Automating And Simplifying Workflows

Abstract

Any broadcast organization that remains static runs the risk of being overtaken by newer, more agile alternatives. To remain competitive, broadcasters must constantly work to increase process velocity, accuracy, and flexibility. These goals cannot be reached without reducing time to market, manual touch-points, and associated labor costs. A major hurdle on this road to efficiency is the absence of a universal method to identify content, resulting in unnecessary manual workflows and time- and resource-consuming communications with third parties for the production, processing, and exchange of content. Root causes for these impracticalities include problems with work identification during acquisition, reconciliation, and de-duplication of assets obtained from multiple sources; placing high demands on limited resources; and causing delays or reducing content capacity. A necessary element to solve this problem is the use of globally unique and persistent works identification. As such, it will open the door to quasi-instantaneous, metadata based, machine-to-machine processes. A well-designed ID will include content and video service identifiers. Its architecture will also allow the embedding of other IDs such as pre-existing, in-house, local, application-specific, third-party, or content-rich commercial identifiers. Whether for feature films, episodic series, or even sports, significant benefits can be found by leveraging a unique ID recognized throughout the workflow and by all partners from content origination to processing, enrichment, storage, distribution, measurement, and attribution. In this paper, we explain the desired structure of identifiers plus their positive impact on workflows and speed. Finally, use case examples will demonstrate real-world applications.