Julien Gachot
Co-founder and CEO, Embrace
Content producers and media companies are faced with the immense challenge of producing enough premium quality content to meet ever-increasing demand and distribution complexity.
How can Media-oriented Business Process Management technology help streamline the overall content preparation chain, and improve the experience for people involved with the numerous man-in the-middle tasks associated?
Historically, broadcast manufacturers built specific and powerful tools for engineers, by engineers. It has now become critical for vendors to also bring solutions to market that connect processes, systems, and people.
In this article, we’ll be touching on some of the aspects that need to be considered to develop modern, advanced automation, orchestration, and collaboration solutions suitable for the content creation industry - with users in mind.
Media travelling from creation, production, ingest, transformation, packaging, distribution, through to consumption defines what we collectively name the Content Supply Chain. It is a complete process to plan, create, manage, process, and deliver content to desired channels and audiences. At present, when content consumption grows, across multiple geographies and with an increasing number of business and distribution models, numerous solutions become necessary to run your operations.
The journey can become very complex to manage, supervise, and scale. In most cases, with the same headcount.
More than with any other industry, the Media Supply Chain is a business process that uniquely includes both systems and users. Most creations require human review and approval for example. Professional tools (storage, asset management, creative apps, collaboration platforms) are already in operation. Workflow automation appears to be more critical than ever to manage efficiently the Content Chain in a fierce competitive environment.
Defining a Content Chain strategy comes with some serious challenges for media companies of all sizes: speed to implementation, internal IT expertise and resources, ease of use for operators, simplicity to integrate with existing systems. At Embrace, we design our solutions and business models considering all these stakes. In fact, all our products meet our mission statement to help companies in their transformation efforts leveraging user-centric applications and low-code design for instant adoption by operators and engineers. We strongly believe this strengthens our customers’ sovereignty by limiting the dependency on the vendor with faster implementation, instant adoption by users, higher quality of deliverables, predictable and reduced costs to maintain the system in operation and manage constant evolutions.
A user-centric approach optimizes processes and improves collaboration
Designing products based on user habits and expectations greatly improves the onboarding and adoption of innovative solutions. The user-centric approach also greatly helps break operational silos by connecting peers in a simple, quick and safe manner - including remote users - making collaboration easier than ever. However complex the workflow, operators should not be exposed to the underlying technological complexity.
Platforms must seamlessly fit in any technical framework
The days of end-to-end solutions in Broadcast are behind us and have given way to best-of-breed and hybrid-cloud architectures. It has become imperative to combine modern IT architecture with clear and readable business models, allowing customers to easily integrate pertinent business tools, scale infinitely at predictable costs, and fully control their information systems. Amongst other things, products should always offer Open APIs, rely on standard protocols and services, and be available on premise, in the Cloud, or in hybrid mode.
Low-code automation allows for easy implementation and personalization
Low-code is a new way to empower customers to build their own media workflows and integrations extremely fast. In fact, complex workflows are drawn instead of requiring line by line coding. All workflows or connectors are reusable, like LEGO® bricks, and are always secure and reliable. Not only is customization made simple when designing media workflows using Low-code initially, but it also makes them extremely fast to adapt once in production. Very limited programming skills are required from the technicians or engineers in charge of maintaining the Content Chain in operation.
When we established Embrace in 2015, we initially launched an automatic promo versioning platform called Automate-IT. We believe the instant market fit came from the fact that the system uniquely satisfied both the creative teams and the engineers alike.
Just before the pandemic, we came to market with a Business Process Management system called Pulse-IT. Unlike with automatic promo versioning, we were not the first company to offer a media-oriented orchestration solution. However, by embracing some of the concepts covered in this article and then translating our vision into the product, Pulse-IT empowers our customers to translate, optimize, execute and monitor any business or broadcast processes simply and quickly. Very complex workflows can be set-up in minutes connecting modern and legacy systems and yet be extremely easy to interact with for any operator in the organization.
Pulse-IT system overview
At the core, Pulse-IT is the orchestration layer accelerating a wide variety of content creation or broadcast processes from ingesting, transcoding, AI-based transcription, metadata mining, asset management, asset utilization, automated content processing or postproduction, packaging, versioning egress to distribution. Pulse-IT excels in breaking down barriers and silos while connecting disparate heterogeneous systems to form a cohesive workflow that increases throughput and simplifies operator use.
How does Pulse-IT contribute to the Content Chain process?
Above is a typical supply chain workflow where raw material is ingested for standardization. The process includes audio quality control and processing, transcoding, metadata indexation, AI services and transfer for distribution to On-demand services, OTT, TV or Direct-to-consumer platforms.
In this case, Pulse-IT can orchestrate all steps, start workflows, and interact with users via HTML customized forms. The system is configured by entering parameters and settings to connect on-line and archive storage, MAMs, PAMs. This gives the ability to simply adapt the orchestration of the Content Supply Chain to all types of environments to serve operational teams efficiently and limit human mistakes.
Content Supply Chain transformation brings many benefits in terms of operational efficiencies and business agility to become a competitive advantage for media companies of all sizes. Automation and optimization can significantly help improve modern media operations, unleash the creativity of talents, ease your user's journey into working with emerging technologies, such as AI and ML.
Content Supply Chain platforms help solve operational workflow pains by implementing user-centric solutions that invite customers to welcome digital transformation positively, because it enhances their own performance. Applications need to connect people and systems at all stages of the business process from Ingest to Distribution to produce large quantities of high-quality content, in different formats, for various audiences.
