The Unified Media Services (UMS) toolkit provides a simple way for media services from multiple vendors to be integrated into a single, comprehensive asset management and delivery platform. “With today’s keen commercial awareness, content owners and broadcasters need their asset management systems to be much more than simple libraries,” said Tony Taylor, chairman and CEO of TMD. “They need to integrate media services from ingest through transcoding to cloud storage and content delivery networks, and they need to synchronise rich metadata with multiple databases. This is something we have been building for years, but with the introduction of UMS we have simplified the process based on open standards.” UMS is an architecture with an API, based on web services. It enables external media services devices, whether using their own proprietary interface or an open, FIMS-style adaptor, to be integrated on a single, media-aware workflow bus. It eliminates the need for visibility of any individual proprietary API, enabling the system designer to create workflows based entirely on services. As well as applications handling the content, such as ingest, transcoding and storage, UMS also manages metadata applications. Data dictionaries are treated as media services, enabling extensive metadata schemas to be maintained across multiple databases, and content delivery services to be populated with the correct metadata. It also enables command and control services to be built, and audit trails to be tracked. “The move towards service oriented architectures will ultimately make content management easier and result in big business benefits,” Taylor emphasised. “What we are doing with UMS is making it easier and much faster to create interworking through industry standard protocols, essentially by taking a core part of our expertise and building it into a standards-based API. By making it easier to create new workflows through multiple devices, this makes content businesses more agile.” N3716
