WarnerMedia Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Production Metadata Workflows & Standards for Media & Entertainment

Posted on 25th June 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Metadata has long been understood as important, particularly by archivists. But it’s only in recent years that a renewed focus has been put on metadata. As the large broadcasters and media houses have expanded and as streaming has become a bigger and bigger proportion of output, it’s become increasingly clear that a coherent, already-executed metadata strategy is essential. Recently, A+E had 5 weeks to transfer much of their inventory to Discovery+ which was achieved largely thanks to a cloud-to-cloud transfer and ingest workflow which not only checked the integrity of the media but also ensured metadata was correctly transferred.

In this video from SMPTE New York, we hear from WarnerMedia’s Yonah Levenson and Dave Satin about metadata and workflows. Yonah starts by defining the different types of metadata: Descriptive (e.g. time of day), Technical (e.g. File size, Compression), Administrative (e.g. Who created, last modified, location), Usage (e.g. when last used. how many times, Structural (e.g. Page numbers. Scene numbers), Preservation (e.g. location of file, checksum, retention policy) and Rights (e.g. Licensing, Permissions, Contracts, who signed off on rights).

Yonah gives examples on all of the above and then discusses standards and best practices for metadata such as starting with a spreadsheet, ensuring you get the right governance from the start, writing every decision down and getting a whole range of people involved to ensure your metadata plan is going to suit the company as a whole and not just your part of it.

Dave Satin takes the floor next and shows how the logical technical blocks of the video workflow interact with external software and services. On top of this, he then overlays the people needed to run these functions as well as the problems that generally come up. His over-archine point being that complex supply chains cause complex problems. He continues to highlight metadata pain points and which workflow problems they give rise to.

Dave finishes on a very compelling iceberg graphic showing much of the required functions in metadata lie below the surface of obvious requirements. The trick is to identify and adopt them into your workflows before crashing.

Yonah returns to the stage to introduce the Language Metadata Table, also known as LMT. First started in 2017, it’s grown to describing 239 languages with a further 150 on the way. Speaking earlier this year, Yonah explained “People speak different languages…you don’t know what they’re saying and we have this problem in the industry where there really hasn’t been a definitive, unified standard of language codes.” LMT addresses this problem and works for Audio, Visual (subs, narratives, Sign language), Content Licensing
Rights, Acquisition, Distribution content, Localisation preferences.

This is ongoing work between MESA and SMPTE to get this standardised. The working group will meet again soon.

The session closes with a long Q&A session which includes a discussion of camera-originated metadata, maximising metadata, when to start collecting metadata (when money starts being spent), use of metadata to tag ‘sprites’ used in films so the sprite can be localised to national sensitivities/cultural norms, finding ‘homes’ for metadata such as standards like AXF, logging regional restrictions on archive news footage, differences in camera-collected metadata, the importance of having the right metadata during obituaries, metadata conservation for archives intended for 150 years in the future.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Will Kreth Meta Data Systems & Simply.TV DDEX WG co-chair
	Yonah Levenson Manager, Metadata Strategy & Taxonomy Governance, WarnerMedia / HBOMax
	James Snyder Library of Congress and SMPTE board member
	Dave Satin Digital Imaging Technician, HDR & 4K expert

Video: Understanding the World of Ad Tech

Posted on 27th May 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Advertising has been the mainstay of TV for many years. Like it or loathe it, ad-support VoD (AVoD) delivers free to watch services that open up content to a much wider range of people than otherwise possible just like ad-supported broadcast TV. Even people who can afford subscriptions have a limit to the number of services they will subscribe to. Having an AVoD offering means you can draw people in and if you also have SVoD, there’s a path to convince them to sign up.

To look at where ad tech is today and what problems still exist, Streaming Media contributing editor Nadine Krefetz has brought together Byron Saltysiak from WarnerMedia, Verizon Media’s Roy Firestone, CBS Interactive’s Jarred Wilichinksy and Newsy’s Tony Brown to share their daily experience of working with OTT ad tech.

Nadine is quick to ask the panel what they feel the weakest link is in ad tech. ‘Scaling up’ answered Jarred who’s seen from massive events how quickly parts of the ad ecosystem fail when millions of people need an ad break at the same time. Bryon adds that with the demise of flash came the loss of an abstraction layer. Now, each platform has to be targetted directly leading to a lot of complexity. Previously, as long as you got flash right, it would work on all platforms. Lastly, redundancy came up as a weakness. Linked to Jarred’s point about the inability to scale easily, the panel’s consensus is they are far off broadcast’s five-nines uptime targets. In some ways, this is to be expected as IT is a more fragmented, faster-moving market than consumer TVs making it all the harder to keep up and match the changing patterns.

A number of parts of the conversation centred around ad tech as an ecosystem. This is a benefit and a drawback. Working in an ecosystem means that as much as the streaming provider wants to invest in bolstering their own service to make it able to cope with millions upon millions of requests, they simply can’t control what the rest of the ecosystem does and if 2 million people all go for a break at once, it doesn’t take much for an ad provider’s servers to collapse under the weight. On the other hand, points out Byron, what is a drawback is also a strength whereby streaming has the advantage of scale which broadcasters don’t. Roy’s service delivered one hundred thousand matches last year. Byron asks how many linear channels you’d need to cover that many.

Speed is a problem given that the ad auction needs to happen in the twenty seconds or so leading up to the ad being shown to the viewer. With so many players, things can go wrong starting off simply with slow responses to requests. But also with ad lengths. Ad breaks are built around 15 seconds segments so it’s difficult when companies want 6 or 11 seconds and it’s particularly bad when five 6-second ads are scheduled for a break: “no-one wants to see that.”

Jarred laments that despite the standards and guidelines available that “it’s still the wild west” when it comes to ad quality and loudness where viewers are the ones bearing the brunt of these mismatched practices.

Nadine asks about privacy regulations that are increasingly reducing the access advertisers have to viewer data. Byron points out that they do in some way need a way to identify a user such that they avoid showing them the same ad all the time. It turns out that registered/subscribed users can be tracked under some regulations so there’s a big push to have people sign up.

Other questions covered by the panel include QA processes, the need for more automation in QA, how to go about starting your own service, dealing with Roku boxes and how to deal with AVoD downloaded files which, when brought online, need to update the ad servers about which ads were watched.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Tony Brown Chief of Staff, Newsy
	Jarred Wilichinsky SVP Global Video Monetization and Operations, CBS Interactive
	Byron Saltysiak VP of Video and Connected Devices, WarnerMedia
	Roy Firestone Principal Product Manger, Verizon Media
	Nadine Krefetz Contributing Editor, Streaming Media

Video: Cloud Services for Media and Entertainment: Production and Post-Production

Posted on 28th January 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

My content producers and broadcasters have been forced into the cloud. Some have chosen remote controlling their on-prem kit but many have found that the cloud has brought them benefits beyond simply keeping their existing workflows working during the pandemic.

This video from SMPTE’s New York section looks at how people moved production to the cloud and how they intend to keep it there. The first talk from WarnerMedia’s Greg Anderson discussing the engineering skills needed to be up to the task concluding that there are more areas of knowledge in play than one engineer can bring to the table from the foundational elements such as security, virtulisation nad networking, to DevOps skills like continuous integration and development (CI/CD), Active Directory and databases.

The good news is that whichever of the 3 levels of engineer that Greg introduces, from beginner to expert, the entry points are pretty easy to access to start your journey and upskilling. Within the company, Greg says that leaders can help accelerate the transition to cloud by allowing teams a development/PoC account which provides a ‘modest’ allowance each month for experimentation, learning and prooving ideas. Not only does that give engineers good exposure to cloud skills, but it gives managers experience in modelling, monitoring and analysing costs.

Greg finishes by talking through their work with implementing a cloud workflow for HBO MAX which is currently on a private cloud and on the way to being in the public cloud. The current system provides for 300 concurrent users doing Edit, Design, Engineering and QC workflows with asset management and ingest. They are looking to the public cloud to consolidate real estate and standardise the tech stack amongst many other drivers outlined by Greg.

Scott Bounds Architect at Microsoft Azure talks about content creation in the cloud. The objectives for Azure is to allow worldwide collaboration, speed up the time to market, allow scaling of content creation and bring improvements in security, reliability and access of data.

This starts for many by using hybrid workflows rather than a full switch to the cloud. After all, Scott says that rough cut editing, motion graphics and VFX are all fairly easy to implement in the cloud whereas colour grading, online and finishing are still best for most companies if they stay on-prem. Scott talks about implementing workstations in the cloud allowing GPU-powered workstations to be used using the remote KVM technology PCoIP to connect in. This type of workflow can be automated using Azure scripting and Terraform.

John Whitehead is part of the New York Times’ Multimedia Infrastructure Engineering team which have recently moved their live production to the cloud. Much of the output of the NYT is live events programming such as covering press conferences. John introduces their internet-centric microservices architecture which was already being worked on before the pandemic started.

The standard workflow was to have a stream coming into MCR which would then get routed to an Elemental encoder for sending into the cloud and distributed with Fastly. To be production-friendly they had created some simple-to-use web frontends for routing. For full-time remote production, John explains they wanted to improve their production quality by adding a vision mixer, graphics and closed captions. John details the solution they chose which comprised cloud-first solutions rather than running windows in the cloud.

The NYT was pushed into the cloud by Covid, but it was felt to be low risk and something they were considering doing anyway. The pandemic forced them to consider that perhaps the technologies they were waiting for had already arrived and ended up saving on Capex and received immediate returns on their investment.

Finishing up the presentations is Anshul Kapoor from Google Cloud who presents market analysis on the current state of cloud adoption and the market conditions. He says that one manifestation of the current crisis is that new live-events content is reduced if not postponed which is making people look to their archives. Some people have not yet done their archiving process, whilst some already have a digital archive. Google and other cloud providers can offer vast scale in order to process and manage archives but also machine learning in order to process, make sense and make searchable all the content.

The video ends with an extensive Q&A with the presenters.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Greg Anderson Senior Systems Engineer, WarnerMedia
	Scott Bounds Media Cloud Architect, Microsoft
	John Whitehead Senior Engineer, Multimedia Infrastructure Engineering, New York Times
	Anshul Kapoor Business Development, Google Cloud

Video: Is Too Much Choice No Choice At All? What Consumers Want In The Era Of Peak TV

Posted on 7th August 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

The number of streaming services continues to expand are we going back to the future with too much choice, just like cable TV packages with a thousand channels? Discovery will launch a direct-to-consumer service imminently and ViacomCBS Nordics are launching a new SVOD service to global markets, just to cite two examples of new launches after Disney+ proved that with the right brand and content, it’s not too difficult quickly rack up tens of millions of subscribers globally.

This panel from Streaming Media Connect discusses navigating the world of multiple streaming services and finding what you want starting with a look at the programmes that US respondents to an annual survey value most.
They discuss the average number of streaming subscriptions today in different demographics and how each of them expects this to change in the future with some suggesting an average of around 3, some more so. This reveals the question of whether YouTube is AVOD or SVOD, one service or millions. People will come back to a service depending on ‘how deep and hot often [it’s] refreshed’.

Ali Hodjat from Intertrust, highlights a 16% increase in content DRM licence delivery during the pandemic. Keeping DRM licences delivery smooth is essential for low-latency streaming. There has been a COVID-related boost in viewing, so Matt Rivet raises the question of whether this will reduce again. Sherry Brennan suggests it will go down, but the market share shifts which have happened are likely to remain, sports watching excepted. The reason for this is that the pandemic is likely to have prompted people to try new things, and many will find these suit them.

It’s estimated that 17% of video traffic is streaming of pirated material. Though many torrents are legal, there has been an increase in torrent downloads during the lockdowns. Ali and Matt discuss the question of whether discovery is a barrier to people accessing video legally. For those that have many services, ‘choice paralysis’ is a thing and does hamper selecting something to watch, particularly when not alone. Whilst getting consensus across multiple people is always difficult, it’s made no shorter when there are 200 options across 3 services. The panel starts with the principle that it’s “too hard to search” and discusses recommendation engines and the difficulty of tracking who’s watching.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Sarah Lyons Senior Vice President, Product Experience HBO MAX / WarnerMedia
	Randa Minkarah President, Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder, Resonance AI
	Sherry Brennan Senior Media Consultant
	Ali Hodjat Directory of Product Marketing Intertrust
	Moderator: Matthew Rivet Director, Altman Solon

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