Service Oriented Architectures ForBroadcast Media Asset Management

摘要

As broadcasters move from traditional to file-basedproduction, distribution, and archiving, Enterprise MediaAsset Management Systems (EMAM) become vital formanaging business processes and content. MAMsolutions that initially were dedicated to supportdepartments like News, Programming or Sports, evolveinto generic EMAM platforms managing entire businessprocesses across those departments, from planning &drafting to commissioning, ingest, logging, cataloguing,search & retrieval, browsing, rough cut, collecting,ordering, editing, conforming, transmission, archiving,content exchange and content sales. They do this byoffering workflow management, collaboration tools,content transfer, transcoding, migration and monitoringcapabilities, and integrations with third party systems.This ongoing evolution makes EMAM increasinglyvaluable for broadcasters, but puts considerable demandson the software architecture with respect to extensibilityand integratability. EMAM must provide very highavailability, scalability and resilience. Failures of systemcomponents must not result in a major loss in quality ofservice. Downtimes are difficult to tolerate, hence evensoftware and hardware maintenance must be possible inoperation, without perceivable loss in quality of service.This paper explores how Service OrientedArchitectures, an architectural style becomingincreasingly popular in business process integrationprojects, can be applied to broadcast EMAM. Strategiesfor scalability and n+x redundancy, self-organisation,dynamic resource detection and allocation, and zerodowntime strategies for maintenance and emergencysituations are discussed. Finally, the proposal is validatedagainst real-world workflows, and benefits compared totraditional system architectures are given.