The challenges of a fragmented media supply chain

“Simon, do you know where my program is?” “I don’t know. Who is the distributor’s servicing partner for this TV show?” “I don’t know, and I can’t reach them to find out. Is it you? And if it’s not you, who is it?”

We did service content from that distributor, but not all their catalogue, not in all regions, and not to every broadcaster. The media supply chain is often very fragmented, with many different service providers, distributors, and systems involved. At that moment, I should have been able to log into a platform to check the status of the content. But no such platform existed. Nor did my client have a system recording and sharing the journey and status of his content from acquisition to playout. I called our company’s on-call operations manager back in London. They didn’t know if we were responsible for delivering that content, so they logged into a remote system to investigate. After some time, they found out that a file transfer server had stopped working, and the file (recognized only by a long, confusing filename) was stuck in an outbound transfer directory. Who knew?

After rebooting the servers, the files slowly started moving to the broadcaster’s system. An hour later, my relieved client called back to confirm that the programme was safely in place for that evening’s broadcast. Crisis avoided, but only just.

Why we need smart, automated workflows

This last-minute scramble showed a big problem in the media industry: the lack of an intelligent, automated, connected supply chain. Moving important content from post-production in Los Angeles to a broadcaster somewhere else in the world involved many third-party vendors, manual processes, and a lack of clear information. It worked, but only just. Imagine if both myself and my client had real-time visibility into this connected content supply chain. What if there was intelligent monitoring and alerting to raise issues before they escalated? What if there was intelligent monitoring and alerting to raise issues before they escalated? What if I could have logged into a single platform to instantly see where the content was? Intelligent, automated workflows would have avoided all the stressful phone calls, manual checks, and last-minute efforts to meet the deadline.

The future of the media industry is in automation and integration, and the eyes-wide-open sensible application of new AI tools. From post-production to playout, smart workflows can change how content is managed, reducing mistakes, saving time, and making sure assets get where they need to go smoothly. By automating these processes, broadcasters can focus on what really matters: delivering great content to their audiences on time.

The way forward … with Merapar

At Merapar, we’re focused on building the future of cloud-based, integrated media supply chains. Our solutions automate the entire content journey, from post-production to publishing. By using data science, machine learning, and AI, we help clients enrich metadata, check for compliance, localise content, and insert ads.

Our cloud platforms are built on open data systems that connect smoothly with existing workflows, allowing broadcasters to improve without having to change everything they already use. With our expertise in systems integration, we help clients bring together the best tools into a unified, scalable solution. Metadata enrichment, compliance support, localisation, advertising insertion point identification are all benefits that come from a supply chain built around an open data architecture in the cloud that can entertain new AI technologies as they mature.