Smart Screen Exclusive

ContentBridge Calls for Interoperable Master Format Standards

By Chris Tribbey

Doug Reinart, COO of digital supply chain solutions company ContentBridge, looks at the current state of how the industry handles its digital supply chain and is both encouraged and discouraged.

He sees studios, networks and content owners weighed down with legacy film and tape elements, and those content companies and digital retailers who are ahead of the curve when it comes to digital master files and associated metadata are mostly doing it differently from one another.

“We have vaults filled with a hodgepodge of title elements, text and audio elements not properly conformed to main video assets, elements sprawled across various service provider locations, and missing metadata,” Reinart said. “In short, it’s a mess that keeps costs high and efficiencies low. Current conditions are unsustainable for any media company expecting significant multi-territory growth in the future.”

But he has reasons to be encouraged: Netflix and other digital-first companies are becoming more vocal about the need for industry-wide adoption of Interoperable Master Format (IMF) standards for digital distribution, allowing for the storage and distribution of movie, TV and other programming formats more easily among business partners. Reinart tackles the potential for IMF standards in the industry in a new ContentBridge white paper, “A Bridge To The Future,” available to industry trade organizations.

“I’m for any approach that allows content owners and distributors to maintain a single, very high quality collection for fully related and conformed title assets,” he said. “Many content owners do not have title asset collections that readily translate to IMF-compliant asset packages.

“This is not a justification to perpetuate outmoded digital supply chain practices. Technical specifications for audio and video will continue to evolve, but work done today to adopt IMF will pay dividends down the road.”

Reinart — a former EVP of worldwide operations for Paramount Pictures — points to data showing that video comprises nearly two-thirds of global consumer Internet traffic and 55% of mobile data traffic. But even though much of the media and entertainment supply chain has become digital and automated, much of the source content is meant for other distribution channels other than digital (cinema, disc and broadcast), title assets (particularly language dubs and subtitles) are scattered across multiple distributors and metadata is missing.

With services like Netflix, iTunes, Google Play and Amazon now defining how content needs to be delivered (as opposed to broadcasters), the media and entertainment industry would be wise to follow the call from the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE) and other industry groups, pushing for the industry-wide adoption of IMF to storing and distributing content.

“The IMF approach enables a content owner or distributor to maintain a single, very high quality collection of fully related and conformed title assets,” the white paper reads. “Much of this single asset package can serve as the deliverable from content owners and distributors to the largest video retailers that service global markets.

“For smaller retailers, content owners can deliver a subset of the IMF package assets, with audio visual elements transformed to lower bitrates and easier-to-use codecs. A composition play list (CPL) satisfying the retailer’s requirements provides the instruction set to generate these deliverables.”

IMF can offer content owners a single, service-ready master asset collection, replacing the assortment of assets scattered across many of today’s digital vaults, Reinart argues, and IMF packages can be stored at the content owner’s discretion across public cloud storage services and private data centers. No more duplicative manual mastering or deliverables re-creation, he added.

For more information about the white paper, call (310) 405-6178 ext. 1 or visit www.contentbridge.tv/azure.