MediaGuru upgrades Huawei’s MuchTV

Huawei, Dubai recently deployed a centralised solution to manage its media assets and push content on IPTV and OTT platforms. Huawei’s streaming platform, MuchTV, was launched in September 2015 as part of the company’s expansion into digital content and hosting space.

The platform offers content to address the tastes and demands of the MENA audience. It needed an advanced media asset management (MAM) solution, with all functionalities such as metadata creation, fast search and distribution capability, EDL support, archiving, workflow integration and multiple language support. One of the key requirements for Huawei was censorship of content with a role-based approval mechanism.

Huawei contracted systems integrator MediaGuru to provide a centralised content management solution that provided metadata enrichment and was capable of delivering across multiple platforms. After a meticulous assessment of technical and budgetary requirements, MediaGuru suggested an advanced MAM solution by Media Alliance to Huawei.

Sanjay Salil, Managing Director of MediaGuru, says the systems integration specialist “offered a comprehensive solution including the database and content processing server as well as storage”.

“The solution provides content censorship, which was a key requirement for the client. It also allows for the screening and selection of content to be pushed to the OTT and IPTV platforms,” he said.

The Media-Alliance MAM solution, BORNEO, is cloudbased and works as a single integrated and modular application offering MAM, newsroom, workflow and metadata management, content processing, archiving and delivery. It has been deployed to handle MOV and MXF file formats. Within the MAM system, the operator can selectively pick the content to be distributed after getting approval from the director, and create the final clip by using integrated render capabilities. The operator also has an option to send the media files for non-linear editing (NLE) on Apple Final Cut Pro.

Screen Subtitling provided the subtitling software, an automated solution that converts a library of subtitle files to a streaming format. QNAP provided networked attached storage (NAS) and the workstations were supplied by Dell.

“All these solutions and the centralised platform are scalable to cater to the growing volume of content and users. Archiving was not part of the set-up; however, the system is ready for integration with archive modules (ALTO or tape library) as and when required by the client,” Salil clarifies.

MediaGuru carried out on-site testing and finetuning of complete workflows. Users were sufficiently trained to ensure efficient use of the solution.

The workflow

As part of the workflow, the video files in MXF or MOV formats are ingested into the system. The Watchfolder-based ingest takes the files to create system-generated metadata, which is then pushed to the MAM database. Once in the database, the files create a high-quality proxy for web browsing and thumbnail creation. This is followed by high-resolution, high-quality file movement from the cache storage to production storage. The high-res files are then picked up by the Edit Decision List (EDL) for content censorship.

After finalising the EDL, only the approved content is sent for subtitling to the Screen Subtitling system. Screen’s software solution uses open subtitling, a technique whereby the subtitled text is permanently burnt in and visible in the video portion of the media. In this process, all NG (non-genuine) clips are removed from the exported copy of the HQ files. The EDL files go through the transcoding system to create proxies and thumbnails for browsing. The files are subsequently moved to the MediaMat Subtitling desk for streaming to multiple platforms. At this stage, the system-generated metadata is available. The client can further undertake a custom metadata enrichment on the platform.

“The project was delivered within the stipulated timeframe, in three weeks including the time of equipment delivery. With censorship being a key requirement for the client, we made sure the solution catered to the client’s requirement.”