Digital Production Partnership

The DPP, the media industry’s business network, recently announced the development of a proof of concept to demonstrate how component-based workflows using IMF (the Interoperable Master Format) can be applied to advertising use cases. A new report, The Business Benefits of IMF for Advertising, has been released to DPP members to provide a business-level overview of the aims of the work, and a common set of working practices for the delivery of adverts using IMF.

DPP member companies taking part in this work have two key aims – to deliver greater operational efficiency in advertising, and to unlock new commercial opportunities.

This work aligns to the DPP’s suite of IMF publications for programme content by using SMPTE TSP 2121-1 (IMF Application DPP ProRes) and SMPTE TSP 2121-4 (IMF Application Constraint DPP JPEG2000) as its foundation. Interoperability is at the heart of this initiative, enabling the development of automated supply chains compatible with both programming and advertising.

“Building on what has already been achieved by the DPP and their members around IMF adoption, we are extending the work to support advertising use cases through the development of a proof of concept,” said Michael Moorfield, Global Broadcast Services Manager, Adstream. “This is an ideal opportunity to showcase the potential business benefits for the whole supply chain. For me, one of the measures of success would be if the findings became an enabler towards standardising workflows for video advertising distribution and publishing.”

The proof of concept establishes how an IMF package can be exchanged internationally throughout the advertising ecosystem: from agency, to clearance bodies, to the distributor, through to broadcast transmission. The results of testing will be announced later this year.

“IMF offers great potential for scaling up versioning workflows effectively and efficiently,” said Rowan de Pomerai, head of Delivery and Growth, DPP. “We’ve been working for some time on enabling its use for broadcast and online programme content, yet advertisers also face huge versioning challenges. So, it’s extremely exciting to see so many companies in the advertising supply chain supporting this initiative, and we believe that IMF will offer them real operational benefits.”

The Business Benefits of IMF for Advertising document has been developed for potential implementers to start to understand how IMF could benefit their businesses through operational efficiencies, and to learn how shared, component-based workflows could drive yield.

“The convergence of advertising across Linear TV and Online brings with it a need to standardise, which could unlock significant benefits across the ecosystem.”, said James Morgan-Yates, CTO, Clearcast. “With collaboration across the industry, we can bring the ‘best of both worlds’ to all advertising, from traditional through to addressable and programmatic, by delivering multiple variants of ads in a single package with metadata; allowing compliance processes to scale up, minimising storage needs and reducing manual effort for operations teams. The results should be reduced cost, increased efficiency, fewer operational risks and more revenue opportunity for everyone involved.”

This work will be presented at a DPP event in February 2020. The DPP continues its work on IMF for Advertising by collaborating with its members to generate proof of concepts and investigate methods for streamlining, simplifying and automating the processes.

The DPP, the media industry’s business change network, published its annual report on the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to its member companies. This year’s report has been enabled by DPP member company Covatic.

CES 2019, is the most in-depth publication on the trends to emerge from the world’s biggest technology trade show. It highlights the arrival of voice-led content voice search as the most significant development at CES 2019.

“Google assistant integration into smart displays was widespread at CES 2019,” reports DPP managing director and author of the report, Mark Harrison, “In short, most smart TVs now work with some combination of Apple, Amazon or Google voice search, as well other proprietary voice solutions. This contextual voice-led content search takes consumers one step nearer publisher-agnostic content platforms of the kind we have seen in news and music.”

Voice content search wasn’t the only new trend at CES that could have profound implications for media. Among others was the emergence of out of home environments as technology rich spaces suited to ubiquitous media.

“There are a range of public spaces – from airports to shopping malls, leisure resorts to sports stadiums – that are really well suited to the introduction of the internet of things (IoT), AI, robotics and automation. And they will all need a supply of media,” says Harrison. “This is going to prove a very active market for technology and media companies over the next few years.”

The DPP has data on technologies and trends at CES going back to 2010, and the latest report sets the 2019 trends in a wider trends perspective. It is the first of a trio of reports from the DPP looking at key trends for media. The next will be the DPP’s 2019 Predictions, published in early February. This will be followed by a unique examination, called Blindsided, which looks at emerging trends that could prove highly disruptive for the professional media sector.

Cloud-based working is transforming businesses the world over. But the cloud was never built to suit the needs of the media industry. So what would it take to create ideal cloud environments for media? In a ground-breaking new report, Building the Media Cloud the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) has called upon the expertise of its membership to explore this fundamental question.

The report comes out of a DPP AT HOME event – the DPP’s special event series for creating reports about major industry issues. The event brought together over 20 subject matter experts to look at the core requirements for the media cloud. It was enabled by DPP member company Zayo.

“There are plenty of things the media industry does now for no good reason other than custom and practice,” says DPP managing director and author of the report, Mark Harrison. “In designing cloud based workflows we have an opportunity to start again, and to architect more elegant and efficient ways of working. But we won’t be able to do that unless we have an industry wide understanding of what good looks like.”

Building the Media Cloud is the starting point for that discussion. It explores four areas:

• Characteristics: the fundamental principles and attributes that need to characterise successful cloud based environments for media
• Services: the key media services that need to be performed in the cloud
• Maturity: a maturity assessment of those services made against the required characteristics
• Conflicts: an assessment of conflicts within media ecosystems caused by differing levels of maturity of different services

“At Zayo, we see a growing number of customers successfully rely on multiple cloud environments to run their media workflows to the cloud. Their experiences help us architect a media cloud that is effective and secure within the broader hybrid cloud environment.”, says Ravi Rabheru, director, Cloud & Security at Zayo, “This report will help customers and suppliers to share a common understanding of what the industry needs to achieve best practice in media cloud services.”

Building the Media Cloud is available for download for DPP members here. The next DPP AT HOME report will look at the monetisation of OTT content, and will be created out of a special session at IBC 2018.