4 TVBEurope Guest Opinion What happened next?
The FIMS project, one year on from the IBC2012 Innovation Judges Prize Award. By Jean-Pierre Evain, senior engineer, European Broadcasting Union
THE FIMS vision is to create a common framework for media services, within which media companies can economically combine and recombine standardised, discrete services compliant with the framework. The FIMS services are designed to satisfy ever-shifting requirements for the preparation, transmission and ultimate consumption of media content. The effort has brought
together end users, manufacturers, system integrators and IT specialists to deliver on this vision, which allows FIMS specifications to be developed in full awareness of other industry developments and user requirements. It has done so under the auspices of the EBU and the AMWA under a royalty-free, compensation- free framework to make this technology broadly accessible and affordable. The Technical Board of FIMS counts around 90 member companies and is co- chaired by Sony and Bloomberg/Triskel.
FIMS has been designed to
promote interoperability and reusability through a Service- Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach. FIMS has gained much acceptance by providing improved efficiency, agility, scalability, access to best-of-breed implementations, facilitation of code reuse, and avoidance of single vendor lock-in. The FIMS 1.0 specification has been successfully implemented by several vendors. It abstracts the common behaviour of services, including job management, queuing and message exchange patterns. It uses a simple and
extensible model for structural technical and descriptive metadata based on the EBUCore. The specification also defines the
first three following services: A ‘Transfer Service’ to copy or, optionally, move, one or more files to another location (or to several locations). Five different transfer protocols are permitted: HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SFTP and FILE. A Transfer Service may implement
one or more of these protocols. A ‘Transform Service’ to alter essence and container formats. This interface builds on the Transfer Service interface, adding elements of transformation to
the input. A ‘Capture Service’ to convert a stream-based realtime input such as an HD-SDI or RTP stream to one or more files. Year 2012 was marked by the
IBC Judges’ Prize awarded to the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), Bloomberg and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) on behalf of the FIMS project. This led to further market recognition and encouraged FIMS to explore new ground. As FIMS activities are user-driven and users asked for new service interface definitions for repositories and for quality analysis, these mark the current FIMS activities.
Essence and metadata During the last 12 months, FIMS has been extremely active in defining a new set of service definitions for managing repositories under the leadership of Bloomberg/Triskel. Media organisations are challenged with feeding more content to new distribution channels. This
From the implementers: Bloomberg
“Creating a global, SOA-driven media processing platform is a crucial part of Bloomberg’s technology roadmap to achieve the flexibility, maintainability and scalability required to meet current and future business requirements. Limiting vendor dependencies enables best of breed solutions reducing time to market and product launch. Bloomberg Multimedia enlisted industry experts from Triskel
to collaboratively design an open architecture and implement a standard (aka FIMS) as part of their global media platform by abstracting all media services coupled with a BPM workflow engine. This methodology yielded normalisation of media transcoding and data mover services while exposing a simple consistent interaction from the business process orchestration system.
www.tvbeurope.com September2013
EDITORIAL Editorial Director Fergal Ringrose
tvbeurope@mediateam.ie Media House, South County Business Park, Leopardstown, Dublin 18, Ireland +3531 294 7783 Fax: +3531 294 7799
Editor Neal Romanek
neal.romanek@
intentmedia.co.uk
Staff Writer Holly Ashford
holly.ashford@
intentmedia.co.uk
Intent Media London, 1st Floor, Suncourt House, 18-26 Essex Road, London N1 8LN, England +44 207 354 6002
Editorial Consultant Adrian Pennington Associate Editor David Fox USA Correspondent Carolyn Giardina Contributors Mike Clark, David Davies, Richard Dean, Chris Forrester, Mark Hill, Dick Hobbs, John Ive, George Jarrett, Heather McLean, Bob Pank, Nick Radlo, Neal Romanek, Philip Stevens, Reinhard E Wagner
Digital Content ManagerTim Frost Office Manager Lianne Davey
Jean-Pierre Evain: The Technical Board counts around 90 member companies and is co-chaired by Sony and Bloomberg/Triskel
requires accessing media assets located in many repositories (MAM, DAM, FileStorage, etc.). The FIMS Repository Service
exposes a common interface for Creating, Retrieving, Updating and Deleting (CRUD) media content, essence and associated metadata. This makes it possible for an application and/or orchestration engine to leverage a media repository as a service by providing all the features needed for implementing a media workflow. An event-driven model based on a standard SOA pattern is available as part of the interface to handle data synchronisation and state management. The repository specification will be released this month as part of the extended FIMS1.1 specification. The most recent project started
by FIMS is on quality analysis (QA), led by Interra. The FIMS QA Charter provides recommendations for a standardised FIMS-compliant API, exposing capabilities oriented around analysis and reporting of asset properties (eg, audio and video parameters or container structure compliance or integrity) identified in cooperation with EBU QC. The simple service will extract and provide information via analysis
The Bloomberg Team is expanding this same principal to other media services (repository, QC) by leveraging the solid FIMS base service interface. Current metrics are showing a significant increase in content production and distribution by enabling abstraction of media services and sharing of services across business processes. Implementation times addressing new business needs have also been drastically reduced.”
according to a pre-set profile. A higher-level service will add pass/fail parameters. Although essentially agnostic
of the SOAP or RESTful approaches to implementation, a FIMS project has been established to specify a RESTful binding of the published FIMS 1.1 services, along with a reference implementation, test suite and examples. This work is led by Quantel.
These will complement the
existing WSDL/SOAP bindings and reference implementation and will offer the same service capabilities. The group has defined a representation of the FIMS data model using the popular JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format, allowing consistent operation with XML. The REST specification will be released this month.
The FIMS Business Board,
chaired by Turner Broadcasting, exclusively composed of users (including A&E, ABC, AD-Id, AMWA, BBC, BCE Luxembourg, Bloomberg, BskyB, CBC, Cognizant, EBU, ESPN, Fox, HBO, ITV, Mesclado, MTV, NBCU, NFB Canada, NRK, Prisa Digital, RAI, RedBee Media, PBS, Sony, Triskel, Turner Asia Pacific, Turner UK, TV-Globo and Viacom), is now defining what additional services should be addressed. Several options are being considered: information management, media search and retrieval, advanced transform and other MAM related processes. FIMS is also working with SMPTE on identifying the requirements for a FIMS service for IMF. For more information:
http://www.fims.tv Contact information:
fims_adm@list.ebu.ch
Head of Design & Production Adam Butler
Editorial Production Manager Dawn Boultwood
Senior Production Executive Alistair Taylor
Publisher Steve Connolly
steve.connolly@
intentmedia.co.uk +44 207 354 6000
Sales Manager Ben Ewles
ben.ewles@intentmedia.co.uk +44 207 354 6000
Sales Executive Richard Carr
richard.carr@
intentmedia.co.uk +44 207 354 6000
Managing Director Stuart Dinsey US SALES
Michael Mitchell
Broadcast Media International, PO Box 44, Greenlawn, New York, NY 11740
mjmitchell@broadcast-media.tv +1 (631) 673 0072
JAPAN AND KOREA SALES Sho Harihara Sales & Project,
Yukari Media Incorporated
sho@yukarimedia.com +81 6 4790 2222 Fax: +81 6 4793 0800
CIRCULATION
Intent Media, Sovereign Park, Lathkill Street, Market Harborough LE16 9EF, UK
FREE SUBSCRIPTIONS
http://curwood.coffeecup.com/ forms/TVBEurope/
Subscriptions Tel +44 1580 883848
TVBEurope is published 12 times a year by Intent Media London, 1st Floor, Suncourt House, 18-26 Essex Road, London, N1 8LN, England
Intent Media is a member of the Periodical Publishers Association
© Intent Media 2013. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the copyright owners. TVB Europe is mailed to qualified persons residing on the European continent. Subscription rates £64/€96/$120.
Allow 8 weeks for new subscriptions and change of address delivery. Send subscription inquiries to: Subscription Dept, Intent Media, Sovereign Park, Lathkill Street, Market Harborough LE16 7BR, England. ISSN 1461-4197
Printing by Pensord Press, Tram Road, Pontllanfraith, Blackwood NP12 2YA
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84