Your chance to inform the Digital Media Initiative
Post categories: blog
| 12:42 UK time, Friday, 27 July 2007
We are proud to introduce a new initiative with the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Digital Media Initiative (DMI), which will affect the ´óÏó´«Ã½ for many years to come. Something which I'm sure the Backstage Community will and could sink its teeth into.
From how the metadata is structured to what formats we should or could be using. Its all in the DMI.
There will be lots more information about this long term initiative in the next few weeks, till then we thought we'd give you an overview of this massive project.
It is generally recognised that the media industry is undergoing a fundamental shift towards an environment characterised by audiences consuming digital content delivered on demand through platforms of their choice. As outlined through the Creative Future strategy, the ´óÏó´«Ã½â€™s ambition is to be at the vanguard of global media organisations operating in this exciting, but challenging new world and to continue to be able to serve the ever changing needs of audiences in the UK and abroad.
Fulfilling this ambition requires considerable change across the ´óÏó´«Ã½. The Digital Media Initiative (DMI) is at the heart 0of this transformation providing the ´óÏó´«Ã½ with a flexible, multiplatform enabled, digital production capability with the associated technology infrastructure.
DMI is focussed on delivering a solution that will provide the ´óÏó´«Ã½ with the following capabilities:
- Collaborative multiplatform production capability: DMI will allow multiplatform programme making teams to work together throughout the production lifecycle and provide individuals access to the work-in-progress content from the point of its inception regardless of the platform.
- Streamlined and agile production process: The move from tape to file-based digital production workflow will reduce the time consuming activities relating to the handling of tapes and allow more time to be spent on creative, editorial tasks.
- High quality information about assets: DMI will drive a step change in behaviour towards an asset management culture where information about the content is captured at the point of knowledge and gradually enhanced to facilitate effective exploitation of content throughout the asset’s life.
- Flexible infrastructure capable of supporting future services: DMI provides a solid, reusable foundation for cost effective delivery of new and emerging audience facing services.
Key Drivers for DMI
The underlying business drivers and rationale for DMI encompass both internal capability development and market and external pressures.
Internal Capability Development
- Delivery of the process and technology change required to support a true multiplatform and on-demand ´óÏó´«Ã½. The strategy to deliver multiplatform commissions cannot be achieved effectively without investment in DMI and thus the objectives that form part of the Creative Future will not be achievable.
- Addressing the operational metadata issues within the ´óÏó´«Ã½ in a way that supports our audience facing services and enables cross platform exploitation of our assets.
- Improve our ability to find content to facilitate the re-use and exploitation of our assets. At present, our audiences can access our content faster than we can.
- Allowing content that is ‘born’ digital to ‘stay’ digital, which in turn increases our ability to exploit that content for both public service and commercial use.
- The provision of a more agile infrastructure that is more responsive to changing audience needs and less dependent on manual and costly ‘back office’ processes.
Internal Capability Development
Delivery of the process and technology change required to support a true multiplatform and on-demand ´óÏó´«Ã½. The strategy to deliver multiplatform commissions cannot be achieved effectively without investment in DMI and thus the objectives that form part of the Creative Future will not be achievable.
Addressing the operational metadata issues within the ´óÏó´«Ã½ in a way that supports our audience facing services and enables cross platform exploitation of our assets.
Improve our ability to find content to facilitate the re-use and exploitation of our assets. At present, our audiences can access our content faster than we can.
Allowing content that is ‘born’ digital to ‘stay’ digital, which in turn increases our ability to exploit that content for both public service and commercial use.
The provision of a more agile infrastructure that is more responsive to changing audience needs and less dependent on manual and costly ‘back office’ processes.
Market & External Pressure
Delivery of the process and technology change required to support a true multiplatform and on-demand ´óÏó´«Ã½. The strategy to deliver multiplatform commissions cannot be achieved effectively without investment in DMI and thus the objectives that form part of the Creative Future will not be achievable.
Addressing the operational metadata issues within the ´óÏó´«Ã½ in a way that supports our audience facing services and enables cross platform exploitation of our assets.
Improve our ability to find content to facilitate the re-use and exploitation of our assets. At present, our audiences can access our content faster than we can.
Allowing content that is ‘born’ digital to ‘stay’ digital, which in turn increases our ability to exploit that content for both public service and commercial use.
The provision of a more agile infrastructure that is more responsive to changing audience needs and less dependent on manual and costly ‘back office’ processes.
Key Programme Principles
The following programme principles have been defined to guide the design of the DMI operating model and to provide direction for further phases of the programme. These have been grouped into Business and Technology Programme principles.
Business Programme Principles
- Focused on the productions that are critical to enabling production areas to deliver their Creative Future and have the characteristics to transition effectively and will demonstrate real and visible change to the business.
- Focus on and enable creativity.
- Foster cross business area activity and new types of output.
- Exploit cross business area synergies.
- Be a pan-´óÏó´«Ã½ Solution which delivers pan-´óÏó´«Ã½ benefits.
- Have agreed, common and consistent policies and guidelines.
- Deliver role based and team based training.
- Deliver business area specific support which is designed alongside systems and processes and not at the end.
- Make things simpler, easier and better.
- Be bottom up and business led.
- Enable a new integrated archive business which puts metadata at the heart of the production.
Technology Programme Principles
- Be flexible to support new types of platforms.
- Follow the write once, read many principle (WORM).
- Be Digital Fabric based (e.g. a single interface between multiple systems).
- Have an appropriate scale of resilience against architecture.
- Support Open Standards.
- Support commodity items.
- Avoid duplication and conform to the overall ´óÏó´«Ã½ architecture principles.
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