TransMedia Dynamics

Overtime the broadcast media industry has undergone a radical upheaval from a linear TV channel based environment to a digital environment, infusing content to digital platforms such as YouTube, Netflix, and internet TV. This device revolution, and the associated ease of accessing media content, has compelled companies to overcome the untenable restrictions of their legacy linear content delivery systems and produce content on demand and in much larger volumes. “With the increasing content, and delivery options, the need for effective management of media content throughout its life-cycle has climbed up the priority list for organizations,” begins Tony Taylor, Chairman and CEO, TransMedia Dynamics (TMD). In such a scenario, organizations do not just require video and audio, they also need metadata for the electronic program guide (EPG), and the protocols to deliver online content, “for instance, 80 percent of the failures for iTunes uploads are based on issues with the metadata structure and has nothing to do with the audio and video. This provides a challenge for CIOs or CTOs in terms of the complexity of delivering to multiple platforms,” he adds.

Spearheading this transformation is TMD, headquartered in Aylesbury, UK, with offices in Austin Texas and Canberra Australia, that designs and implements media and collection management solutions for media, broadcast, and archive organizations around the world. “Our media asset platform’s workflow and content intelligence engine enables customers to scale up their non-linear content preparation environment by just adding in new automated workflows,” says Taylor.

TMD’s flagship product, Mediaflex®UMS, provides a unified platform for a range of media services that are designed to deliver an integrated solution, incorporating comprehensive business and operational workflow management for today’s media organizations. Mediaflex was not only developed as a technology platform that combines third party technology with TMD’s own media services but also to provide business metrics, ultimately bestowing an insight on what is happening in the organization. “It not only manages the digital aspect but also takes care of the physical assets, such as the organization’s tape and film stocks” states Taylor.

Mediaflex is a SOA based product that manages the whole media content. The platform has a metadata repository and workflow engine that assists in managing the entire life-cycle of media content, including creation, digitization, repurposing, enrichment, delivery, publishing and archiving.

The company prides itself on its best-of-the-breed business process management, and workflow engine; bestowing clients the ability to develop and configure their own software-defined workflows. “With our solution, clients don’t need to employ expensive developers to develop their workflows. We offer an intuitive drag-and-drop user interface so that they can produce their own,” claims Taylor. “We offer a very hierarchical data model that allows our customers to track elements of media and the genealogy, with comprehensive search capability enabling people to find their content quickly.” For instance, TMD helped Raidiò Teilifis Eireann (RTE), a semi-state company and the national public service broadcaster of Ireland to transition to a completely file-based infrastructure. TMD’s new architecture provided a quantum leap in operational performance across every part of the RTÉ television service.

Forging ahead, TMD aims to continue to innovate their product to meet the growing demand of content and grow its operations to meet the demands of the customer. “We are looking at how we can benefit our customers by changing the licensing model,” concludes Taylor.