Designing and Integrating a Cloud-Based-MAM System in Only Three Weeks with Vidispine
Customer Case - AKK on Vidispine Media Supply Chain
LOGIC Media Solutions implemented a complete Vidispine media supply chain for German live-broadcast provider AKK in just three weeks thanks to the use of managed services and by reusing development components.
Availability and fast turn-around are critical challenges for any live broadcast media workflows today. Live transmission of events such as sports is of course especially demanding due to the high numbers of viewers, the low latency requirements and the storage and distribution infrastructure needed to feed the news sites with instant clips of highlights and interviews.
Journalists need instant access to highlight material, background or preliminary reports and interviews, in addition, to live feeds from event to be able to tag them and download them if necessary. They also need the latest information fast.
This is a very common media supply chain requirement in the world of sports on the internet (OTT) today, where minutes and even seconds can be the difference between updated and outdated news. And by extension of course also a difference between revenue and ROI (return of investment) on each event. For AKK, a German live–broadcast provider for 30 years, it was obvious that a new OVP (Online Video Platform) was needed. One that could be easily customized for each event and allow journalists and similar users access to different sports events by managed permissions.
To meet these challenges, system architect LOGIC decided to build a new native cloud-based MAM solution that could easily be scaled to any number of users and technical requirements for AKK. Vidispine’s platform VidiNet was the obvious choice for this challenge as AKK was able to benefit from the platforms managed services and agile development of a new UI, using existing components.
The Vidispine Media Supply Chain - How Does It Work?
Vidispine's cloud-native platform VidiNet is a service portal for managing content and for hosting media services such as the VidiCore API, VidiCoder, AWS Elemental Mediaconvert and Bitmovin to mention a few. This whole architecture is designed to act both as a cloud-native MAM system ready to go, and as a developer platform in the cloud. We call this ecosystem, VidiNet.
The Vidispine MAM solution was the perfect choice for building a media supply chain, flexible enough to meet the workflow challenges and requirements that LOGIC and AKK were facing.
When an operator uploads a clip to the MAM this initiates VidiCoder, the transcoder workhorse in the Vidispine media supply chain, to immediately convert the incoming video formats from uploaded ProRes versions to H264 versions for various multi-format distribution workflows. Due to AKK’s need for different users, the MAM system enables different user types, which apart from the administrator role, contains two main types of users:
- The operator – responsible for uploading clips and content to the MAM system
- The journalist – qualified to download content for news publication
The journalists log on to their accounts and depending on credentials, get access to highlights, interviews, statistics and more needed to update news articles as the sport events proceeds.
“The beauty of this architecture is that it also allows individualized user access to provide journalists with content that is even more target group-specific. For example, a workflow covering a football premium league will allow account logins for each individual game.” – Helena Steinholtz, Customer Success Manager at Vidispine
Helena Steinholtz and her customer success team at Vidispine designed and delivered a fully working system for LOGIC in just three weeks. This was made possible due to Vidispine´s culture of working close together with our customer as well as the accurate system specification provided by LOGIC and AKK.
The Solution
The Vidispine media supply chain for LOGIC and AKK was first used in the Diriyah Tennis CUP 2019. The Vidispine CS (Customer Success) team designed a dedicated graphical user face based on the Video Library component of VDT, a building block for creating unique graphical user interfaces for any customer media supply chain. The Video Library component of VDT is a Vidispine graphical user interface model based on our VDT (VidiCore Development Toolkit) available for our customers.
“Being able to not only present a company profile GUI (Graphic User interface) but also exposing just the right tools for each user is a significant workflow advantage of the Video Library component of the VDT. AKK and LOGIC gave us some basic graphical guidelines for the user interface, and we built the user interface based on those guidelines.” – says Helena
The VidiNet solution is hosted by LOGIC’s in-house product LOGIC Portal and is provided to AKK as a turnkey solution to be reused without incurring additional development costs. The user interface can be easily adapted to the design of any particular event, which further enhances the recognition value.
AKK, was very happy with the final media workflow solution: “Many thanks to LOGIC Media Solutions. In the short time it was possible to create a functional and appealing cloud solution. Even short-term changes to the technical requirements were quickly implemented. With this platform we have the opportunity to distribute our customers’ images to editorial customers in a targeted manner. I look forward to continued good cooperation and projects in 2020.” – John Sturm, Managing Director of AKK
What does Media Supply Chain mean, why do I need one, and how do I implement one? Get answers to your questions and learn how to achieve efficiency and get added values with a Media Supply Chain.
Why Build Your Solution with Vidispine?
The media supply chain designed for LOGIC's customer AKK is a perfect example of the flexibility and scalability of a Vidispine MAM solution in VidiNet. No matter the workload of the system, the native cloud architecture will instantly scale up to meet any requirement as they occur. With the available industry-leading transcode services like Bitmovin, AWS Elemental Media Convert and VidiCoder at your fingertip, your media supply chain can be technically adapted to meet any new distribution model that awaits around the corner.
About LOGIC Media Solutions: LOGIC’s team of highly qualified and trained engineers offers services from pre-and post-sales service plus consulting. LOGIC focuses on Media-production, -broadcast, -contribution, and –distribution. The customers are broadcasters, enterprises, and telecommunication companies. More about LOGIC: here
About AKK: AKK has been one of the providers in Germany for live broadcasting for over 30 years. Whether live transmission via satellite or internet, video wall, graphics packages, editing stations, or suitable creative staff – they put your event in the proper perspective. More about AKK: here
Your Contacts for Getting Started with Vidispine