VTV: Guide to the Censorship and Federated management system

This paper is aimed to provide VTV operators (editing, censorship and federate operators) with the guidelines required for start using the new censorship workflow and all the features seamlessly integrated on it, thus permitting the station to leverage the improvements performed on the overall management by the inclusion of key operations such as task assignments, operations tracking, email notifications, automatic media transfers and checksum generations.

For more information and the full technical specifications, please refer to the attachment.

VTV, Vietnam Television, the national broadcaster of Vietnam is the only nation-wide TV in Vietnam. VTV was formed on September 7th, Vietnam Television became an official name on April 30th 1987 and since then it’s also become the national television. At present, Etere has a strong relationship with VTV, based on years of management of the VTV’s nine channels playout by using an Etere system, a choice that has permitted VTV to achieve an operative efficiency while meeting audience’s quality expectations.

Due to the importance and critical nature of censorship operations, Etere has provided VTV with an Etere MERP solution able to manage all the activities -from initial editing to the final checksum- under a centralized and integrated workflow. The workflow created for this purpose will permit VTV to track every single step of the censorship and federated processes, giving operators the tools and functions required to reach the maximum of efficiency and reliability:
■ Censorship management, a streamlined censorship which automates all operations and integrates editing and re-versioning capabilities to produce a suitable final content
■ Federated management, a sophisticated management of content between VTV Archive and VTV VNTC, including asset export and automatic remote retrieval capabilities

The use of workflow technology will permit TVT to significantly improve its censorship process by introducing on it the use of a series of enterprise capabilities including:

■ Intelligent and tailored workflow which faithfully reflects the censorship
■ Clear abstraction of censorship tasks with custom results, roles and rights
■ Detailed logging and monitoring from a single interface
■ Scalability for including more custom workflow actions at any time

This paper is aimed to provide VTV operators (editing, censorship and federate operators) with the guidelines required for start using the new censorship workflow and all the features seamlessly integrated on it, thus permitting the station to leverage the improvements performed on the overall management by the inclusion of key operations such as task assignments, operations tracking, email notifications, automatic media transfers and checksum generations.

Key Benefits
This paper has described the use of a censorship workflow to automate the completion of each single task involved in the censorship process of a television station. The provided workflow will allow the station to reach a large number of operational benefits and advantages derived from the use of MERP technology including the following key benefits:

■ Reliability, reached thanks to a visual representation of the censorship process which permits to have a wide view of both, the single tasks and the overall functioning
■ Flexibility, on the implementation of the workflow allowing the definition and inclusion of
custom actions that fully meet the real needs of the station
■ Scalability, for adding actions (e.g. censorship levels) without altering the workflow
complexity, thus minimizing operational overheads and reducing overall costs
■Centralization, worksheets will be efficiently managed from a central server and monitored
from a management interface to ensure the completion of every single task
■Efficiency, elimination of untracked manual and automatic operations, this, by defining
them in advance and including them in a streamlined workflow
■Accuracy, during the whole censorship process to reduce the risk of mistakes thanks to
the use of automated worksheets, transfers and checksums
■Integration, to allow non-linear editing systems to access the digital archive (through a
proper production interface) and deliver new edited versions of censored files
■Efficiency, an intelligent content management will permit to automatically remove censored content from the archive after a certain number of days of to their rejection