Project description:
Providing infrastructure for the content market
Along with IPTV/OTT monitoring and auditing
The aim of this project is to create and provide the necessary infrastructure, technology and application to provide content market services and provide services to broadcasters. To achieve this purpose, the following steps were taken by SAMIM company.
- Designing, purchasing, installing and setting up equipment related to the content market, including the collection, storage and protection of contents.
- Providing a suitable and efficient mechanism for easy access of operators to the archive content.
- Creating an automation workflow for auditing contents.
- Providing a suitable mechanism for controlling, monitoring and evaluating the system itself and IPTV/OTT operators.
In this system, the management of the whole workflow of audio and video content from the content entry into the system to the content delivery to IPTV operators, which includes converting resources, reviewing, licensing, pricing, archiving, encryption and providing resources to operators, monitoring and other processes provided by creating an integrated software platform based on SOA architecture.
Today, every audio-visual content is considered a cultural document, which can be considered along with written documents and cultural heritage. The IRIB as the largest national archive of the Iran, has a very rich and precious inventory in the audio-visual platform, and with the huge amount of programming for different television channels, the richness and volume of this archive is added every day.
Preserving and maintaining these valuable resources and creating a suitable platform for quick and easy access, requires a powerful archive system. But what made this need more prominent, besides this issue, was the expansion of Internet based TV (IPTV) and the start of their activity. According to the law in Iran, the IRIB was introduced as the only official authority for licensing and regulation of audio and video production in cyberspace and its supervision.
In order to organize these activities, the IRIB needed a powerful tool to be able to collect and select content from the archive of national media programs and provide it to Internet TV operators for distribute in cyberspace. Another issue was the auditing and processing of the content provided from various sources and the issuance of exploitation licenses, which required a wide and comprehensive effort.
This was done by defining a project called ‘Content Market’, whose design, implementation and support was assigned to SAMIM Engineering Group.
Some basic capabilities should be considered for the design of this system, which are:
Main features
- Ability to collect, maintain and manage content from different sources in high volumes
- Ability to follow up rights and track licenses
- The possibility of distributing content in different systems
- Determining and managing the duties of employees
The content market system must meet all the needs in an integrated manner. Creating a suitable platform for interaction with the IRIB Organization’s Archives and Audit, along with providing media content with useful metadata and preparing appropriate and up to date lists, preparing subject headings, optimal maintenance of digital resources and assets with the possibility of review, audit, tagging and … is only a part of the required capabilities provided in the content market system. In addition, the content market system has the ability to search, access, preview, edit and provide content to different platforms in the shortest time and the fastest, and has a suitable user interface for interaction and synergy between content producers, service providers to the audience, and content distributing entities.
Another point that should have been considered in the design was that in the content market system, part of the content is provided through the recording of television channels, but the other part is added to the system through the archive of the IRIB (central and provincial). Also, audio-visual service providers in the cyberspace will be required to submit their content in this system in order to receive a publishing license. As Media Asset Management, the contributor section in the content market system includes all possible inputs and even a person can be a content provider.
According to this definition, the content is provided by the content provider and then it is classified by the general administration of the content market and the necessary corrections are made. After the content is deemed eligible for release to the general public, it is made available to two groups of audiences. Ordinary people who are able to access the existing content through the website form the first group and Internet TV operators are the other audience group of the content market who can add content to their infrastructure system.
The existence of a mass of media content along with a wide range of users requires the creation of diverse user interfaces and dedicated processes with different layers of management and supervision, and while covering the needs of each unit, their consistent connection with each other is also established.
The design of the content market project was assigned to SAMIM Engineering Group in early 2016 through a tender, and it was put into operation in February 2017. The implementation and development of this project was in such a way that the system was working and underload at the same time as the development, and gradually by adding processes, information tables and different sections were completed, and now, a rich database with more than 9 million and 300 thousand records is available.
This system is provided with the aim of organizing and identifying audio-visual content in a centralized manner and with the ability to link with related metadata based on BPMS and BPMN2 standards which facilitates the process of searching, retrieving and distributing it with minimum cost and maximum efficiency.