Digital communication and media asset management services and solutions

One of the most important challenges that currently big media company must face is to transfer contents and information from analogic to digital supports. The aim is twofold: to safeguard the multimedia asset, untying it from the problematic of aging and "virtualize" the contents to make them available and accessible to several users at the same time.

A digitising project defines a solution for efficiently and effectively managing the transition of historical and live analogue material into digital domain in a way that is suitable for its exploitation within a collaborative environment.

The solution conceived by Reply is characterized by a high degree of openness and scalability. It is built around a component model that allows the smooth integration of modern video broadcasting and of professional audio broadcasting infrastructures: two aspects that have the same relevance in the project and require the development and integration of specific technologies.

There are two separate islands to manage the audio and video requirements: they comprise of specific technology, solutions and products to address correctly the uniqueness of the audio and video processing.

These islands produce audio and video essences and audio and video metadata, ranging from technical metadata (length, frequency, bandwidth, etc.) to descriptive metadata (asset annotation, automatic classification, etc.). Metadata model adopted by the solution is highly customizable and allows to support wide range of user scenarios. In particular the adoption of state-of-the-art modelling techniques allows easy integration of complex metadata schema and relationships (e.g. SMEF, P/META or custom one).

The islands are fed by a Migration Management Systems that takes care of accessing the legacy databases to produce and control migration lists. Those lists are assigned to ingest operators that take care of “raw” material digitalization. The Migration Management Systems supports and allows the analogue to digital migration workflows.

There are also other systems that exploit the audio and video services provided by the islands: the newsroom, the witness systems (radio and video) and live recording systems.

The resulting system complexity is hidden from the users and operators thanks to a thought over carefully Media Asset Management solution.

The solution chosen allows to have a unified view of the system, it provides navigation, search and retrieve facilities. It also enables the support of customer workflows and the enforcement of business rules through the adoption of user profiles, groups and related security models.

The Media Asset Management solution transparently supports the customer in the adoption of the digital technology in its day-by-day activities providing a unified environment within which the ingestion, the cataloguing (scene change, quality control, speech to text, annotating and other pluggable modules), the archiving, the integration with newsroom computer systems takes place.

The solution ties together valuable information with audio and video essences allowing to:

- Augment and optimize the exploitation of archived material
- Publish the archived material on different channels (broadband internet, UMTS, satellite, DVD, etc.)
- Enable the electronic commerce of the archived material
- Make the access to the archived public material