How it Gives The Weinstein Company Control of its Feature-Film Library

This week, Technicolor announced a new digital library management service called MediAffinity, naming The Weinstein Company (TWC) as its first customer. MediAffinity is actually a combination of existing technologies that Technicolor is packaging together for the first time in a system specifically designed to manage a digital feature-film library from ingestion through distribution to various channels including iTunes, Xbox, and the like.
Other Technicolor customers, including broadcasters such as ITV and The Disney Channel, have for about two years used some of MediAffinity’s underlying tools, such as the workflow orchestration engine that was originally designed to support Technicolor’s broadcast pipeline infrastructure, Technicolor Senior VP of Service Innovation and Management Kurt Clawson told StudioBytes. But TWC is the first company to utilize those systems through a new web portal Technicolor designed. It allows customers to take control of their own asset repository.

“It’s the first leveraging of these services in a self-service model,” Clawson explained. “We’ve been servicing the Weinsteins for a number of years, but MediAffinity was the first opportunity we gave them to take their titles, put them into the library, and expose them so they could make decisions about processes and delivering their content.”

For TWC, that means logging into the system, browsing content and selecting certain titles for delivery to multiple channels – iTunes, Xbox, PS3, and Amazon. Each one of those has different profiles for deliverables, including specific metadata packages and service level agreements for processing and turnaround, which are addressed and templated in MediAffinity.

“We work directly with customers to define the workflow process they want to engage in to deliver content to aggregators,” Clawson said. “That can include everything from review-and-approval steps to automated QC processes, content restoration, and reframing. We validate those workflows and create a template that assures that every piece of content delivered out the back end will meet the stringent requirements of a particular content aggregator.”

Plenty of different asset-management applications are being promoted to movie studios as an answer to their archiving needs, but Technicolor says other systems don’t address the specific complexities of handling feature films. “Your feature has 30-something thousand frames of information per reel, and seven to nine reels of content,” said Clawson. “You need to preserve that all the way down to the frame level if you want to repurpose for varying things in the long term. Our system lets us do that, but also groups those together and manages them at a title level. The 30,000 frames representing reel one, along with seven other reels, are associated to create a release. Different sequences of those frames, or marriages with different audio essences, create a domestic release versus an international release, for example. A standard system isn’t going to manage the complexities of those relationships.”

Technicolor customers who are already having deliverables created by the facility can opt to have assets archived in MediAffinity as each new project is finished. For existing material, Technicolor has a strategic partnership with Front Porch Digital, which provides a robotic tape-ingest system that can pull in thousands of hours of content per month, creating mezzanine and proxy versions of the content (for browsing the stored video) while also analyzing it and generating extended metadata about it. Customer assets are stored in a secure data center handled by Technicolor, but the assets remain under the control of the content owner.

“We don’t manage anything other than the physical infrastructure that hosts the storage for the content,” Clawson adds. “It’s a software-as-a-service model. We’re hosting the storage in a secure environment, we’re providing the software and hardware infrastructure to handle reformatting and repurposing that content, and we’re hosting the web portal that allows the customer to come in and self-manage their content. They add their own metadata, choose which pieces of content they want to add into the library, and manage the storage policies – everything from high availability storage to off-the-shelf archive copies that can be pulled off and stored, either in an iron curtain or back at their own facility.”