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.
What was the challenge this Rally user faced?
In Canada, larger television broadcasters must provide described video for all English- and French-language programming that is broadcast during prime time. Described video (or DV) is narration that describes important visual details in a video. DV is an accessibility feature that helps people who are blind or visually impaired understand what’s happening on screen.
One of our new customers ingests a high volume of content from a large media distributor, however, the described video is not always provided. As a result, this customer was scheduling content for prime time and ordering the associated described video from an external service provider, 3Play Media, in parallel. 3Play Media offers transcription, audio description, captioning services.
What did the customer’s workflow look like before?
Previously, the operations team would have to manually pick the proxy, upload it, then come back later and place the order within 3Play. These services can be ordered via an API, however they might take up to a few days to be completed. On completion, audio DV then needed to be embedded within the source media and redelivered to the playout system
The 3play API relies on “callbacks” to notify 3rd parties when an order has been completed on their end. Once 3Play’s job was done, the team would receive the notification, download the audio DV media, and reassociate it with an asset. Then they would need to start reprocessing the media before it could be sent to Linear.
This created a disruption in the automated media supply chain which required a lot of manual steps, time, and attention.
What does the customer’s new DV workflow look like?
To create a more streamlined, automated process for this customer, we designed a solution to upload media and order jobs via API through SDVI Rally Decision Engine. We helped the customer provision an Amazon API Gateway that can be used as a callback URL for 3Play, which in turn feeds an SQS queue. Rally consumes that SQS queue to get real-time feedback of their 3Play orders.
This customer can now easily manage audio DV ordering through 3Play Media without having to use multiple interfaces. It now takes only two clicks to complete this workflow in Rally Gateway:
- Order a DV from a specific source asset with a specific priority
- Assign the audio DV and redeliver to Linear
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Have a media supply chain challenge you’re not sure how to solve? Reach out and let’s start a conversation about how cloud-enabled workflows could help.
