SPECIAL REPORT ///


The Need for MAM Midwives


/// By Craig Norris


t has been three years already since I wrote an article about media asset management (MAM). That's a


long time in the world of IT and digital production platforms. In three years, Nokia went from being the world's number one phone maker to being sold for a song to Microsoft. Three years ago, a


fully-fledged MAM was very much in the "too hard" basket for a lot of broadcasters. But today, some broadcasters have embraced a fully-fledged MAM implementation and benefitted strongly from it. One such survivor of the MAM


implementation experience is Foxtel in Australia. Foxtel subscribers enjoy


more than one hundred channels of television, radio and music entertainment, with more than twenty of those television channels completely owned and operated by Foxtel. That means Foxtel makes all the programming decisions, acquires the content and prepares the material for final broadcast, and keeps a content library for all of those twenty-something channels. In Foxtel's pre-MAM life, the


previous paragraph implies that a lot of videotape was received,


processed and stored -- and all by way of manual handling. Post-MAM, things are very different, and much better. How did they do it? This author has been


involved in the Foxtel MAM project, not as a full time participant, but as a casual contributor who participated in a lot of the earliest planning activities, and subsequently as an occasional auditor-cum- sanity-checker-cum-diagram creator. One of my early contri-


butions was an analysis of the extrapolated volumes for incoming new content and their sources, and the various flavours of file format and content encoding that could be expected. The result of the analysis showed that there were dozens of major content providers in diverse locations around the world. The diversity of content


sources is in itself an inconvenience. There was also a further complication brought about by a lack of standardization in the file formats and encoding schemes for the digital content that they could provide. Foxtel's solution for


mitigating the operational complexity brought about by


//////////////// 4 TV Technology Europe I February-March 2014


the diverse sources and formats was to utilise experts in the collection, conversion and QC of the digital content master files. The aforementioned


preprocessing of the incoming files has become the role of external content aggregators. Now Foxtel only needs to deal with a small number of content aggregators who each acquire the original master files from the various distributors and then deliver that content to Foxtel ---- after conversion to a standardized file format and encoding scheme. The external aggregators


collect the studio original master files from the content providers in Hollywood, New York, Atlanta, London, Singapore and the other major centres of television content distribution. Then they edit those master files to close up any gaps, note the timecode locations for the natural breaks where programme segments can be defined, render an output file in Foxtel's house format and finish off with a full file QC. Foxtel's operations have


been streamlined. The company now only deals directly with unified and pre-formatted content that has already had a local QC before delivery. Foxtel's incoming file traffic


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