MediaHub Australia, a media playout, and distribution provider, uses Framelight X workflow orchestration to unify fragmented workflows into a single, highly configurable environment.
The digital media, play-out and distribution facility at MediaHub in Sydney delivers more than 400 channels across Australia and international markets. Its digital infrastructure platform includes fibre connectivity, private clouds for broadcasters and data storage services.
The company was originally established by a team of broadcasters to customise and manage channel playout services. Since then, they have grown and diversified the scope of the business based on new technology and trends in the broadcast industry, internationally and in Australia.
Services range from linear broadcast playout, master control and NOC, to CDN-agnostic live streaming and data centre infrastructure as a service. In the background they handle fibre connectivity, storage and archive, MAM systems, video transcoding and conversion services and disaster recovery.
Workflow Unification
Today, its services support a wide range of broadcasters and content owners. As part of a unification strategy, MediaHub set out to pull together the multiple systems its teams use for media logistics, ingest and asset management – into a single, integrated solution. The objective was to keep the efficiency of their own customised workflows, but unify them to reduce complexity and gain further operational control.
Already a Grass Valley partner for some time, MediaHub has been working with the company since the launch of its facility. They chose to adopt Grass Valley’s cloud-native Framelight X solution, a part of the cloud-based AMPP production system. It supports collaboration between distributed teams, and is designed in a way that allows users to build and adapt systems dynamically to meet demand, thereby making their content creation processes more efficient.
Content Federation
They were also attracted to the idea of content federation, which is basic to the Framelight X system. MediaHub is aware that having different systems for each stage or region in the content creation process can lead to content being copied multiple times, taking up time, bandwidth and storage space. Framelight X federates content into the one system, regardless of its type or location, for more efficient sharing between teams and functions throughout content creation.
Framelight X was selected for its scalability, hybrid deployment capabilities and ability to support self-service customisation. It has numerous scheduling tools, dashboards and a workflow engine that drives media logistics and automation across the operation. The deployment includes core Framelight X capabilities like Elastic Record for line ingest. This means users can begin working remotely in a browser within seconds of a live record, without relying on operators on premise or on location and without waiting for ingest.
Finding assets
Customised Automation
The workflow engine automates repetitive tasks such as ingest, metadata tagging and distribution, freeing up creative resources. Users can design workflows through a familiar interface, using tools including logical operators, transcoding and AI integrations for transcription.
This customizable automation enables broadcasters to simplify operations, adapting workflows to their unique production needs and scaling to meet demand fluctuations.
Another feature is Framelight X Assets, which gives a single view across all sites and can scale to millions of assets. The assets can be browsed and searched via boolean or other customised search techniques, and organised into unlimited virtual folders independent of physical file system folders. When security rules or specific permissions are added to assets, these rules are automatically applied as assets are moved or copied between folders.
Framelight X Inspector manages all asset metadata in customised groups and metadata fields. Permissions can be applied to each metadata field, which instantly becomes searchable and can scale to hundreds of possibilities. Inspector also supports subtitle and closed caption decoding for QC.
Continuous Control and Optimisation
“MediaHub operates in a dynamic environment where flexibility and efficiency are critical,” said Alan Sweeney, CEO of MediaHub Australia. “With Framelight X, we now have a single solution that allows us to design and adapt workflows to meet the specific needs of our customers, while continuously optimising how we use both on-prem and cloud infrastructure.”
Workflow engine
A key differentiator in the selection process was the ability MediaHub’s internal teams have to build and modify workflows independently. Competing solutions would require the use of long-term external services to achieve similar outcomes, limiting flexibility and increasing cost.
“Framelight X gives us full control,” said Simon Scott, CDIO of MediaHub Australia. “We can now consolidate our media workflows into one technology stack and combine on-prem and cloud compute in a way that was not previously possible. It allows us to evolve our operations in line with how our business evolves.
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