The present invention relates in general to enterprise-wide data management and in particular to a service-oriented architecture adapted to handle media assets, services and other media-related applications.
A “media asset” as used herein refers generally to any form of media content, including video, audio, still images and the like. Media assets can exist in digital (e.g., MPEG-4 or raw video) and/or analog (e.g., film) forms. Organizations that create and distribute media content typically generate numerous media assets that must be managed. For instance, the organization needs to track assets in various forms and formats, generally distributed across a range of storage locations and systems. The organization also needs to regulate access to the various assets so that people or business units within the organization that need an asset (or information about an asset) can obtain what they need while unauthorized uses are prohibited.
In an effort to meet these needs, numerous computer-based media management services and systems have been developed. These services and systems use a variety of protocols and interfaces to support asset management functions such as creation, distribution, updating, storage and retrieval of media assets. The protocols and interfaces vary greatly depending, e.g., on the type of asset being managed and the particular needs of a business unit or organization that implements a given service or system. Allowing business units to select or develop their own media services and systems provides tremendous flexibility to an organization, as each business unit can adopt a solution that meets its particular requirements.
Integrating these solutions across disparate business units, however, has proven difficult. Often, the various services and systems are proprietary and cannot be easily modified to intercommunicate with other vendors' products. Different services and systems may also support different and potentially incompatible protocols for performing asset management functions such as locating and/or transferring assets.
One solution that has been tried is to create point-to-point connections between pairs of media asset management services or systems on an as-needed basis. For instance, when two business units determine that they would benefit from sharing access to media assets and/or metadata about their respective media assets, these business units can contract with a developer to create an interface that will enable the two services or systems to communicate. Creation of custom interfaces is generally a slow process, as the developer must design and test the interface for the specific services or systems being connected; six-month set-up cycles are typical. Such interfaces are also fragile, in that modifications to either service or system may break the communication path until such time as modifications to the interface are made. In some cases, business requirements may change so rapidly that the developers of point-to-point interfaces simply cannot keep up.
Further, creating and maintaining a point-to-point connection can be a major expense. The expense multiplies as the number of services and systems to be integrated increases, making the point-to-point solution cost prohibitive for large organizations. Thus, point-to-point solutions are not scalable to large media enterprises with many business units and disparate media services and systems.
Another solution is to create a monolithic structure that supports intercommunication between a number of “preferred” media asset management services or systems. As long as every business unit in the organization is amenable to using one of the preferred services and systems, this solution is workable. However, as with the point-to-point approach, the cost of implementing this approach scales with the number of different services or systems on the “preferred” list. Thus, as a practical matter, it is usually necessary to limit the number of preferred systems. Business units may then face a difficult choice between a system that meets their needs but is not a preferred system and a preferred system that is a poor fit to their needs.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a more flexible, scalable solution to the problems of creating, distributing, updating, storing and retrieving media assets across a large organization.