Why Logistics Is the Next Frontier for the Interconnected Media Supply Chain

By Geoff Stedman, CMO for SDVI

CURRENT TRENDS such as industry consolidation, a heightened focus on profitable growth, a greater emphasis on more streamlined and efficient processes, and the extension of content delivery to more endpoints worldwide all validate media organisations’ embrace of cloud-based media supply chains to enable scalable processing and delivery of content at massive volume.

As organisations looked to optimise their supply chains, they often started with intelligent automation as the first step in realising greater efficiency in their own media operations. But as media companies and their supply chains grow increasingly interconnected, automating media logistics is becoming the next frontier for innovation.

Why automated media logistics?

Because right now, for most media companies, their media supply chain is focused mainly on their own assembly line. Yes, it is a sophisticated and highly automated assembly line that already has transformed their ability to deliver ever-greater volumes of content. But at the end of that line, few media companies have an efficient, scalable mechanism facilitating the exchange of content and metadata with their business partners in a fast, frictionless manner (the digital equivalent of the loading dock and shipping/ receiving).

To meet their delivery commitments, media organisations have either hired teams of operators to look up the specifications for each destination and create each package manually, or they have outsourced this work to a service provider that often also performs duplicate transcoding and QC services. Either way, the process is time-consuming and costly, and it doesn’t scale in an efficient way to meet growing demand.

This model for delivering and receiving content and metadata — between content producers, content owners, content distributors, and aggregators — creates duplication of work throughout the media supply chain ecosystem. The built-in inefficiencies are problematic even on a small scale, and they are a massive issue when demand for content is immense and fast time to market is essential.

What’s needed is a more automated way to interconnect supply chains to not only ensure that content and metadata arrive as the receiving company needs them, but also build a more scalable, cost-effective process with fewer manual steps. Going forward, automated media logistics will allow this process to proceed almost as if the delivering and receiving companies are simply two departments on the same supply chain.

Implementing Automated Media Logistics

Today, for media companies that package content for delivery, certifying metadata and content specifications with each new delivery partner takes time and work. For every piece of content delivered, the receiving company wants to be able to verify that what they received is what it expects and can use. By simplifying and standardising how content and its associated metadata are prepared prior to content exchange, the interconnected media supply chain addresses both these bottlenecks in the conventional content flow.

Several leading media companies today are simplifying and standardising their content and metadata exchange — an interconnected media supply chain — and introducing automated media logistics by using supply chain templates and cloud-based infrastructure to deliver content.

Rather than consume the time and skill of operators on manual configuration of metadata and media transformations on an ongoing basis, these organisations took advantage of a comprehensive metadata mapping exercise that created a variety of templates to specify delivery/receipt requirements for different destinations. These shared templates enable system-level agreement between organisations with respect to content format and metadata. With this understanding in place, media organisations can not only eliminate duplicate work but also apply automated tools and presets as well as take advantage of the massive scale of cloud storage and processing to accelerate content exchanges dramatically.

Automated Logistics in Action

A+E Networks and Discovery demonstrated the power of this model when they partnered to execute an automated content exchange, moving a high volume of library assets from A+E to Discovery for the Discovery+ launch in fewer than two days. Fortunately for both A+E Networks and Discovery, both companies were using the SDVI Rally media supply chain platform for their media operations, which meant it was a straightforward process to connect their two supply chain platforms together to automate and accelerate this bulk content transfer all in the cloud. While the Rally platform is known for enabling agile and efficient media supply chain optimisation for the industry’s best-known brands, it also supports the connection of media supply chains across organisations of all sizes so that they can optimise how they receive and distribute content.

As the community of interconnected media supply chain partners continues to grow, and more media factories become connected through “trusted content” relationships, it will become easier for new partners to exchange content. At the same time, businesses that acquire new libraries through consolidation or mergers can more easily integrate their assets in a uniform repository.

Automated media logistics will drive new levels of business agility and efficiency in the overall content flow from source to distribution partners, feeding a more dynamic and responsive media ecosystem. As media organisations are able to respond faster to consumer demand, they will accelerate their own profitable growth objectives.

In the current media marketplace, where new content deals have become an almost daily event, media organisations need a low-friction model for accurate, reliable content transfers. Pairing internal supply chain efficiency with the significant time savings enabled by automated media logistics, they can respond to and deliver on new opportunities more quickly. Together, automating the media factory and accelerating media logistics also will enable more efficient preparation and delivery of culturally relevant content to audiences in markets all around the globe. The world of entertainment will become a bit smaller, as it becomes more connected.

Leveraging cloud-based automation of the media factory and accelerated media logistics within the interconnected media supply chain, today’s media organisations can address current business challenges and knock down barriers to seizing new business opportunities.

Visit https://sdvi.com