How do you measure a media company’s responsiveness? The agility with which it can adapt to change or seize new opportunities? The time it takes to bring new content to market?
Specific metrics for responsiveness are difficult to pin down. But having the capacity to flex and scale makes all the difference in being able to say yes to business opportunities, and it’s vital in an environment where nothing is predictable.
The simple fact is that we operate in a business environment that is, always has been, and always will be unpredictable. Given this fundamental unpredictability, you could make the operational argument that responsiveness is, by definition, an imperative. (And on some level, the shift of media supply chains to the cloud reflects an acceptance of this dynamic.)
That’s why, when one of our customers captured the essence of responsiveness in a simple phrase, we seized on it. It is a metric that highlights a truth that many Rally customers discover: the more they push on efficiency, the more agility they gain.
In this month’s Supply Chain Thinking blog, learn how “resources per output asset per time” is a perfect metric for responsiveness.
SDVI’s Decision Engine is a powerful, innovative tool designed to streamline media workflows and supercharge the decision-making capabilities. The Decision Engine provider allows Rally users to custom-build logic using Python code, enabling:
- Better management and parsing of ingested files
- Reviewing the presence and format of ingested media
- Decision-making for deliveries based on metadata
- Communication with third parties
- Triggering multiple operations in parallel
Its unique design helps control race conditions, ensuring only one evaluation script runs against a specific asset at a time to avoid data conflicts.
The introduction of the Rally SDK further enhances the versatility of the Decision Engine. It addresses challenges such as the inability to test code before pushing to a silo and the time it takes to push preset changes from the IDE to a silo. With the Rally SDK, developers can quickly test code directly from their machines, even outside the context of an asset, and run unit tests before deploying new code to production. This remarkable technology, paired with the Decision Engine’s native Python code-running ability, not only accelerates development but also reduces testing delays, truly revolutionizing how we approach media workflow management. You unlock loads of new potential in your media workflows using SDVI’s Decision Engine.
If you’d like to find out more about how Rally can help improve and streamline the work of operators, reach out to your TAM or solutions architect.
New in Rally:
When delivering media to a variety of endpoints, supply chain engineers are often confronted with bandwidth limitation on the receiver’s side: either limiting the number of deliveries made in parallel, or limiting deliveries to a maximum per day or no further deliveries until a certain time.
Over several releases, the Rally Decision Engine has been updated to enable a wider array of job scheduling, concurrency and pacing options. Decision Engine now allows for jobs to be either scheduled in future, limited in concurrency, or paced. When scheduling a job, unlike a scheduled supply chain, operators can run and visualize within the same supply chain, and create a queued job right away.
- A concurrency tag will limit the number of active concurrent jobs that have the same tag.
- A job pacing tag will limit the number of jobs run per unit of time – for example, a limit of ten jobs per one day.
When jobs with any of these tags or dates are created, information is available in the Job Details, allowing operators to verify the reason why a given job is queued but not executed yet. Pacing and concurrency can also be filtered against, allowing operators to check for potential delivery bottlenecks based on third-party restrictions.
Learn about more of the recent updates made to the Rally platform in our latest Rally Updates blog.
Application Spotlight
AWS Application Services
AWS doesn’t just provide cloud infrastructure for Rally users. It is also the provider of several of Rally’s most useful application services.
AWS Elemental MediaConvert is a file-based video transcoding service that allows you to easily create VOD content for broadcast and multiscreen delivery at scale. It combines advanced video and audio capabilities with a simple web services interface and pay-as-you-go pricing.
Amazon Rekognition offers pre-trained and customizable computer vision (CV) capabilities to extract information from images and videos. Millions of images and videos can be analyzed and human visual review tasks augmented with artificial intelligence (AI).
Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition service that adds speech-to-text capabilities to any application: ingest audio input, produce easy-to-read and review transcripts, improve accuracy with customization, and filter content to ensure customer privacy.
Learn more about the full spectrum of best-in-class tools in the Rally Application Services Market.
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