Media: Long Live Content!

Multi-screen media was facing the challenge of storing huge volumes of analog content in physical tapes in its video library. More than storage, re-use/syndication of the content on tapes was difficult as its assortment was increasingly person dependent.

Therefore Multi-Screen Media (Brand: Sony Entertainment Television) deployed Digital Asset Management (DAM) to digitize all its analog contents (videos) to the digital file format. With MSM Digital Backbone (MSM-DBB), the company started digitizing its 10,000 hrs of library (tape based) contents and all the future contents from August 2010, with various metadata tagged with each digital asset. The metadata tagging includes the basic and advanced properties of the asset and also scene based tagging on video time-code. This mass scale digitization project got completed in June 2011, but digitization of old content is still under process. MSM sourced software solution and hardware from IBM including:

• 35 servers for various functions such as ingest, apps, DB, transcoding, portal usage
• 2 nos of 80 ports brocade fiber switch and 4 nos of 48 ports network switch
• 270 TB of high-performance online storage and 843 TB of near-line storage
• 900 slots of LTO5 robotics arm based tape library with 6 drives

Benefits

The portal of MSM-DBB enables complete search of assets as per star cast, episode numbers, airing dates of the television episodes, and scenes. For example, now one can search all sixes of cricketer Yuvraj Singh in the IPL 4 and the tool will search all video clips, where Yuvraj is hitting sixes and edit the assets accordingly.

MSM has competitive edge with respect to content flow for selling and also time to air. It will also build the effectiveness on the performance by reducing the time to search the specific content by more than 70-90%. As the contents are available on file format and also transcoders are attached to the solution, a content can be transcoded to a specific format (web, mobile, etc) and the content can be re-purposed. This has opened up a new revenue stream all together.

MSM will see the RoI of this project within the next 34 months, ie, by 2013, effectively.

Operational Impact

The Merger and Migration of Content from Player-to-Player: In case of any M&A among the media organizations for convenient library merger, with DAM, it's easier to migrate content from player-to-player.

Consumers Demand for Content: As savvy consumers demand the content on their platform. The DAM will enable the content on their platform and serve them any time, any place as per their demand.

Social Impact

Due to the MSM-DBB, all the tapes which are hazardous and magnetic are eliminated and changed to file based. Secondly, very few tapes are sent through courier or are hand delivered, which otherwise causes more carbon to the society, informs Ajay Kumar Meher, senior vice president and head, technology, Sony Entertainment Television.