In a recent statement the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA) – perhaps best known for their work on the AAF format – and the EBU announced that they are co-publishing a Request For Technology through a joint working group called the Framework for Interoperable Media Services (FIMS) Task Force. The Task Force’s overall aim is to address interoperability issues in digital workflows and the purpose of the RFT is threefold:

• Define an overall architecture for integration of reusable components
• Validate this architecture by applying it to three services
• Develop a list of appropriate services for the entirety or part of the media industry

As background to the need for a standardised set of services the RFT raises two key sets of issues for our consideration (describing them as justifications would be too strong a phrase at this point):

• Limitations of current (or traditional) approaches – these include problems surrounding interoperability, maintenance, scalability, dynamic discovery, dependence on vendors for customisation and implementation of solutions, etc.
• Media industry characteristics – this lists issues believed to be unique to media technology such as large file sizes, highly collaborative workflows with significant “human” task elements, streaming, multiple resolutions, special time requirements, etc.

Both of these lists make familiar reading for industry professionals as being representative of issues that we have to deal with on a regular basis. The implication of the lists is that they describe the set of issues that a collection of reusable and standardised industry services can address, and this is where AMWA/EBU’s view differs from mine.

Firstly, the limitations of current approaches as expressed aren’t incorrect, but they are generic IT system complexities that are simply becoming more common in the media industry as the scope of IT-based media systems, their complexity and associated integration requirements grow. Some of these limitations need to be addressed with better implementation methodologies, and others will require a shift in thinking from vendors - to provide external interfaces that are as rich and robust as those available internally, for example. Some of the issues seem to be somewhat misplaced - for example, it is hard to see how a set of standardised media services will be able to address issues around the availability of appropriately skilled technical talent (the point on “dependence on vendors, above”).

Secondly, the media industry characteristics correctly identify key issues affecting system implementation in the media industry, but I can’t see how standardised services will solve, for example, network-related issues surrounding the transfer of large files. In fact, real world experience shows that although the management of transfer requests can be service oriented, the actual transfer of large files should be kept outside the SOA infrastructure.

Lastly, there is a more general problem with this approach. I believe that there is a risk that the Task Force will get plenty of responses, each of which being a version of the interface method that the respective vendor has or intends to implement, which is specific to the needs and world-view of their product. The Task Force will then have to face the choice of choosing to support one vendor's view of the world, or mixing definitions from several vendors that will end up as a least common denominator of functionality that ultimately no vendor will be prepared to implement.

I believe that AMWA/EBU have identified the appropriate architecture and building blocks that organisations need to adopt to simplify future media systems integrations, as shown in the figure below extracted from the RFT.

Taken from Section 10 of RFT from joint EBU-AMWA Task Force on FIMS

However, what is needed as a first step is an adoption by vendors of open IT standards and, as mentioned above, robust and rich service-oriented interfaces that are well documented, that are exposed using standard IT protocols such as SOAP or XML over HTTP, and that can be easily accessed using widely available integration tools. Attempting to get vendors to implement a rigid, standardised set of service interfaces that could remove their ability to differentiate their products by providing their own features is taking the standardisation efforts too far and risks distracting attention from the fundamental issues in my opinion. But maybe it should not be a surprise that the solution to these problems is seen by standardisation bodies as an opportunity to create a new standard. All this said, I would encourage all vendors to have a look at the RFT and think about how their interfaces would fit into the landscape described. It’s the right technical direction regardless of the success or otherwise of the standardisation process.

The BBC coverage of the Winter Olympics this year was extensive compared to that provided previously, but most of the events are considered to be fringe sports in Britain, that get little coverage outside of the Olympics - even the ones that Britain has a reasonable chance of winning a medal in. In Sweden however, winter sports are part of the national tradition and events such as cross country skiing and biathlon (cross country skiing with guns) are covered live every weekend in shows that run, in some cases, for hours.

Reflecting this level of national interest, in order to provide maximum coverage of all events at the Winter Olympics, the Swedish state broadcaster, SVT, gave web viewers direct access to the host broadcaster's video feeds and delivered them, over the Internent, without commentary directly to anyone in Sweden who wanted to see them. The image below shows the web stream of the live main event shown on terrestrial TV, but also has links to two events, an ice hockey semi final and a biathlon race, that are shown live online without commentary, marked with "okommenterad".

The idea of letting web viewers get access to feeds that normally would have been deemed too fringe to make it to broadcast combines two interesting ideas, one borrowed from retail and made famous in a book by Chris Anderson called the Long Tail, and the second being the Good Enough Revolution coined in a Wired article by Robert Capps. In short, the Long Tail theory describes a strategy where selling a large number of niche items in relatively small quantities can provide a customer base as large and lucrative as a traditional approach of selling fewer popular items in large quantities. The Good Enough Revolution puts a name on the idea that the most expensive, complex and professional way of doing things is not always the best, sometimes it is just as good, or better, to move towards a simplified and easier product or service.

Obviously the Olympic ice hockey semi final in the example below is not a cheap and simple production, but from SVT's perspective the additional cost of providing another raw stream online is low and from a viewer's perspective a match without commentary is simplified and "good enough". Despite this simplification the content can still be attractive to a small number of viewers and if many events can be provided this way at low cost, then the effect can be likened to the Long Tail. Taking the idea a bit further, it is easy to see how something like the Sky Sports FanZone commentators could be combined with a web-only stream that otherwise would not have professional -- or dare we say, traditional -- commentary to provide a "good enough" experience to viewers.

It will be interesting to see how keen other broadcasters and content companies will be on ideas like this one. Indeed, it is instructive to think about how approaches like this might be able to enable new business opportunities. Looking back to consider the core reason behind the success of media groups such as ESPN in the USA and BSkyB here in the UK, we get a very simple answer - access to sports. Admittedly those powerhouses are built on the back of billion-dollar licensing deals for incredibly popular Premiere League and NFL content, but both also provide access to a lot of niche and specialist material which has a small, but significant viewership - an effect of the Long Tail at work again.

Consider for a moment the three unrelated factors of - the enduring popularity of local sports such as Sunday local-league football; the speed of technical innovation which allows simple but powerful, remote operated cameras to be used for near-broadcast quality acquisition; and a local and regional press which everyone believes to be in rapid decline. Perhaps as well as bringing a greater variety of international sporting coverage to our screens, this kind of "good enough" approach could also be used to good effect by local media groups by enabling them to engage with their customers by providing a new level of access to something that many local communities are passionate about - their local teams, and their local sporting heroes.