Solving the Pre-Delivery File Format Media Mess
In the mid-2000s, the media industry had a fleeting hope the SD to HD migration was also an opportunity to consolidate the world’s frame rates into one, simplifying the media world and shrinking variances and complexity. Things actually went in the opposite direction as the ecosystem now deals with many resolutions, color spaces, codecs, wrappers, and soundtrack configurations. In addition, bespoke versions, such as descriptive audio tracks, embedded closed-captions, and localization requirements compound the number of iterations.
In other words…
FRAME RATE x RESOLUTION x COLOR SPACE x CODEC x WRAPPER x SOUND SPACE = FILE FORMAT MESS6
With this complexity and increasing time pressures, the aggregation of media assets from multiple outside parties has become particularly problematic. There’s typically a very clear delivery specification in place, but ask anyone in the media supply chain whether they’ve ever received a file in the wrong format, and the answer is almost always yes.
Signiant’s Software-Defined Content Exchange (SDCX) SaaS platform alleviates this problem with a unique and powerful approach. A patented capability called CloudSpeX makes it possible to determine the format compliance of a media asset before the Signiant system enables a transfer. By trapping out errors before the content ever leaves the source, aggregators can effectively push the problem back to their suppliers. Significant cost savings are possible when expensive bandwidth and QC resources at the destination are no longer consumed by the inflow of non-compliant assets. And perhaps most importantly, valuable time can be saved by eliminating the cycle of discovering an error, calling for a re-send, and starting all over again.
In the latest installment of Metadata Everywhere: Filtering Media Deliveries with Pre-transfer Asset Validation, Signiant shares how its SDCX architecture extracts embedded metadata for pre-transfer asset validation including:
- How the SDCX architecture enables a unique and powerful approach to asset validation
- How file validation specifications are configured in the cloud
- How metadata fingerprints are extracted and checked prior to file delivery
- How CloudSpeX streamlines operations in an increasingly complex landscape
Streamlining the Supply Chain
Media companies spend valuable time and resources dealing with inbound assets that fail to meet their published delivery specifications. Signiant hears this from thousands of businesses as a growing issue throughout the media and entertainment ecosystem. By dramatically lowering the number of improperly formatted files that land at the destination, CloudSpeX saves time and money amidst the growing complexity of multiplatform delivery. It’s a built-in feature of a system that is probably in use anyway, so deployment is a snap. The number of media formats is only increasing. As supply chains continue becoming more global, complex, and time-sensitive, the headaches associated with file delivery compliance also grow. CloudSpeX is an excellent example of how Signiant’s SDCX SaaS platform helps media companies become more efficient in ways Beyond Fast File Movement.
