24 Friday 13.09.13 theibcdaily What happened to the vision?
The FIMS project, one year on from the IBC2012 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 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
“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
Jean-Pierre Evain:
The Technical Board counts around 90 member companies and is co-chaired by Sony and
Bloomberg/Triskel
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 (e.g. audio and video parameters or container structure compliance or integrity) identified in
cooperation with EBU QC. The FROM THE IMPLEMENTERS: BLOOMBERG
market and product launch. Bloomberg Multimedia enlisted industry experts from Triskel Inc 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. The Bloomberg Team is expanding this same principal to other media services (repository, QC) by leveraging the solid FIMS
FROM THE IMPLEMENTERS: TURNER BROADCASTING
"Enterprise integrations present challenges that are sometimes very difficult to overcome and require
considerable resource investment. FIMS is a framework that is specific to media processing and the
integration of components that do the work. Turner is an active FIMS participant and sees FIMS as a SOA
integration tool that provides interoperable integration of best-of-bread systems and components."
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.”
simple service will extract and provide information via analysis 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
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