One of the industries that are reaping the benefits of technological advancements is the media and entertainment (M&E). Companies in the media supply chain are able to dip into the global base of consumers thanks to improvements in broadband internet and are able to deliver their content through web browsers to an increasing audience. As the media landscape started evolving, Dan Goman and his team recognized the need of content owners for better tools for content management. That’s how the story behind a cloud-native media logistics and delivery platform that uses the IMF began.
How Dan Goman entered the industry
Things started on the other side of the spectrum for Dan Goman and his team. In the beginning, they were creators and producers working on creating great content for their viewers and launching OTT platforms and channels. During those times, they went through all the pains of creativity and distributing content and realized how the entire content cycle can be done more effectively and without having to hire a ton of different vendors. They saw a way to use a network of top-class technology companies and future-proof formats like the IMF, create their own SaaS and change to an entertainment technology company.
The major challenges of content delivery
The biggest hurdle all content producers are facing today is delivering the best quality video format to a range of devices and endpoints. As the global market is growing, there is also a rising need in delivering content that is localized and compliant with the target market. The geographic distribution of content requires the creation of different title versions which further means an increase in costs for storage, manpower and time needed for those operations.
What is IMF and how it supports faster content delivery
Having faced these issues themselves, Dan Goman and his company were able to see the solution in using IMF in the Cloud. The Interoperable Master Format represents a single file with individual components like video, audio, sub and captioning data, dynamic metadata, and packaging data. By being able to create a master file and alter all additional assets in accordance with the final delivery point, content owners get to experience the following benefits:
- Less storage required for different title versions,
- Ability to process content faster since even the smallest pieces of the title like individual scenes can be altered without having to create a new version from the beginning,
- Cost saving, because of less work needed to be done for a title alteration and less storage required,
- The certainty that the IMF can meet the future requirements of new content platforms,
- Higher quality of content delivery and reduction in human error thanks to the IMF specs to automate and conform to destination points.
Additionally, by working with the IMF and having the entire infrastructure in the Cloud, content owners also get to have enhanced flexibility, accessibility, and ability to make changes at a moment’s notice. For that matter, these functions are only possible with the scale of new IT cloud environments because of their practically unlimited capacity. With the huge reduction of costs this cloud-native solution provides, companies are able to increase their overall ROI and deliver their content with a significant decrease in time-to-market.
Summing Up
As the global base of consumers is growing, high-quality delivery of content becomes a top priority for content producers and other players in the media supply chain. Luckily, with people like Dan Goman and his team who were able to experience the process from that standpoint, we get to see the creation of major technological solutions that support faster, better, and cheaper globalization and geographic distribution of content.
