Media Cloud & Microservices

Helps Members to move to flexible microservice architectures in the cloud.

Most broadcasters today are using cloud services in some ways, but the cloud continues to change fast, and attractive new possibilities have opened up. The latest trend is towards serverless architecture and what is known as FaaS – function as a service – opening the door to an entirely new way of running media services.

MCMA provides a painless way of adopting serverless architecture and implementing media workflows in the cloud. Created as an open-source project, free to use and available on GitHub, it offers reusable services that can apply to all applications and infrastructures across multiple cloud providers. 

2022

  • status_done_12px.png MAM based on MCMA (Q2 2022)
  • status_done_12px.png Demo at IBC (Q3 2022)

2021

  • status_done_12px.png Launch control: a web-based application to monitor and deploy complex cloud infrastructure (Q1 2021) 
  • status_done_12px.png  Cloud agnostic engine to develop workflows: Node-Red (Q2 2021)
  • status_done_12px.png  Open-source libraries on GitHub for AWS, Azure, GCP (Q4 2021)
  • status_done_12px.png  Standardisation at SMPTE (Q4 2021)

2020

2019

  • Disseminate micro services-based technology among EBU members;
  • Provide tools and libraries to facilitate the development and deployment of workflows for media applications;
  • Support EBU members in deloping workflows using MCMA technology.

MCMA is a project of the EBU Metadata & AI group, under the umbrella of the EBU's Strategic Programme on Production

REST APIs

Its main goal is to develop a set of simplified REST APIs with a minimum payload. These APIs allow integration of cloud and in-house based workflows, by combining microservices between (multiple) cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google) and in-house services.

Currently, the work is focussed on the Launch Control application; a user-friendly interface to help design and monitor microservices workflows.

Flexible workflows

So far the emphasis has been on Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled services, such as speech-to-text, automatic subtitling, translation, text-to-speech, face recognition and identification, emotion detection, speech-to-text evaluation, FFMPEG media transformation. However, developers can easily duplicate and extend the code for other applications.

Multi-cloud

The MCMA cloud services provide an abstraction on top of provider-specific cloud services, providing cross-provider interoperability.  Using the libraries, components and instructions available on GitHub, MCMA offers a turn-key solution ('implementation by example') for cloud infrastructure implementation, deployment and management.

MCMA has been successfully demonstrated at IBC and NAB events since 2017 and in a dedicated developer workshop in 2020.

Standardization 

MCMA architecture allows to manage and process complex media workflows as a Job. The log management strategy is a critical challenge in a microservice architecture. A major challenge in building media solutions around multiple microservices is that status reporting is done in a wide variety of ways, making it very difficult to sort through these and determine the real status of the overall jobs being accomplished by these services. The MCMA team is working on standardizing Job Management with SMPTE: 

Working group: https://kws.smpte.org/higherlogic/ws/projects/629/details

Standard Proposal: https://github.com/SMPTE/st2126

Guidance and tools

MCMA website

MCMA White Paper

MCMA New-York 2020

IBC2019 presentation

IBC 2018 presentation

MCMA GitHub Repositories

MCMA is an open-source project with a variety of GitHub repositories the main ones being: 

Workflows

mcma-workflows leverage AI technologies from multiple cloud vendors in a single media workflow using mcma-libraries 

Libraries

mcma-libraries contains various libraries (AWS,AZURE,GCP) that assist in setting up media workflows in a multi-cloud environment. 

Launch Control

mcma-launch-control is a cloud-hosted web application that allows configuring, deploying and monitoring your mcma-enabled media workflows.

 

Related topics

Data

The EBU helps Members to enhance and enrich their media by integrating their data from commissioning to distribution taking benefit in advances on Artificial Intelligence.

Digital Terrestrial Television

Although public broadcasters are available on pay-TV platforms such as satellite, cable and IPTV, Terrestrial Television (Analogue and DTT) remains the backbone to free-to-air TV access and the most widely used means of receiving television globally.