Throwing the Switch

The digital media industry often seems like a train on a continuing journey. We drop cars and passengers and pick up new loads at every stop yet the single journey continues. From quarter to quarter, conference to conference the industry takes on some new ideas and amplify innovations constantly unloading, reloading and sometimes parking (or abandoning) loads of hype along the way. All the while we stay on the same track and same journey however just changing the load but never jumping the tracks. Isn't it time we threw the switch?

As veterans in this industry, sometimes we take things for granted and we communicate our vision with some ignorance of the customer. We throw around a lot of acronyms and make a lot of assumptions that the market are IT experts or even care about the tech speak. When we start to understand that content owners care less about the tech and more about the Quality of Service (QoS) we will start to smooth the journey for these rights holders and distributors. If we make the QoS and Quality of Experience (QoE) as seamless as traditional media delivery from the customers perspective then we will have accomplished something. We have a term “glass to glass” but to simply say it without context is only part of the story. Let’s unpack this journey into its parts – lay down the tracks, so to speak.

Let's begin with the video, content and data from point of capture and loading into to the system. “Quality begets quality,” as the saying goes. This expression is clearly applicable in the digital media world. The source content, whether live or VOD, ultimately dictates the quality of the experience. Therefore logic says that the more you optimize the source loading the better its contribution to the total experience journey.

This thinking is a cornerstone of our Platform as a Service (PaaS). Optimize the source and everything else on the trip gets more efficient. This was a core value when we acquired ReplayXD in 2014. As a result we have deepened our grasp of optics and processing, developing automation to make the onboarding of LIVE HD video, which is typically stranded in a camera, production device or origin server, a seamless and integral contribution point to the digital media value chain and content journey.

This work underpins our capabilities in working with content from all sources, since our platform is, of course, source agnostic. The journey is only a journey when the rails are integrated and strong. What good is quality content if that quality can be compromised by the network? It’s critical that the network goes beyond transport and delivery: it must be content aware.

We see the camera as more than a stranded asset. It’s part of an integrated digital network, with a lens at the origin. Optics are critical but equally important is the ability for the camera to participate increasingly as an integrated network device. That cornerstone of “glass to glass” gives a hint at how we’ll continue to dissolve the line between video contribution devices and the network, orchestrating them into a single service.

At each stop on the journey we add new loads like encoding, transcoding, storage, metadata: the list goes on and the interactions get exponentially more complex. That complexity has kept efficiency breakthroughs at bay over past years. Load in social media, data, editorial and…well, you get the picture. Making all of these pieces interact efficiently is one thing. Getting to “frictionless” system is quite another. The genesis of our real time operating system (RTOS) was to make the operation and orchestration of all these pieces possible and unified through a single system, at scale.

The final, critically important, piece of the puzzle is creating compelling user experiences. The ways for consumers to experience content has grown exponentially, and we’re only beginning. Mobile devices, connected TVs, dongles, set-top boxes: the list goes on. It’s difficult to keep up with one let alone all of the options. That challenge is why we took a programmatic approach to generating feeds from our OS: so those feeds can be displayed on any device through our universal rendering engine.

That means we can generate feeds that render experiences in record time to the Universal App and also activate native experiences. We generate a themed framework and eliminate the heavy lifting typically associated with starting from scratch for every experience on every device. These frameworks and themes can be distributed 'as is' or continue through a more thorough creative and branding experience.

We have thrown the switch and have a long track ahead. The only thing certain is constant change on this journey. We're leaving this junction with many paths to travel to the destination. With innovation, automation and services as our foundation, we’re continually building a platform and a path for enabling ongoing change with minimal friction to the journey.

Our vision is to constantly expand the opportunities to automate and streamline the process across the glass to glass ecosystem creating new ways for our clients to exploit technology, thinking less about the tech and more about the QoS across the digital media market: Always Evolving.