Automated Content Supply Chain Management in the cloud. Completely in the cloud

Off the Fence (OTF), an award-winning producer and distributor of factual television and feature-length theatrical documentaries, has recently migrated their content management and fulfilment operation away from an outsourced service to an in-house, self-service model based on BLAM.

Overall, the BLAM platform provides a wide range of functions supporting the OTF content services team, however, this BLAM Briefing focuses on the automated content supply chain capability.

System Overview & Integrations BLAM is provided to Off the Fence as a managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) from Blue Lucy.

Functionally, BLAM is the material repository for the entire OTF media inventory and provides fully automated content delivery capability. Operationally, BLAM orchestrates cloud-based services and provides precise management information through dashboards and specific reporting.

Behind the browser-based user interface, Blue Lucy uses AWS services as infrastructure to provide a cost-effective solution with infinite scalability. BLAM utilises Amazon Web Services (AWS) Relational Database Service (RDS) for database provision and the BLAM services run in Docker Containers on the AWS Elastic Container Service (ESC).

BLAM also utilises and orchestrates a number of cloud-based services from providers with whom OTF has direct commercial relationships:

AWS S3 for all content storage;

AWS Elemental MediaConvert for transcode / format conversion;

Signiant Media Shuttle for content delivery;

Telestream CloudQC for automated quality assessment;

EasyTrack is the content rights management system. It is the master business system and is the single source of truth' component in the overall system which holds the rights and material metadata for the inventory of around 80,000 assets.

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Content Migration The OTF operating model is a great example of an increasingly popular business model in which a content owner takes direct control of inventory management and fulfilment, using technology provided on a Platform as a Service (PaaS) basis.

Typically, the biggest perceived difficulties in the migration of a significant media catalogue to the cloud (in this case more than a petabyte) is how long it will take and how much it will cost. This is a misperception though, AWS make the migration process extremely easy with their Snowball Service, as we've discussed in a previous posts. Using Snowballs means material arrives in the S3 Bucket in bulk - about 3,000 files per batch - with each file triggering a set of linked ingest workflows:

Automated format validation;

Automated browse/proxy creation;

Automated matching of received media files to BLAM Placeholders EasyTrack Products are mapped to BLAM Asset placeholders and keyed using the expected file name data;

Manual Task flows for operators to quickly confirm that the file essence matches the Asset or to manually match.

Process Automation & BLAM WorkOrders Whilst there is a high degree of workflow-based automation during ingest, the fulfilment function is entirely automated using BLAM WorkOrders. WorkOrders create a relationship between individual workflows, allowing synchronisation, aggregation, and monitoring of complex or multi-faceted functions. Efficient operating models utilise parallel running workflows and the workflow components may not always be sequential; WorkOrders provide a mechanism for orchestrating these composite workflows.

Conceptual view of BLAM WorkOrders

The WorkOrder model is configurable in BLAM and allows a menu of Services to be created which are mapped to one or more automated or task based Workflows. WorkOrders may be raised within the BLAM user interface or passed in from third-party systems via the API. The WorkOrder itself will typically relate to media assets and call the Services from the menu that are required to deliver the required outc

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