H.265 and Tomorrow’s Broadcast Operations

As expected, this week the ITU ratified the high efficiency video coding standard (or ITU-T H.265 / ISO/IEC 23008-2 HEVC to give it its proper name).  HEVC offers significant improvements in compression for all resolutions, including Ultra High Definition.  IBC 2012 was a-buzz with talk of Ultra-HD, 4k (with and without a capital K), and HEVC. [...]

Case Study: Business Architecture Review

Continuing our posts describing some of our recent projects, we look at an engagement where we helped a major broadcaster by recommending a plan for future content operations.  To do this, we reviewed our client’s current business architecture, worked with them to articulate a future vision, and recommended a plan to achieve their target content [...]

Mapping Out a Lean Enterprise MAM Architecture

The Bodhi Tree Group recently completed a major project to design an enterprise Media Asset Management (MAM) architecture for a leading Pay TV operator.  We’ve written a case study describing how our team worked with our client to deliver a vision of efficient file-based processes, a set of baseline operational metrics, and a future roadmap for [...]

The Uncanny Electrickery of Automatic Content Recognition

I’ve given up trying to fool my IntoNow iPad app into telling me that I’m watching something other than what’s on my TV.  After a fruitless weekend of surfing various live, recorded, YouTube, and time-shifted shows and being informed by IntoNow within a few seconds what I was watching, I admit defeat.  This Automated Content [...]

First Look: Amazon Instant Video vs. Netflix on PS3

I’ve been an Amazon Prime subscriber for a few years and, for me, the ability to watch the odd TV episode or Movie online for free was always a bonus in addition to the speedier mail deliveries. I never really thought of Amazon as a replacement for Netflix.  However, after using the Amazon Instant Video [...]

NDS Acquisition: Cisco’s Second Chance?

Last week, Cisco announced it was planning to acquire NDS for $5Bn, its biggest acquisition since Tandberg in 2009.  It’s tempting to imagine that if Cisco had acquired NDS rather than Scientific Atlanta in 2006, it would be a lot further along with its Videoscape vision and strategy than it is today.  So will this [...]

Limitations of Lean in Broadcast Operations

In the past few blog posts we’ve been looking at Lean and how the philosophy of avoiding waste and good housekeeping might benefit Broadcast operations, specifically Media Asset Management (MAM) and file-based workflows.  In our final post in the series we look at some of the limitations of Lean in a broadcast content supply chain.
Lean [...]

What the Toyota Motor Company can teach Broadcast MAM – Good Housekeeping

In our last post on Broadcast MAM the key concepts of Lean operations were introduced and how Toyota’s 7 areas of waste (or inefficiencies) could be a useful checklist in the broadcast industry.  In this post we’ll look at how Lean could further benefit a Media Asset Management (MAM) and file-based workflows implementation by looking [...]

What the Toyota Motor Company can teach Broadcast MAM – Avoiding Waste

This is the first in a series of articles discussing how the Toyota Motor Company’s Lean philosophy can be applied to broadcast operations – specifically Media Asset Management (MAM) and file-based workflows.  In this post we introduce the Lean philosophy and look at how the 7 areas of waste are relevant to eliminating inefficiencies for [...]

Benchmarking Broadcast Operations

WYMIWYG – What You Measure Is What You Get
Source: John Bicheno, Six Sigma and the Quality Toolbox
Measuring performance is a critical task if an organization is serious about operational excellence in terms of improving quality, cost-base, and scalability.  The outputs of repeatable processes can be measured and compared not only against internal historical data but [...]