At IBC, Jan-Hendrik Hein of Hearst Networks EMEA sat down to share that company’s experience working with AWS and SDVI to reimagine its media supply chain.
Committing both to technical transformation and to process innovation, the organization and its existing personnel deployed the Rally platform on AWS cloud. This expansive and radical change encompasses every step in the Hearst Networks EMEA supply chain, every third-party system with which information is exchanged, and numerous discrete systems. Through a truly integrated cloud-based supply chain and data-driven automated workflows, the organization has brought exceptional control, flexibility, and speed to its content preparation and distribution operations.
Here, Jan-Hendrik Hein describes the project in his own words:
In last month’s blog about the importance of connections between systems, I declared that no system — not even Rally — can exist as an island. This month I’ll go one step further to say that no company can function as an island either. Partnerships play a critical role in driving innovation and delivering better solutions to customers.
Our involvement in building a best practice cloud-based media supply chain for content localization, undertaken with other tech leaders as part of an IBC Accelerator Programme, is just one example. Countless other partnerships formed over the years offer further proof that collaboration among technology companies creates a stronger, more connected industry that is more responsive to end-user requirements. That’s why, for any media organization looking to solve a technology problem, it’s worthwhile to assess each vendor’s approach to collaboration and their success in building partnerships that not only drive faster delivery of better solutions, but also enable greater agility in maintaining those solutions and their efficacy.
Just as systems must integrate seamlessly to perform at their best, technology vendors must work collaboratively to minimize friction for end users. This month in the blog, we discuss how partnerships allow vendors to build on one another’s expertise and capacity for innovation to solve hard problems more effectively and efficiently for customers than any one vendor could on its own.
Editor’s note: “What was your favorite problem you helped solve in the past year?” This is the question we posed to our Technical Solutions team at the start of the year. Their answers reveal some of the best problem-solving taking place on Rally media supply chains today. This is the first in their series of answers.
The Problem
Our customer had a remote team executing QC tasks on laptops, utilizing a common NLE. While the organization had successfully migrated their content library and processing workflows to the cloud, content was pulled out of the cloud for QC tasks, plus they needed more editing capability. The customer was experiencing unnecessary expenses, administrative headaches, and the possibility of security vulnerabilities inherent in maintaining remote workstations. Migrating all of that content in and out of the cloud both created lots of egress costs and weakened the security posture of their supply chain overall.
The Assignment
- Keep content in the cloud environment, eliminating egress costs and reliance on legacy on-prem storage (or laptops).
- Give editors (and administrators!) a consistent workstation setup utilizing a single, current NLE.
- Add robust edit and versioning capabilities into a new, optimized workflow.
In the blog, we show how the customer’s new workflow provides clear visibility, consistency, and security. The customer now has a full edit/versioning workflow that is maintained in the Rally environment where administrators enjoy full control. And the organization has assurance that manual QC and versioning processes will not expose them to needless egress costs or security vulnerabilities.
New in Rally
Gateway Import/Export, New Caption & Subtitle Supports
New Gateway Import/Export
The Gateway import and export functionality has been updated to use a format that simplifies transfers from one silo to another. This update eliminates reliance on resource IDs, instead using resource names. It also includes a more sophisticated UI that shows progress and error messages more clearly.
SDVI has removed legacy export functionality and will remove legacy import at a later date. This approach allows users to import saved Gateways in the old format and to export them to the new format as necessary.
Accurate Player: Additional Subtitle Support
Accurate Player within Rally Gateway now supports scc, srt, stl, pac, and itt subtitle formats.
Closed Caption Converter — Sync Checks
Closed Caption Converter has been updated to allow for synchronization checks between captions and videos, automating a previously manual tagging process.
These are just a few of the recent updates made to the Rally platform. Read more in our latest Rally Updates blog.
Application Spotlight
Skywalker Sound Tools
Cinnafilm has partnered with one of the most respected names in audio, Skywalker Sound™, to bring their world class tools to the PixelStrings platform, including their unique content aware upmixing.
Based on signal processing technology developed and used for over thirty years at the legendary Skywalker Ranch, Skywalker Sound Tools provide an intelligent, automated audio pipeline offering channel mapping, routing and combining, loudness analysis and correction,downmixing, and much more.
Learn more about the full spectrum of best-in-class tools in the Rally Application Services Market.
Upcoming Events
