Sinclair Broadcast Group Streamlines Media Content Ingest with TrackIt and Sony's Ci Media Cloud

Challenge: Streamlining Media Content Ingest

The Sinclair Broadcast Group was seeking a solution that would assist in the ingest of media content into their centralized media asset management system, Sony’s Ci Media Cloud. Each media asset was comprised of five files, including two BXF media essence files with corresponding sidecar and ancillary files presented in varied formats. The challenge involved bringing this content into Ci as one “consolidated media object”.

The existing process would result in media assets being ingested without all of the necessary information which caused them to be inaccessible in their Ci Workspace. The objective was to implement an automated solution that would reduce ingest issues and aid in consolidating these diverse ancillary files into a unified and coherent structure for storing and previewing the media assets as a single object in Ci.

BXF Parsing Workflow Implementation

TrackIt successfully addressed the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s requirements by implementing a robust BXF Parsing Workflow on AWS. BXF, or the Broadcast eXchange Format, is a SMPTE standardized, XML-based protocol designed for the exchange of data between broadcast applications and devices. This protocol was used in the deployment of Ci, built on AWS, as the media management and collaboration platform for their broadcast operations.

The implemented ingest workflow parses one of the two BXF files for each media asset, extracts the metadata, consolidates the media object, and utilizes the Ci API to update the way the media file and its associated BXF elements are represented in Ci Workspace. The workflow also manages ingest failures due to corrupted data or connectivity problems. A dead-letter queue (DLQ) was implemented to temporarily store files while retries were attempted before alerting an administrator for manual intervention.

Workflow Steps

Ingest: BXF media essence files and associated sidecar files are uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket, triggering the automated BXF parsing process on Ci Workspace.

Event-driven workflow with Amazon API Gateway: Events generated by file uploads are captured and organized using Amazon API Gateway and Ci API Webhooks, serving as triggers for the BXF Parsing Lambda Function.

Metadata Extraction: The BXF Parsing Lambda function extracts metadata, consolidates, and transforms assets into a single media object.

Media object update: API calls are initiated to update the Ci Workspace with the new consolidated media object.

Handling failures with a Dead-Letter Queue (DLQ): A DLQ temporarily stores messages that the BXF Parsing Lambda function couldn’t process, allowing for retries in case of API call failures and manual intervention for corrupted or faulty data.

Services Used

• Amazon S3: Scalable and durable storage for media essence video files and associated sidecar files, ensuring secure access and efficient retrieval. Integrated with Ci Media Cloud’s Bring Your Own S3 Storage (BYOS) to seamlessly utilize existing resources within the cloud environment.
• AWS Lambda: Core of the parsing workflow, with functions for parsing BXF files, making API calls to Ci, and notifying a Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic on event status.
• Amazon EventBridge Scheduler: Scalable task scheduling service leveraged for the management of workflow tasks. Retries are scheduled for any failures or exceptions raised by the BXF Parsing Lambda.
• Amazon SQS: Serverless message queuing service used to manage the flow of media files. A dead-letter queue (DLQ) is used for failed parsing events, facilitating effective error resolution.
• Amazon API Gateway: Secure and scalable entry point integrated with Ci API Webhook to capture and organize events from file uploads on Ci Workspace.
• Amazon SNS: A fully-managed simple notification service that helps set up, operate, and send notifications from the cloud. In this workflow, events are published to the SNS media bus previously deployed within production.
• Terraform: Deployed Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for provisioning and managing the required infrastructure components, ensuring flexibility, repeatability, and streamlined disaster recovery.
• Sony Ci API: Facilitated communication with Sony’s Ci Media Cloud’s media asset management system, where assets processed by the workflow were stored as consolidated media objects.

Outcome

The BXF Parsing Workflow implementation provided the Sinclair Broadcast Group with an automated solution for ingest and media asset consolidation. By efficiently extracting metadata from BXF files and updating the data to Ci, consolidated media objects are created, and ingest failures are reduced. Within Ci, the media asset, along with its metadata, BXF files, and other ancillary files are housed as elements of a consolidated media object – ensuring associated files and data remain intact throughout the ingest process. The seamless grouping of files belonging to the same media asset and a process for managing ingest failures enhanced the overall efficiency of the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s media asset management process. This has helped to ensure a successful and organized adoption of the Ci platform across Sinclair’s broadcast, licensing, and distribution teams.