An interview with industry thought leader, Tony Taylor, TMD Executive Chairman
London, September 2019
As the global media ecosystem evolves from what has been a relatively simple traditional linear broadcast distribution model to a complex multi-faceted and geographically distributed content supply chain, ensuring the efficiency of the businesses operating within it becomes crucial to their profitability and survival.
With ever increasing demands from new and existing clients of TMD a key theme we are currently seeing in the industry, is the desire to improve return on investment of content, enhance the accessibility of it and to deliver digital transformation across the organisation that creates operational efficiencies.
Cloud and Coeus
Although there is arguably still a lot of hype about the benefits of cloud-based platforms, it is an undeniable fact that they provide an opportunity for all types of organisations. Particularly those that traditionally would not have had the resources for a content supply chain management solution, to now participate in it and therefore gain the efficiencies that larger organisations get from it.
At TMD we have partnered with ERA, a data centre and storage services provider, for the creation of Coeus Intelligent Media Archiving. This cloud platform provides a secure environment with enhanced capabilities including comprehensive accessibility and discoverability as well as intelligent content queue management features. The cost-effective subscription-based plans provide organisations of any size with a scalable model to efficiently adapt with the growth of their content library on either a short or long-term basis.
Cloud based platforms and storage facilities are becoming progressively more and more popular across all sizes of organisation. For organisations with a large and valuable archive, they enable content that is not used often to be cost effectively stored to secure it and protect its value and hence improve its return on investment. An example of this is TMD’s client, Astro in Malaysia, who currently have the Mediaflex-UMS platform on premise for demanding content supply chain management processes but are migrating content into Amazon Glacier as well as looking at the wider implications of migrating the Mediaflex-UMS platform to AWS. This hybrid solution is financially advantageous for Astro because it reduces vault storage costs and improves the longevity of the content and hence preserving it for future use.
Of course, there are quite a few cloud service providers now and as a software provider we look at ensuring our solutions meet the demands of a multitude of clients across a range of platforms. This includes the Oracle Cloud, platform where we have been working with Oracle Cloud solutions architects to implement a managed services content supply chain solution across the APAC region. More information to come on this in the coming weeks.
Mediaflex-UMS
As an organisation that has extensive expertise through experience in the media industry, we have been leveraging it to enhance the capabilities of our Mediaflex-UMS platform. Of course, UX (User Experience) has to be placed at the heart of the design philosophy of any business system. In the media industry UX means many things from the look and feel of the user interface, through to the ease of workflow orchestration, systems administration and engineering support. All of which are comprehensively catered for in the platform. Recent updates of the Mediaflex-UMS web-based UI include enhancements to the video player, workflow orchestration engine and cloud deployment capabilities. These enhancements are designed to provide a platform not just for traditional media companies, but for new entrants, marketing/brand agencies and VOD/OTT organisations, whether used in an on-prem, cloud or hybrid environment. Licencing options include perpetual, subscription and pay-per-use.
Archives
The world has a plethora of archive organisations from private collections to national agencies. All of which have a mandate to secure and preserve a wide range of objects from physical artefacts to digital content. The work that we have carried out for our archive clients includes the acquisitions, accessioning and collections management of both physical and digital objects and assets. For physical objects there is comprehensive functionality such as vaults management that includes space management, barcode creation, printing and scanning, as well as that for acclimatisation where objects such as film cans are kept in climate-controlled environments and need to be returned to room temperature. For digital objects there is comprehensive functionality for digitisation, QA, QC, curation and of course access to the content.
Kuala Lumpur
A recent progression for TMD is its new venture with DAMSmart and Silver Trak Digital in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Australia based company, DAMSmart has a key focus upon content preservation and archiving digitisation, with Mediaflex-UMS facilitating some projects surrounding these areas. Silver Trak Digital provides content aggregation and logistics services, as well as having recently acquired DAMSmart. Through creating a joint brand by bringing the three companies together, a platform collectively providing solutions for tape management and digitisation all the way through the content supply chain to content aggregation and delivery has been created. Therefore, providing a greater scope of services and solutions for the South East Asia region with the aim to meet and cater to the growing demand and needs of the media sectors there.
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