An international task force between the EBU and the Advanced Media Workflow Association (and industry) is defining a first reference architecture and specification for broadcaster centric 'Service Oriented Architectures'.

 

Television operation's second phase of digitisation is marked by the transition to the use of IT-based technology across all areas of television production. A key issue is the provision of agile infrastructures that allow adoption to new business models and to avoid vendor lock-in situations. Broadcasters clearly foresee that strategic technology changes are required to allow more flexibility in workflows and cost leveraging. The EBU believes that the use of flexible IP-based 'Service Oriented Architectures' or similar architectures, as a natural extension of IT-based production, offer the potential for greatly improved interoperability over the current (often proprietary interfaces based) system design practices.

 

After several years of sherpa work, in EBU' projects on Common Processes and Networked Production, and in AMWA's MSAG, the two organisations have established the joint project EBU-AMWA FIMS (Framework for Interoperable media Services).

 

Naturally, this EBU MIM FIMS project is the user group through which EBU will liaise with EBU-AMWA FIMS:

 

- experts in common processes and networked production are invited to review the services proposed and specified by EBU-AMWAFIMS

- experts are invited to contribute to the EBU-AMWA FIMS requests for technologies and use cases

- metadata experts in MIM are also invited to review the EBU-AMWA FIMS work on metadata and class modelling

 

For more information on the EBU-AWMA FIMS project: http://wiki.amwa.tv/ebu

 

All information on the EBU-AMWA FIMS project is public including meeting reports, requests for contributions, working darft and completed specifications.

 

EBU AMWA FIMS specifications are simultaneously submitted fro review by AMWA and EBU (via this group EBU FIMS). Comments and feedback are resolved by the EBU AMWA FIMS project and final specifications are submitted to EBU and AMWA for final publication.

 

All members of the EBU MIM FIMS project are encouraged to join the EBU-AMWA FIMS project and participate directly. No fee. The only condition to join is to sign the EBU-AMWA FIMS  Participation Agreement (PA), which has been designed to protect the compensation free framework (technology is submitted by FIMS members for free, forever)  under which the project operates, strictly. The FIMS PA is available from the FIMS wiki at http://wiki.amwa.tv/ebu/index.php/PA.

 

In a project like FIMS, the role of users is key. EBU members are such important users. FIMS is working for you!