade rendering it as a tool any organisation can now use within their communications and marketing strategies.
• Complexity – however, the production and distribution processes are, in many ways, more complex than they were due to the need to target a wide range of outlets, platforms and devices. Online film hire company Netflix claim that they have to encode every property into 120 different files for distribution to the plethora of different outlets, devices and platforms.
• New Skills – although the skills required to produce content remain largely the same, new skills are required to version and distribute content, as well as to manage rights and metadata.
• Metadata – once upon a time a Production Assistant would log shots on location, then rushes were logged by junior production staff as they were digitised for editing; now, a more comprehensive approach to metadata is required earlier in the production process. What is captured where, when, how and by whom is a fundamental issue within the business process.
• Rights – in some sectors, such as animation, rights have always been a complex issue, but as more outlets appear and more properties carry merchandising, format and associated licensing rights, this complexity keeps on increasing. Capturing these rights availabilities and processing payments in and out as a result have become a key business requirement.
• Workflow – the advent of new production technologies, particularly hard drive recorders, has resulted in a need to fundamentally rethink the production workflow.
• Storage – time was that you could send your rushes into storage on tape and keep the masters to hand. However, with more and more content being originated digitally, new strategies and tools are required for near line backup and for the transfer of large files between facilities, to customers and into the cloud.
Some of these trends and issues are tackled head on in this document.
As with most industries, the video business, and the online video business in particular, is full of jargon. Here’s a quick glossary that may be useful for you (with apologies to those already in the know!):
Assets – these are completed properties that are ready for distribution: they may be held in different formats, versions and even with different titles
Cloud – the cloud is an all-‐encompassing phrase that generally means the redundant storage [see below] and processing of data on a distributed network not owned by the client that is paid for (or ‘rented’) on a per usage basis.
Codec – is an algorithm that enables large amounts of video or audio data to be compressed in an efficient manner; codecs are often confused with file formats (MP4 is a file format and H.264 is a codec for this format, for example).
Content Delivery Network (CDN) – a special kind of internet network that can scale to accommodate massive numbers or users and viewers. A CDN is essential when handling large scale live events, the delivery of services with large scale traffic or traffic peaks, and in defending against hacker attacks.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) – is a system enabling the ingestion, storage and retrieval of digital data. We believe that there are two types of DAMs – internal and external (iDAMs and eDAMs).
Digital Rights Management (DRM) – the protection or the tagging of content via algorithms so that its ability to play can either be managed or measured.
Elements – these are the components that make up an asset, such as shots, voice over, music, graphics: changing any of these elements clearly changes the asset they are in.
Media Asset Management (MAM) – similar to a digital asset management system, but usually has better functionality for dealing with images, audio and video and is a more specialist tool.
Online Video Platform (OVP) -‐ is a video management system that enables you to prepare, manage and distribute video across a wide range of outlets.
Redundant storage – is where two copies of a file are available in case one corrupts; this can be on the same computer using more than one hard drive, or across different networks (also called geo-‐redundant).
Rights – these are permissions to use or exploit an asset either for free or for payments or credits due.
Royalties – these are payments due to those contributing to the production of a right.
Not all organisations involved in video production work in the same way, of course, so prescribing a one-‐size-‐fits-‐all solution would be simplistic. However, we believe that there are some broad themes that can be adopted by most organisations and have developed the following broad model to make sense of the processes that need addressing for everything from broadcast TV production to the making of a movie for a marketing or training department.
The video delivery process of the future
1. Production
The main changes in the pre-‐production involve the capture of content on digital hard drives and the potential requirement for an on-‐location metadata strategy.
Tapes are far more portable and, arguably, durable, than hard drives, so thought needs to be given to redundancy and on how digitally recorded content can be transported. In future some cameras will come with LTE/4G and WiFi and WiMax capabilities that will enable them to record directly to central storage facilities, or even an edit suite, as the content is shot.
Capturing metadata on location can save time and effort in the long term, but may just not be feasible depending on the circumstances. Ironically, a genre such as news that requires rapid
metadata processing is a difficult environment to capture this information whereas drama, where the metadata is less time critical, is an easier environment for it to be inputted. To date there are no accurate voice or sound generation systems that can process in real time, although such packages can be used at the ingestion stage.
A further consideration is to log the production within a rights management system early in the production process so that it can be seen within the organisation’s workflow for planning, sales and distribution, before any money is spent.
Key Considerations
2. Post-‐Production
Most efforts around upgrading an organisation’s video management capabilities seem to be focused around the post-‐production area. This makes sense since this is the point at which the data is usually ingested and formatted. However, we believe that there is a considerable amount of confusion over the role of a digital asset management system for this purpose, and the wider requirement of a digital asset management system for distribution. Very often one size does not fit all.
For this reason we encourage organisations to think in terms of an internal digital asset management system (iDAMS) which covers post production workflow and an external system (eDAMS) for approvals, management, distribution and long term storage.
3. iDAMS
We draw a distinction between asset management systems for internal and external use: of course, these can be the same system, but we believe that different feature sets may be required in many cases.
An internal digital asset management system usually needs to be able to:
• Ingest and log content
• Handle elements, assets, projects and metadata
• Conform content to technical specification
• Provide the ability to generate proxies
• Enable rough editing and sequence creation
Pre-‐Production Key Considerations
• What digital formats will be used ? This may depend of the camera marque, but it will need to be future proof and efficient – storing rushes digitally costs money.
• How will rushes be transferred from the production environment to the post-‐production environment ?
• What will we store locally, and for how long ?
• Use a meaningful file naming convention at this point that may contain the rushes’ production name, subject and some detail. Most cameras can also automate certain metadata fields such as the name of the camera, the cameraman, time, date and length and these should be properly configured so that they are encapsulated in the atoms at the head of the video or audio file.
• Add the production to a rights management system before costs are incurred to improve tracking.
• Store content and manage content across multiple locations and storage devices
• Manage internal user permissions and workflow
• Flag content status
• Indicate rights position
• Provide good search functionality
4. eDAMS
An external digital asset management system usually needs to be able to:
• Store master copies and versions in the cloud or off-‐site along with any underlying elements or materials, potentially with a cost-‐effective offline option
• Have an approvals system
• Be accessible globally
• Provide an API for integration with websites and other distribution points such as web portals, apps and broadcast systems
• Link to a rights management system
• Provide the capability to encode and version the content in multiple versions according to profiles
• Have advanced search capabilities
• Scale, and be capable of dealing with hundreds of thousands of assets
Structured & Unstructured Data
Traditionally, data has been held in structure environments: think of the file system on your computer. However, as the amount of data explodes, the ability to manage data in an
iDAMS Key Considerations
• Currently we would recommend storing rushes locally and laying off to optical tape and off-‐site backup once a production is complete, tagging and keeping any content that is liable to be re-‐purposes and then saving this content with the master version(s) both locally and in the cloud. (See the Storage Appendix below for more detail on the options available.)
unstructured way is also important. You may well know the feeling of looking for something on a file system that's many years old with multiple users -‐ finding anything can be a nightmare.
So, the ability to tag data in an unstructured way is also very important if you are to be able to rapidly retrieve it.
Despite its popularity, there are other problems with structured data:
• You end up with multiple copies of the same file in different places
• Structures change and an existing hierarchy can be difficult to change
• You may need to index your content in different ways, by date, author, content, language; traditional structured data models such as Windows or Mac file systems really aren't much use for this.
Version control
Very often you will change your elements and assets and want to store each version so that you can roll back or refer to a previous version.
Search
Of course, above all you will want to be able to search and find your content rapidly amongst tens of thousands of elements or assets. The search function, and the ability to filter searches intuitively, are therefore an essential aspect of any system.
eDAMS Key Considerations
* For your eDAMS make sure that it is widely accessible via the internet on multiple devices and allows for content approval and commenting
* Ensure that it supports structured and unstructured data and has a good search engine for when your stored data increases
Metadata is how your content is tagged, searched, found, viewed and selected. For example, metadata is what drives television information guides or the search results within your intranet or website, so this is becoming increasingly important in a world of digital delivery.
The point of ingestion is a good time to add additional information to captured elements. However, there is a tendency due to time or resource pressure to overlook this. In the longer run this is likely to result in more work and cost.
The amount of metadata captured depends on the type of production, but since closed captioning is now a requirement in many major markets, the data captured should be granular and, in addition to the data already captured, should potentially include:
• Scene information
• Scene participants
• Scene description
• Dialogue and/or ambient description
• Quality issues
Providing a detailed metadata schema is beyond the scope of this document, but in our experience, rights management platform tend to make the best master records for metadata since they encompass more information than asset management systems.
The storage of the metadata is also crucial – it can be stored within the asset file, associated with it in a database or held separately in what is called a ‘sidecar’ file. TV Everywhere is developing a technique where the content file can remain associated with the database or sidecar file even if they are separated at any stage.
Metadata Key Considerations
• Be pragmatic about what metadata can be entered at source and what you will need to enter at a later point
• You need to make sure that there is clear workflow and responsibility for entering metadata
• Remember the old adage – rubbish in, rubbish out – nowhere is this more true than for metadata
• You may use metadata across many systems, so select a master record or master system for your metadata
At a basic level content needs to be stored as a master and, optionally, a proxy; or, in other words, a hi-‐res and lo-‐res versions for use internally during the production process.
However, once a production is complete many different formats and versions are likely to be required. The options here are to produce these on demand from the master via a transcoding engine, or to pre-‐produce the most common formats so that they can be readily available for distribution. A future option may be to dynamically render the content on the fly, potentially without physically changing the underlying files.
There are three elements to an encoded video file: the wrapper, video and audio. The video and audio will each have their own codecs, or compression algorithm and the wrapper will typically carry some metadata in it such as the filename and length of the video.
See Appendix 1 for more details on different encoding settings.
Another consideration when encoding is protecting your asset with some form of digital rights management (DRM): this will probably make sense only for publicly distributed content, although you may wish to watermark other content.
A new technique being developed by TV Everywhere involves installing a reference item in the content wrapper at the encoding stage so that its usage can be tracked and that it can be associated with its metadata and other information even if separated.
Encoding Key Considerations
• Encoding demands a great deal or trial and error or expertise if you are to cater for all eventualities
• Ensure that you have the flexibility to manage evolving codecs such as HEVC and any new codecs or formats that may appear
• Consider how you keep metadata associated with your content
Rights management is a complex area where the legal world meets with the production industry. At a basic level, the ownership of an asset needs to be logged, although on a more complex level, the ownership and payments due to all elements of an asset may need to be recorded and, as the asset is sold or distributed this needs to be tracked and updated.
This can become very complex very quickly – imagine a property with music royalties, contributor royalties, distributor costs, funder payments all of which vary depending on the sale or the rights for everything from in flight and mobile clips to cable and broadcast across different time windows and hundreds of countries and regions as well as multiple languages.
Of course, a corporate production where the rights have been ‘bought out’ will be much simpler, but tracking this in case any element of a production is re-‐used can still sow problems for the future.
Detailed rights management with the Rights Tracker platform
Rights Management Key Considerations
• Rights management is a complex area where specialised knowledge is required
• Retro-‐entering rights data can be a tremendously complex exercise, so it is worth capturing this data very early on
• You are likely to want to keep records for rights in (sales revenues) and rights out (royalties and contributions) as well as contributor/funder payments
When an asset is complete you will want to manage it for playout onto sales portals such as your own website, commercial websites you might operate and third party systems and websites such as YouTube and Facebook. You may need versions for mobile, tablet, PC and smart TVs at different data rates (see the guide in Appendix 3).
Of course, there are also many other considerations such as the ability to manage metadata, version the content, build players, playlists and schedules, interface with websites and third party portals, markets and systems.
More advanced features allow for digital rights management, ad insertion and management, scheduling and management and playout of live events and simulcasting.
Sophisticated ‘drag and drop’ player building with the VidZapper online video platform.
Video Management Key Considerations
• Flexibility is key in selecting a video management or ‘online video platform’ (OVP)
• Ensure that is can meet all the requirements across your organisation
• Consider how you can achieve new revenues from direct to viewer services
The distribution of content is itself a complex logistical task these days. The permutations of outlets, platforms and devices, from mobile to HD broadcast (and now 4k and even 8k) can be utterly baffling. (We’ve appended a rather simplistic guide to this document.).
The good news is that many of the new technologies available can actually result in this becoming a cost cutting exercise.
Distribution can be divided into two distinct workflows -‐ internal and external.
Internal distribution to colleagues and clients for approval and comments. it is therefore important that the system can support the ability to comment in the content, perhaps even on a phrase by phrase basis and for content to be approvable -‐ giving the content a status tag is an easy way of doing this.
External distribution can be further divided into two constituencies: broadcast and non-‐broadcast.
Broadcasters will have specific standard, protocols and specifications for their transmission requirements, depending on the technology and standards they are using.
There are by now a large number of non-‐traditional outlets for video now ranging from YouTube to social sites such as Pinterest, Facebook and micro messaging systems such as Twitter, and of course non-‐traditional outlets for broadcaster such as computers, OTT services, tablets and mobile that require totally different standards from broadcast.
Sharing videos on social sites and portals with Mstorer.
No matter what you are doing with your video, there will be a commercial aspect to it, so it's important that you're able to audit all activity on your systems. This may be for any number of reasons:
• to log commercial activity such as time spent on a client account, encodes generated and digital files delivered
• to log sales via the system
• to log rights and royalties due after sales
In an ideal, joined up world, of course, your video management systems will talk to your financial system and automate the processing of invoices and payments.
If marketing and communications are your prime considerations, then you will still want to audit your activity so that you can report on your activity and gauge its effectiveness.
Ideally you will want to create bespoke reports, individual queries and schedule automated reports.
Detailed statistical reports from the VidZapper OVP~
Security & Anti-‐Piracy Strategies
An unfortunate reality of dealing in content is that it can be stolen or exploited without your knowledge. Unless achieving the maximum possible distribution is your objective, we recommend putting in place an Anti-‐piracy policy.
This needs to look at everything from the security of your internal systems and storage to securing external facing systems and also protecting the content itself. Sometimes even all of these efforts are not enough to deter pirates and then you will need to work in conjunction with anti-‐piracy specialists.
Encoded video files are made up of three elements: the wrapper, the video codec and the audio codec. There are a wide variety and combinations of each. We generally recommend the use of the h.264 codec with AAC and an MP4 wrapper: this works in the most circumstances, but you still have the issue of the encode settings.
VZEncoder which enables you to automate batch encoding and uploading
There are a number of parameters you will need to set:
• Container format
• Video – codec, height, width, bitrate, aspect ratio, framerate
Different settings work for different types of content and depending on the devices you’re targeting. Apple currently recommends the following for HLS, for example:
We consider there to be four models that can be considered for the storage of content:
The Cloud – we will provide the hosting and storage for you at two levels. Our redundant service distributes your content over multiple distributed servers. This means that thereʼs no chance of you ever losing any of your content, it will always be there, ready to use and access wherever in the world you are. We also offer a low redundancy service where content is stored on two redundant RAID servers in different locations.
The Private Cloud – this works like the remote cloud described above, but uses dedicated remote servers, or can even use your own internet hosting network.
The Local Cloud – you may want to run the system on your local LAN or WAN. You can also do this. We provide ultra high availability redundant storage through our partnership with Object Matrix. This approach has the added benefits of being able to use single sign on and leveraging your existing security infrastructure.
The Hybrid Cloud – you can, of course, combine any of the above into what we term the ʻhybrid cloudʼ. For example, you may wish to keep larger files within your own network, but make finished productions and assets available within the cloud.
Optimising Storage
We recommend a dynamic model for optimising performance and cost. Below is a typical model that could be implemented:
