SCMS Forum: Sports, Entertainment Industries Converge To Discuss MAM Workflows, Storage Technologies

In addition, a workshop focused on ways to protect and monetize content

SVG’s 11th-annual Sports Content Management and Storage Forum (formerly Sports Asset Management and Storage Forum) welcomed more than 250 attendees from across the industry for a day of informative discussions addressing the latest media-asset–management (MAM) workflows and content-storage technologies.

More than 250 sports/entertainment-production professionals attended the Sports Content Management and Storage Forum.

In addition to a cavalcade of MAM leaders representing major broadcasters, leagues, teams, and vendors who pulled back the curtain on their respective workflows, this year’s program featured a Security and Rights Management Workshop intended to provide attendees with tips on how to better protect and monetize their content.

But first, SVG paid tribute to NHL SVP of Technology Grant Nodine, who served as the inaugural chair of the Sports Content Management and Storage Committee (previously known as the Sports Asset Management and Storage Committee) for three years. He took to the stage to express his gratitude for the opportunity and to welcome his successor, MLB Network VP of Engineering and IT Mark Haden.

“I’m proud to have played a role in the last three years as chairman of the Sports Content Management and Storage subcommittee of SVG,” said Nodine. “I’m glad that we were able to expand the range of topics that we’ve discussed and the depth of our technical discussions at this and other events. I’m confident, as I pass the torch to my friend and esteemed colleague Mark Haden, that the progress we made in sharpening the focus of our discussions will continue. I’m certain Mark will bring his wit, his experience, and his humble ingenuity to the task of keeping the momentum going at each of our SCMS events.”

The NHL’s Grant Nodine is the outgoing chair of the Sports Content Management and Storage Committee.

The SCMS Forum is made possible through the support of the SCMS Committee and this year’s event sponsors: Title Sponsor Quantum; Diamond Sponsors Aspera, IBM, and Panasas; Gold Sponsors Avid, Cloudian, Dalet, HGST/G-Technology, and Vizrt; Case Study Sponsors CoreSite, Imagen, and Primestream; and Event Sponsors Dell EMC, Diversified, and Spectra Logic.

This year, the SCMS Forum expanded its focus beyond the sports industry to address the content-management challenges faced in live entertainment. In a morning keynote conversation, Creative Artists Agency CIO Eric Iverson (formerly, SVP/CIO at Sony Pictures Television) elaborated on the content-management successes and failures he has seen in Hollywood and what the sports industry can learn from live entertainment in terms of managing, protecting, and monetizing their content.

Much like the sports industry, Iverson noted, Hollywood as an industry coalesces around common causes. During his keynote, he touched on three recent causes in particular: industry self-regulation, content protection and cybersecurity, and the streamlining of the industry supply chain. While the first two certainly pertain to sports, the third particularly resonated with the crowd, because it mirrors television’s transition to digital distribution.

“There’s no way that the industry could have gone from film to digital distribution without an industry conversation. Period,” said Iverson. “There was a huge economic problem to solve, which had to do with the fact that you had all of these prints that you were going to replace and you had new devices that needed to go into every single theater. How are you going to basically pay for all of these new devices? You can’t just go tell every theater on Earth, You should just go buy a very expensive projector, and, trust us, it’s all going to be good. There had to be a way of actually financing that, because the entire industry had a vested interest in moving from one to the other.”

Iverson also echoed many of the MAM-workflow challenges expressed by other panelists throughout the day, including the vital need for metadata.

Creative Artists Agency’s Eric Iverson, in his morning keynote: “There’s no way that the [entertainment] industry could have gone from film to digital distribution without an industry conversation. Period.”

“In Hollywood, there’s over 80 different productions of Hamlet,” he said. “So, if you have data coming through a supply chain and it just says ‘Hamlet,’ that doesn’t tell you anything at all about what the production is. You’d be surprised how many products out there literally have the same name. If you don’t have a way of, as an industry, talking about how data moves through that supply chain, that’s a really big problem.”

In addition to the morning keynote conversation, the SCMS Forum featured panel discussions on Lessons Learned From MAM Beginners and Veterans; Embracing the Cloud for MAM, DR, and More; Storage Solutions for Video Archives; Crowdsourcing Metadata; and How Artificial Intelligence Could Change the Asset-Management Game.

A series of Case Studies were presented by YES Network (sponsored by Avid), MLB Network (sponsored by CoreSite), IMG Replay (sponsored by Imagen), and AT&T Sports Networks (sponsored by Primestream).

The Security and Rights Management Workshop kicked off with a Spotlight Q&A with The Walt Disney Studios’ Ben Stanbury, followed by panel discussions on Security and Content Protection and on Rights Management and Licensing.

Check staging.sportsvideo.org for more in-depth reports, video interviews, and photos from the 2017 Sports Content Management and Storage Forum.

 

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