Stitching Together the Digital Workflow

Jonathan Lunness

With the advent of digital media, IP and IT technologies are revolutionising the delivery and consumption of media. Television, Broadband and Telco industries are converging, bringing with them new opportunities to reach audiences, in new and varied ways.

These opportunities are not without challenges. Typically these new channels need to be launched with budgets that are a fraction of what was available back in the days of analogue television. Furthermore budgets that typically accounted for 1 or 2 channels a decade ago, are now being diluted across more and more diverse channels.

Increasingly the success of these new channels is dependent on broadcasters being able to reuse and repurpose media in economical ways across sites, or even across continents. The arrival of digital media has opened opportunities for massive savings and workflow enhancements that were never possible in the days of tape and film. A tape was a physical object and could only be available in one place at one time. Tapes couldn’t be shared between users, and couldn’t be accessed without specialist hardware such as a VTR. Digital media changed it all.

Today nearly every broadcaster uses digital media, and many are deploying digital workflows throughout their facility. Broadcast equipment manufacturers, along with a number of IT manufactures have responded with applications that can capture, manipulate or move this media. However with the multitude of formats, standards and manufacturers, no one supplier can truly claim to have an all-encompassing system, or an end to end workflow. Whilst a number of these broadcast solutions do work as islands or even continents, (in the case of some of the larger brands), there will always come a point where a system needs to interface to another device or to handle an alternative format.

It’s at this point where even the best planned workflow can fail, and an otherwise automated process falls back to relying on dubbing or manual keying of data in order to complete a stage in processing. These automated workflows can fail for many reasons, but it’s typically where vendors of different pieces of hardware need to exchange data. Sometimes there’s debate over whose responsibility it is to deliver the interface, or who correctly supports a given standard, but either way this area is typically a headache for broadcasters and manufacturers alike.

At Suitcase TV we understand these challenges, and frequently find ourselves in the middle of these discussions when broadcasters and suppliers are seeking solutions. As a result, Suitcase has developed a large portfolio of applications both in the hardware and software domains to solve just these kinds of headaches. Unlike other manufactures we’re not pretending to offer end to end solutions, but rather a series of applications that can act as the digital glue in today’s file based workflow.

At IBC2008 we’ll be demonstrating our Purple logging and monitoring systems as well highlighting collaborative workflow solutions such as Aqua, that allow broadcasters to move, manage and manipulate media across facilities.

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