Viacom Singapore: A guide to the Etere-based Media Management System

This paper is aimed to provide VIACOM departments with the guidelines required to start using the new media management workflow and all the features seamlessly integrated on it, thus permitting them to leverage the improvements performed on the overall management by including key operations such as task assignments, operations tracking, email notifications, automatic transfers, accurate conversions.

INTRODUCTION
VIACOM Inc., short for "Video & Audio Communications", is an American global mass media company, the world's fourth-largest. The current company owns Viacom International, which is the formal owner of copyrights of Viacom's corporate website and its cable networks.

Comprising BET Networks, MTV Networks, and Paramount Pictures, VIACOM operates approximately 170 networks reaching more than 600 million subscribers in 160 countries. VIACOM has a strong focus on its own in-house productions which is made for its various networks including Comedy Central, Logo, BET, Spike, TV Land, Nick at Nite, Nickelodeon, TeenNick, Nicktoons., Nick Jr., MTV, VH1, MTV2, Tr3s, CMT, Palladia.

ETERE provides VIACOM with an Etere MERP solution able to manage the entire media activity of the company -from initial acquisition to the final delivery- under a centralized and integrated workflow. A set of tailored workflows will permit operators to track every single step of the media management process while giving them the tools and functions required to reach the maximum of efficiency and reliability.

A centralized and comprehensive digital archiving system based on ETERE will be used to convert and manage VIACOM’s digital content and distribute to its Asian networks. The use of MERP workflow-based technology will permit VIACOM to significantly improve its media management by introducing on it the use of a series of enterprise capabilities including:

MERP capabilities:
■ Intelligent and tailored workflows which faithfully reflects company activities
■ Clear abstraction of tasks with custom actions, results, roles and rights
■ Detailed logging and monitoring of all manual and automatic tasks
■ Scalability for including more custom workflows and tasks at any time

This paper is aimed to provide VIACOM departments with the guidelines required to start using the new media management workflow and all the features seamlessly integrated on it, thus permitting them to leverage the improvements performed on the overall management by including key operations such as task assignments, operations tracking, email notifications, automatic transfers, accurate conversions.

OVERVIEW
The content management, from acquisition to delivery, stands on a set of file-based workflows accurately designed to perform automatic operations and take operators through their assigned tasks. The overall management is illustrated in the following diagram:

VIACOM Singapore is in charge of acquiring and localizing media content for all VIACOM channels in the Asian market. The media management takes place in the Singapore’s office of VIACOM whereas media playout is performed by ENCOMPASS, an external company which also takes care of the videotape archive and the “pre-archive” of transmission files.

The system will manage content stored in the archived with the following characteristics:
■ Codec: Used to archive SD content
■ XDCAM HD PAL: Used to archive HD content
■ Language: English (US), Malaysia (Bahasa), Indonesia (Bahasa), Thai, Simplified Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese

The VIACOM system comprehends different sections with very similar requirements; special needs of each channel will be analyzed to fully meet their requirements. The workflow management approach allows processing assets according to their related department.

INGEST
Content is acquired by the Networks Ops department using different methods depending on the source, all acquisition methods are integrated into the workflow system to make them suitable for the archive generating a final media encoded in a common PAL format.

All methods used by the acquisition system to ingest content will be detailed in this chapter. NB: It’s worth mentioning that files received as HD are processed in that format, then, in case their transmission requires it, they are down converted to SD.

Acquisition Sources
Files which arrive through the Signiant data transfer system are stored into several directories related to specific stations (e.g. Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, etc.).

Key Benefits
With the new ETERE system, VIACOM will benefit from all the advantages derived from Etere MERP, present and future operational benefits are following mentioned:
■Flexibility, on meeting all requirements by proving a versatile media management system
tightly integrated with all the metadata and equipment
■Scalability, to increase the capturing/playing channels without altering the workflow
complexity, minimizing operational overheads overall costs
■Efficiency, achieved by reducing repetitive manual operations, allowing to define and
include in advance in automatic preset workflows
■Reliability, derived from the use of streamlined workflows provided with detailed logs for tracking the overall and individual functioning of the system
■Accuracy, on all phases, reducing the risk of mistakes when archiving data since all archived
contents are continuously checked and monitored
■Integration, of non-linear editing systems to allow direct access to archive through a web
interface empowered with the highest security standards
■Security, across all operations based on specific user permissions depending on the
structure of the customer’s Active Directory domain
■Usability, a sophisticated interface guarantees a smooth use and intuitive management of media content, from ingest to playout