Our Client is a leading professional honorary organization with the stated goal of advancing the arts & sciences of motion pictures internationally. They are renowned in the motion picture industry for their review process and the quantum of digital content they receive and manage is a couple of terabytes every year. Collecting digital content from global participants and presenting qualifying content to a global team of reviewers and critics along with all required information in the required specification is no joke. Our client had outsourced the task of manually checking the quality and specification of the submitted digital content. This is when they reached out to us as a leading consultant of their digital asset management ecosystem. They were finally able to realize the value in our collaborative consultation style and gain better control and visibility on the overall digital content management process.

Too many manual interventions jeopardized the journey

The digital content submitted by applicants internationally were in different specifications and noncompliant formats thereby not compatible to the viewing portal. Our client had deploy teams to manually verify the specifications of each content within every single package submitted. Only those content that met required specifications were pushed into the review portal while other content had to be re-submitted by respective applicants. This manual intervention could go cold at any stage of the process and hence delayed the entire voting and ranking step which played the most crucial role in the overall nominations and awarding ceremony. Any mistake led to major repercussions in the motion pictures industry with global participants.

Lack of uniformity in the specification of submitted digital content for review and tight time window before nominations forced stretched efforts and pressurized work life.

Automation alongside integration

We collaborated with the client’s teams to understand their ecosystem and the complete workflow to identify critical paths in the overall process. Security was one of the key considerations behind their traditional architecture. Any content package submitted by applicants shall not directly get into the client’s most precious Digital Asset Management application - OpenText Media Management (OTMM). So the packages were first dropped into IBM Aspera Faspex from where a human was required to access the file within each package and manually validate the specifications to meet the set standards. Only spec-compliant content were then manually uploaded into OTMM along with relevant metadata based on information available in the submitted application form. As for a specific category of movies, the spec-compliant video files had to be pushed into Brightcove along with metadata which further fed the videos and appropriate information into the actual review portals.

This is where we proposed how we can eliminate the manual intervention by building a custom component that could access the files in Aspera Faspex and review relevant specifications of the files within the package. We also ensured that the component could automatically push only qualifying files (not the entire package) to OTMM. The same component also could send notifications to respective applicants requesting to resubmit noncompliant files identified within the package. Over and above all these, we also ensured that the component could fetch relevant information from the submitted application and automatically update the metadata of the content when uploading them in OTMM. We were also able to integrate to Brightcove so that compliant video content could be automatically uploaded along with metadata updated from information submitted as part of the application form. Furthermore, corresponding supporting files like captions, posters, etc., were also automatically tied together without any manual intervention ensuring better accuracy and viewer experience.

Integrations led to Automated Quality Checks (QC) on the submitted digital content and Automated Upload to content management system after QC clearance along with corresponding custom metadata.

Improved overall workplace efficiency

Our client found value in our collaborative approach – they were able to realize the amount of internal teams bandwidth that got freed up due to this automation and integration. Their teams are now able to focus more on orchestrating the events rather than spending time checking, transferring and following up for the digital content in compliant formats. A direct savings of more than a million dollars per annum was also evident since the manual quality checks, upload to OTMM and upload to Brightcove for specific movie category had been fully automated. Our client strongly believes the success of this automation can be further extended across all movie categories to achieve better experience in the overall journey.