Life of MAM

A MAM was Born

Once the shift to file-based media began, the Media Asset Management (MAM) revolution was born, and has been giving the industry a constant nagging headache ever since, for both broadcasters and vendors alike, due to its bespoke complexity and uniqueness to every different broadcast facility. It comes in lots of different, exciting flavours - MAM-in-a-box, MAM-in-a-tin, MAM Everywhere, DAM, PAM, Uncle SAM.

When the seeds of MAM began to grow in the late 90's, it felt like an opportunity to create joined-up broadcasting, enabling users to share, view and edit media on their desktops with the click of a mouse, whether it was content just shot on location several minutes ago, or an historical piece of footage from 30 years ago, wonderfully recalled and restored from the vaults of a deep, dark archive. The ingest people would ideally press a button and it would magically appear in the control room playout.

It is a subject that is continuously challenging vendors and broadcasters alike, who are constantly trying to play catch-up with an industry that is spiralling out of control with its speeding, galloping, unstoppable changes. From IP and Cloud, to 4K and 8K, we are offered solutions from vendors that are claiming to be `Everywhere' in a bold attempt to deal with these massive transformations.

Has MAM Delivered?

With the never ending discussions in the market, it appears that most MAM solutions available so far have failed to properly address the evolving demands of broadcasters. Archive shelves are still stacked with undigitised tape without metadata in many facilities, as workflows are being placed across multiple platforms, and in desperate need of a flexible solution that can be easily integrated.

Some vendors will argue that they have addressed broadcasters’ needs, but a recent research study by Ovum showed that 40% of the respondents highlighted poor integration of broadcast systems as the primary pain point in a MAM implementation. The research indicated “poor integration, constant search for different middleware formats, and the break in the chain if one element is replaced” as significant causes of concern. Also, trying to reduce the unit costs of media assets on site was cited as a significant point - optimising ROI with an asset, being able to find it quickly, so it can then be reused when necessary.

What Should MAM do?

Needless to say, broadcast facilities have complex infrastructures, with MAM needing to be all things to all people. From vertically integrating with traffic and scheduling, rights and royalties management, monitoring, airtime sales, financial modules, managing rich objects and advanced asset relationships, accommodating legacy assets, fitting with the existing infrastructure, to being adaptable to change existing workflow expectations, this is all part and parcel of what MAM does.

But the core role of a MAM system should still be exactly what it says on the tin – to manage media assets. The best MAM installations are the ones where the MAM is almost invisible, yet manages to perform all its tasks fully.

The end goal of a broadcast MAM system is surely to allow broadcasters to make more and better programmes with fewer costs involved, making jobs more efficient, such as easier and faster access to content, tools at their fingertips, automation of technical operations such as transcoding, and a better view of the overall workflow. But unfortunately technology is continually moving the cost goalposts.

The world has changed since the MAM debuted. Now we all want instant Web access to anything at any time. Yet surprisingly, our industry is one of the last to embrace this anywhere, anytime concept. Although vendors are at least trying to address these needs, we still wait for tapes, email clips instead of collaboratively sharing them, travel to Soho to sit in edit suites, and work in big glass open plan buildings rather than collaborating from great distances. Everyone knows the experience of being holed up in the office at midnight, because that’s where the media lives.

My Experiences with MAM

My first introduction to the world of MAM was back in 2006, and wasn't a particularly pleasant one, helping the Ardendo (now Vizrt) bid team submit a proposal for the mammoth, doomed BBC/Siemens DMI (Don't Mention It) project.

It would be some five years later before I would become heavily involved with the frustrating world of MAM again, this time in India with Vizrt. Lengthy, complex discussions would drag on for hours, days, weeks, years even, with large broadcasters in India for a proposed solution, as I pushed hard for conclusions that could never be reached. Too many people in the chain deciding on what they wanted, too much money at stake, too much back and forth with the clever bods in Sweden to decide on whether we could meet their requirements off-the-shelf, or whether bespoke work had to be done - silly me, of course it did!

My last real involvement with the intriguing world of MAM was more recently, helping BBC Wales evaluate whether to keep their existing newsroom desktop editing solution, or replace it with Jupiter (and Quantel). We finally decided Jupiter was the correct decision for BBC Wales, and I was then deployed in a `Business Readiness' role for a year, as Jupiter was slowly but surely steam-rolled out across Wales. I had to ensure all users of the new system would be ready to go once Jupiter went live. This  included organising a training schedule for 300 journalists and 30 craft editors, `Show & Tell' open days in Cardiff and Bangor (one of the most picturesque BBC regional sites I have ever been to), and creating extensive, laborious User Acceptance spreadsheets, which meant spending hours in a dark room pressing every button in Jupiter and QCut to ensure the system met the requirements (and worked properly!) It's only once you have experienced the MAM world from a user perspective do you really begin to understand the difficulties and complexities involved.  

MAM in a Fluffy Cloud

Most broadcasters think about the promised land of fluffy Clouds, where content can be previewed from a tablet or mobile device, a revolution enabling people to finish their work faster from wherever they are, in a world where getting content to air quickly is always paramount, allowing more flexibility, lower costs, and reduced hardware.

But the cloud is not a bolt-on fix. It is not a technology thing, it’s a people thing. Web-enabling a MAM is not the same as cloud-enabling a MAM. Web-enabling is making an asset accessible via a regular Web browser, so that no custom software needs to be installed on a desktop.

By comparison, cloud-enabling MAM removes the reliance on local engineers to ensure that the spinning disks are online and available, user credentials and permissions to access the media are validated, while removing maintenance and upgrade costs from the operating budget, saving time and money. Until recently, however, it was not generally possible to place the entire MAM in the cloud. Internet access was unreliable, insecure or slow for the file sizes and volumes of high resolution content.

A true cloud architecture provides a secure, hardware/software-free, self-service, simultaneous access to common assets to be accessed from anywhere in the world. Putting the MAM in the cloud makes sense for a lot of broadcast and production companies. It holds substantial benefits in a global media market where content is centrally accumulated, and is globally repurposed.

Established Hollywood studios and broadcasters are unlikely to put their entire MAM in the cloud, since they have already invested millions with their local on-site systems, and the private networks to enable accessibility. Unlike smaller businesses, they have the IT resources to maintain these systems and networks.

However, even these bigger organizations with elaborate on-site MAM's have begun to explore the cloud as a way to work more efficiently — reducing the amount of storage they maintain by extending part of the MAM system into the cloud for certain areas of their business and workflows.

Conclusion

While technology started the MAM revolution, economics will ultimately drive it. Consumer technology ignited cross-platform TV, and is now the major driving force for the production and post-production markets. Creating production and distribution of premium content at scale efficiently, while looking to solve these media management and logistic headaches are the just some of the huge challenges the industry faces.

THE STORY OF TV GRAPHICS

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History

When television began back in 1936, it brought with it the potential to enhance the visual experience with the possibilities of information graphics. However, the history of graphic design in television is one area which lacked any serious consideration in the early days, resulting in limited resources and under investment for many years.

It was nearly 20 years after the launch of BBC Television, that its first full-time graphic designer was employed, John Sewell, in 1954. This was also the year when the first in-vision weather forecast was broadcast, presented by George Cowling. The visual onscreen maps were drawn by hand in the London Weather Centre, before being couriered across London. They would later be replaced with magnetic symbols in the 70's, computer generated maps in the 80's, to the current high-end 3D graphics powered by MetraWeather's Weatherscape XT.

The Early Years

During this era of black and white TV, the quality of broadcasts and receivers were limited to a resolution of only 405-lines, resulting in pictures suffering from poor definition. Up to 20% of the screen was considered unusable to the graphic designer, due to the lack of focus around the screen’s border, coupled with the fact that different television sets cut the picture off at different points.

Because of this, graphics created for TV had many restrictions. Lettering had to be large and bold, routinely created by sticking white Letraset characters onto black card. Credit rolls were special devices which used long strips of black material onto which the Letraset was stuck, and which were physically rolled, either by an electric motor, but more often than not by hand. Any illustrations to grace the screen in those days had to embrace fairly heavy lines, lacking any fine detail.

The restrictions were, of course obvious. People were needed who could be trusted to check the spelling and achieve a balanced design layout, and one or more cameras had to be allocated to view them, in an era when a studio would never have more than four cameras.

These images above show how news graphics were originally made by hand, using cardboard and celluloid for maps and charts. An embossing machine was used to print the type for captions. The graphics department would look more like a decorators workshop, as these images illustrate...

Graphics on Film

The movie industry was no different in the 1950's. Saul Bass (1920-1996) became the first significant motion graphic designer in these early days, designing the opening title sequences for many popular films such as The Man With The Golden Arm (1955), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960) among others. Bass was an extremely talented and productive designer, and is commonly cited as being a pioneer in the field of motion graphics. During this period all graphics were created by hand or on film, and were extremely time consuming and expensive to produce.

Introducing the Character Generator

The first electronic device to radically depart from this crude way of creating onscreen graphics was the Riley character generator (CG), developed in association with the BBC, which would later give way to the more successful Aston in the UK (below), and Chyron in the US, where both names became industry standard generic trademarks.

My first role as a graphic operator back in 1996 at Teddington Studios involved using a fairly hefty, robust beast called `Collage' by Pixel Power, yet whenever I was asked to play out a name strap, the director in the gallery would refer to it as an `Aston', or `Name Aston'. This is something that would never really change in the years since my first job in TV. I would go on to work in international sales roles at both Pixel Power and later Vizrt, yet even today I have seen Vizrt name straps (or `supers', which is the correct terminology) still been referred to as `Astons' in many broadcast centres, even with monitor labels in a gallery displaying this trademark name.

The early 3D character generators surfaced in the 90's, using bespoke hardware. Processing power was such that layouts had to be rendered before they could be used, and extended animated sequences were impossible because of memory limitations. The Quantel Paintbox was heavily relied on to create background images and full frame stills (a very fast, easy-to-use, broadcast-friendly version of something like Photoshop.) I remember working at Anglia TV and having to create a news story map by capturing a road atlas under a rostrum camera, and creating an image from it in Paintbox. Hard to believe now, but that's how it was back then.

Launched in 1981, and years ahead of its time, the Quantel Paintbox was a dedicated workstation, primarily used in the production of television graphics

User interfaces also tended to be rather less intuitive than we would expect in today's Windows-driven market, and operators needed an extended period of training. That was actually a major obstacle in the wider use of character generators: there was a shortage of well-trained operators, and once trained on the preferred machine, they tended to resist moving to another manufacturer and using another device.

Today's Graphics

Many of today's graphic operators now have to be 3D designers too, often possessing a whole range of additional skills to their portfolio that were not required back then. Being competent in 3D design to create elaborate and exciting real-time 3D graphical stories (or even virtual sets) is sometimes not enough these days. Having the ability to handle complex datafeeds, integrate to newsroom systems, or to create advanced templates is often expected these days of a freelancer in the market. Many of these designers even come equipped with their own kit, which makes it handy for entertainment shows on limited budgets, who only require a rental model as the production may only be running for a few weeks at a time.

Sports graphics for broadcasters are often farmed out to graphic production companies such as Delta Tre or Alston Elliot, who specialise in providing operational staffing levels, equipment, and design on fixed term contracts to the likes of BT Sport, Sky Sports, ITV and of course BBC, where I experienced this first-hand during my time as Graphic Producer at BBC Sport.

Sky Sports presenter Will Greenwood between head-to-head VR graphics of opposing fly-halves Farrell and Wilkinson

There is also a huge rise in the need for CG graphics in master control. The multi-channel world has created a whole new television concept - channel branding. Where that once meant just a simple bug inserter, now there is a need for more advanced devices, creating sophisticated branding sequences designed to stop the viewer’s finger hitting the remote and keep them loyal to the channel they are watching. 

Credit `squeezeback's' provided here by Pixel Power, wrapping the branding in multiple windows around the end of the programme, are seen by broadcasters as a powerful way of retaining viewers without reducing the amount of commercial time they can sell (not applicable to BBC and EastEnders!)

The Future

As was the case for its history, the future of broadcast graphics depends largely on its medium, the television, which is going through a substantial change at the moment, probably one the biggest changes since its conception. Although advanced 3D computer generated graphics are part of the content viewed on television, newer technologies have made it possible for these graphics to become highly realistic, perhaps shaping the way in which audiences view and interpret content via television and the web.

Through the use of innovative virtual reality and augmented reality technology, graphics have reached another level to engage viewers through quality, visually absorbing live content, seen to great effect on recent election broadcasts, and used weekly on flagship sport programmes like BBC's Match of the Day and Sky Sports Monday Night Football, that rely heavily on graphical content combined with innovation. Virtual studio graphics now sit alongside and are visually-indistinguishable from the physical-set elements, meaning graphics need to look photo-real, and the tracking must be accurate enough so that when cameras move, the rendered virtual graphics would exhibit a seamless blend between reality and virtual.

MotD makes extensive use of the Viz Virtual Studio for augmented reality

Monday Night Football - a design innovation that gave the virtual set an illusion of having a much larger physical set in the studio

As the industry is gearing more towards VOD and OTT, and the next generation of audiences are forming habits of viewing 2nd screen devices on tablets and mobiles while watching TV, this is creating the need for more interactive forms of broadcast graphics. The younger generation are much more engaged, less passive viewers, who need to be entertained through various form of social media and live interaction. 

I was introducing the 2nd screen companion app, and live social media interaction to the industry back in 2011 with never.no, but discovered the technology and concept was slightly ahead of the curve back then. I found programme editors and producers slightly wary of audience-created content being aired on their live shows, and procurement teams not entirely sure what the value of such technology was worth at that time. Obviously this has since changed with production teams, who now recognise the importance of these social media tools to engage more effectively with their audiences. 

Bringing it all together, Chyron is partnering with ConnecTV for its companion app polling technology, Never.no for its social TV platform, Mass Relevance for its real-time curation and Vibes for its text, Twitter and web voting technology

Broadcast graphics will continue to push the envelope when it comes to producing high quality, visually stunning accompaniments to informational television programming, as long as television as we know it still exists. But how long that will be, who knows...

About the Author

I have seen many changes, and been through many different experiences in the broadcast graphics sector since I began working as a CG operator in 1996, which is why I feel well-placed to write and share this blog.  I freelanced as a Paintbox designer and CG operator in the 90's, before heading up a graphics division at Granada TV. This led to an international sales career with Pixel Power, Graphics Producer at BBC Sport, UK Sales Manager for Vizrt, Sales Director for Vizrt India, Business Development for never.no and MetraWeather, and Project Managing the roll-out of Vizrt for BBC Wales.