SDVI just wrapped our 2025 Media Supply Chain Council – or, rather, councils as this year we hosted events in both London and New York.
At the Media Supply Chain Council, end users speak with end users on topics of relevance to media operations and technology staff. Held at the offices of ITV and Paramount, this year’s participants included leaders from BBC Studios, CTS, Disney, Hearst Networks EMEA, ITV, NBCUniversal, Paramount, RTL Germany, Sky, UKTV, Warner Bros. Discovery, and others.
Attendees heard firsthand accounts of technology projects that have had a dramatic impact on business transformation, projects that redefine how organizations operate and, in the process, bring disparate silos together.
In a contribution to TVB Europe, Geoff Stedman shared some key themes from the event: the convergence of technology and operations, the critical roles of both leadership and front-line staff, and the evolving collaborative relationship between organizations and their vendors.
Content now moves across borders and platforms with incredible speed, and media supply chains are evolving accordingly. Over the past few years, we’ve seen media organizations make real progress in building smart, efficient “factories” that automate the ingest, transformation, and packaging of content for broader distribution.
If you read this spot last month, then you know that I believe supply chain optimization has to extend beyond these “factory” walls and across the boundaries between companies. For any factory, even a highly optimized factory, most of the pain and cost are evident at the edges — the loading docks, if you will — as one partner hands content off to another. That’s why it’s so important to extend automation to the points at which content actually changes hands.
The edges of the supply chain are where you find friction in the form of duplicated effort and the need to deal with missed specifications, manual corrections, and rejected deliveries. This friction at the handoff wastes time, introduces errors, and increases cost. These issues are magnified as the number of endpoints increases. Whether you’re addressing new platforms, new languages, or just different delivery formats, your inefficiency multiplies.
In the blog, we explore the idea of “destination aware” systems: those that understand the requirements of the endpoint and use smart automation to act accordingly. (We also address standardization — and why it isn’t the answer.) Destination aware systems represent a critical first step for building trust between partners, reducing waste, and easing friction across the supply chain.
Subtitles play a crucial role in making media more accessible to a broader audience; however, ensuring they are ready for consumption can be a tedious and time-consuming task. And as the number of delivery endpoints (with their own unique requirements) grows, ensuring compliance across those endpoints becomes more complex. Operators must pay special attention to specifics such as reading speed limits, text positioning, event gap durations, and more. The good news is that Rally and the providers available in the Application Services Market can streamline this process.
With Rally, source captions can be run first through an automated QC provider, which inspects the captions for any issues, generates a report detailing those issues, and can be tailored to meet the destination’s requirements. The report, also known as time-based metadata (TBMD), can then be utilized throughout the rest of the supply chain to inform decisions on next steps.
Accurate.Video Subtitle is integrated with SDVI Rally to provide subtitle editing capabilities.
Rally can also be used to streamline subtitle editing. TBMD can be imported into a Rally Access application such as Accurate.Video Subtitle and, from that report, markers are imported onto the timeline that indicate where errors or issues occur. Accurate.Video Subtitle is equipped with a variety of tools that make the act of subtitle editing much simpler.
In the blog, we detail some of the ways in which Rally makes subtitle editing more efficient, and how third-party tools can help.
New in Rally
Creating Usability Enhancements in Rally Gateway
Regular updates to the Rally platform often include small improvements, based on user feedback, which, simplify and streamline the day-to-day work of Rally users. In our most recent sprint cycle, those included several updates for Rally Gateway.
Asset Tags and Thumbnails in Work Order Widget
The Work Order widget in Gateway can now show the asset thumbnail as well as asset tags, if configured to do so. This reduces the time it takes Gateway users to identify the work order they are looking for, in turn improving the efficiency of manual operations.
Disable Gateway Portal Pages
Gateway Portal pages can now be hidden as administrators work on them. While the page is hidden from Gateway users, administrators can build or change Gateway experiences without the possibility of accidental usage during maintenance.
Gateway Panel Layout: Automatically Open Second Panel
Rally administrators now can configure the Panel layout so that, when a Rally Gateway is configured in the Panel layout, a second panel opens automatically if the first panel is pinned. By eliminating the need to open the next panel manually, this update allows for faster access to items of interest.
These are just a few of the recent updates made to the Rally platform. Read more in our latest Rally Updates blog.
Partner Spotlight
Telestream Qualify
Qualify is the market-leading file-based QC service available to Rally users via Vantage Gateway. This powerful solution efficiently checks and verifies hundreds of video, audio, and caption characteristics at speed and scale. It boasts unique features including native workflow orchestration, AI Language Detection, and TMOS, Telestream’s proprietary video quality scoring algorithm.
Learn more about the full spectrum of best-in-class tools in the Rally Application Services Market.
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