Digital Media Value Chain

Introduction

This document provides an overview of key aspects underlying mass distribution of digital audio and video for players acting in the Digital Media Industry [i]. Its goals are to:

• Equip newcomers with a broad understanding of this type of solutions;
• Describe the areas of concern and building blocks of a digital media distribution solution, which are relevant to define a specific architecture and to establish a suitable sourcing plan (build vs buy);
• Propose a reusable taxonomy for professionals within this sector.

The document starts by providing an overview of the overall Digital Media Value Chain, i.e., the different stages at which value is created, from media creation to its consumption.

It then focuses on those stages that are typically provided by media distributors such as broadcasters, operators or pure Over The Top (OTT) players (the differences between these are described on the Appendix), describing the set of key capabilities typically required to provide the desired value for the multiple stakeholders. Those capabilities include both some specific of media solutions which are described first, as well as some others common to many domain problems which are described on the later sections.

Providing feedback

This document represents my view which inevitably is influenced by my own experience architecting, designing, developing, testing, or advising on solutions within this sector. I will welcome any feedback which helps improve this text or contributes to its usefulness. You can reach me via email at manelra@hotmail.com.

Here you can find it in PDF version (15 pages).

Digital Media Industry Value Chain

An Industry Value Chain extends Michael Porter’s concept of a value chain; whereas Porter’s Value Chain depicts building blocks for how an organization creates value, an Industry Value Chain depicts how a whole industry creates value. Both types of value chains identify the stages of value creation. And on both cases in each of those stages we can then identify a set of required capabilities.

To apply these concepts to the Digital Media Industry involving Mass Distribution, we start by identifying the different stages of value creation on a typical solution. These are illustrated below.

Figure 1 — Media Industry stages of value creation

Below we briefly describe the focus of each of these stages:

• Content Creation
  Author content, produce & create content, market content.
• Media Preparation
  Transform content from its original formats, frequently in high quality, to distribution ready formats adequate to the available communication links and target end-user devices. Protect content to mitigate illegitimate consumption and thus secure its monetization. Enable different modes of viewing content such as in near real time (Live) or deferred in time. Store content in both its original and transformed forms.
• Content Discovery
  Ingest, transform and expose content metadata to facilitate content discovery by end users. Orchestrate media and metadata preparation for distribution to end users.
• Content Distribution
  Distribute content to a very large number of users/consumers.
• Content Consumption
  Provide software and possibly hardware that enable end users to consume the content.
• Monetization
  Obtain financial returns. Typically, these returns are obtained by selling subscriptions or individual contents, and/or by incorporating advertisements into distributed content. Sometimes content, such as promotional videos, is freely distributed to help obtain such returns through another offering.
• User Management
  Authenticate and authorize users to access the platforms and specific content.
• Operations
  Continuously monitor and track systems and usage, to ensure adequate availability and performance.
• Solution conception and engineering
  Identify solution requirements and design, built, test and deploy the solution. On inception this stage typically occurs before most others, but once the solution is deployed it will co-exist and focus on improving the solution and/or in adding features without down-time to existing users.

For each of these stages we can identify a set of capabilities required to execute the activities that fit within it. Whereas not all capabilities are required for all solutions, they are found frequently enough to warrant their systematization.

But prior to identifying those capabilities, within the next section we will describe some aspects of media solutions that strongly influence the capabilities effectively required for a specific solution. This will help the reader better understand the relevance of each of the capabilities described on the subsequent section.

Common aspects of media solutions

The following aspects strongly influence the requirements, capabilities required on several stages and design of media solutions:

• Content rights: authors, distributors and consumers;
• Elapsed time between creation and consumption: live vs non-live content;
• Multi-language and closed captions support;
• Content encoding formats;
• Content packaging formats;
• Non-functional concerns.

Each of these is further described below.

Content Rights: authors, distributors and consumers

Content rights may refer to three distinct concepts:

• Content creator rights — typically the creator owns full rights into the content and controls the conditions under which it can be distributed or consumed;
• Content distributor rights — usage rights are granted by the content creator to the content distributor, typically in exchange for some compensation. These rights may vary in dimensions such as geography, type of usage (live, VOD, recording, offline consumption, …), number of consumptions per user, timeframes, content quality, etc;
• End-user consumption rights — these establish which content each end user is able to consume and on which conditions and are typically referred to as the user entitlements. Users acquire these rights from content distributors;

Content rights are key to obtain proper recognition or financial returns, and their management and enforcement imposes the need for capabilities on several value chain stages.

Elapsed time between creation and consumption: live vs non-live content

The gap of time desired between content creation and content consumption strongly influences the processes, capabilities and implementation required on a digital media solution. When that gap of time must be very short content is viewed in near real time and is referred to as Live content. Non-live content is usually referred to as Video On Demand (VOD) content. Solutions that expose both Live and VOD content often have separate implementations for at least some of its capabilities.

Because Live content must be distributed to its consumers in real or near real time, it is then important to minimize any delays as it flows through the multiple systems. This often requires more or dedicated infrastructure (computing, storage, network, etc) and/or partially or fully skipping some activities performed for non-real time VOD content. For instance, Live content might be prepared and distributed using less compact media encoding formats because more compact formats require more CPU power which might not be compatible with real time processing; and may exclude Closed Captions which can be difficult to produce in real time.

Further, whereas Live content usually relies on a channel/stream paradigm which is exposed to end users using concepts such as Electronic Program Guides and Programs/Events, VOD content is more frequently exposed through catalogues which have a more static nature.

Conversely, because VOD content is distributed to consumers on a timeframe decoupled from the time of its creation, it introduces the opportunity to better optimize and/or enrich it for mass distribution.

Multi-language and closed captions support

Content might be consumed by many distinct users across the world, and often needs to be adapted to those end users by either translating its audio and/or adding subtitles on appropriate languages. Either can replace their equivalents on the original content or add additional representations.

The industry has several standards for incorporating audio tracks and for incorporating legends, including support for multi-track audio or multiple sets of legends and, to ensure a proper viewing experience, to specify how audio tracks and legends are synchronized with the original content.

Frequently either audio translations and/or closed captions are not provided by content creators, and it is the content distributor that sources and orchestrates the processes to add these to the content sources. Regardless of which entity takes these responsibilities we will consider that the underlying capabilities fall on the Content Creation stage. But multi-language and closed caption also requires special capabilities on other stages namely on Media Preparation, Content Discovery, and Content Consumption.

Content encoding formats

Shifting to some more technical aspects, content is represented within byte streams (including files and live streams) using many different forms which are referred to as encoding formats.

Encoding formats typically vary on the amount of data and processing power they require, on their colour, time and/or spatial resolution, content quality, and on whether they are lossless or not (i.e., on whether the content reconstructed from those streams is exactly equal to the content prior to encoding). Encoding formats will also vary on whether they are intended for streaming content or for storing content at rest.

Frequently to satisfy the different stakeholders’ interests, media solutions use different content encodings on distinct stages of the value chain. Thus content might be created and encoded with very high resolution, fidelity, and quality using encodings typically found on content creation equipment, and later be transformed to several lower quality encoding formats more suitable for distribution and consumption at a scale.

Content packaging Formats

Encoded content includes the information required to render the media but often misses additional information to support its distribution to end users. As is the case when distributing physical goods, digital media packaging formats establish the forms by which one or more media assets are combined together for distribution. These will typically vary depending on the distribution medium and target consumption devices.

Also similar to its physical counterpart on which creating the goods typically requires a larger effort than boxing it, content packaging is much less CPU-intensive operation than content encoding.

Non-functional Concerns

Conceptually a media solution establishes a bi-directional link between the entity which owns it and its consumers, on which content flows to the consumer and some gain (financial, recognition, etc) flows to the entity. Using an analogy, it plays the same role as a supermarket which instead of distributing physical goods distributes digital content.

And as in its physical counterpart to ensure success the solutions must ensure:

• Very high availability, e.g. no down time which would reduce transactions and user satisfaction;
• Appropriate performance;
• Scalability to enable it to serve very large numbers of consumers;
• Security to avoid illegitimate access to the valuable and easily replicable digital contents.

Media value chain capabilities

Executing the activities on each media value chain stage requires a given set of capabilities that support those activities. The following image presents an overview of the underlying capabilities.

Figure 2 — Media Value Chain Capabilities

Each of these stages and its capabilities is further described on the following sections.

Content Creation

Content creation includes all activities taken to create content. Whereas for amateur initiatives this may simply involve pressing the record button and sharing a video on social media, in business contexts content creation encompasses much more and may involve hundreds or thousands of people, multiple locations, and multiple sub-stages of value creation such as content conception, planning, recording, reviewing and editing, and marketing content (the credits section at the end of most movies illustrates this).

Depending on project scale such activities will require capabilities to coordinate the effort, effectively create the desired media assets, and help market it. Often these capabilities are in turn supported by special purpose software and hardware.

Because this document focuses on the distribution side of the Media Value Chain it will not further elaborate on Content Creation activities, capabilities, software or hardware, and will henceforth consider this stage as a black box that exposes the original content and its metadata to the later stages on the Digital Media Value Chain, and ignore the internals of that black box.

Media Preparation

Content is usually created on high quality encoding formats which favour high fidelity even if that implies larger volumes of information. Frequently, either due to its size or incompatibility with end user target devices, these formats are not appropriate for mass distribution and the content must to be transformed to distribution and consumption friendly formats. Such transformations will typically involve transcoding, packaging, and protection.

Transcoding corresponds to creating derived representations of the original source media using encoding algorithms and formats, and targeting resolutions and quality levels which, on this context, will be selected to optimize media for the targeted connections and devices, even if at the loss of some quality. Popular video encoding formats include H.264, H.265, or AV-9, and popular audio encoding formats include MPEG1, AAC, or AC-3, but the list keeps evolving. A similar variety of formats exists for sub‑titles, content cover images, or other content related media.

Satellite and cable solutions may broadcast each title on a small set of resolutions such as Standard Definition (SD), High Definition (HD) or Ultra High Definition (UHD) and then each user selects which resolution he wishes to view. On internet-based (a.k.a., Over the Top or OTT) solutions each piece of content is usually encoded on multiple quality/size factors and then the UI software dynamically selects the highest quality possible for each end-user conditions including device characteristics and network capacity..

Whereas encoding formats define the media byte streams, package formats define how those transcoded media byte streams are encapsulated, distributed and then parsed by client devices. Packaging corresponds to the encapsulation of the encoded content into the selected package format.

Package formats are usually selected according to their adequacy for the communications channel: satellite solutions will frequently package content into a format known as MPEG‑2 TS, and OTT solutions will typically use MPEG-DASH or HLS.

To avoid illegitimate content consumption and help ensure that users do pay for its consumption, content is usually protected before it is distributed. The specific tools for such protection will vary depending on the distribution paradigm but will typically rely on public key cryptography mechanisms. Satellite and cable operators typically use Conditional Access (CA) technologies and Smart Cards to implement the cryptographic access control mechanisms, and OTT solutions, where the client devices have straightforward return paths to server‑based web services, rely Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies such as Widevine, PlayReady or FairPlay. All these schemes require secure key storage and controlled access to those keys by both encoders and end-user devices.

In some more advanced scenarios Content Watermarking, which invisibly individualizes the media assets consumed by each user, is also used to enable tracking which user leaked a given piece of content.

The target encoding formats, package formats and protection mechanisms will generally be imposed by those combinations supported by the targeted distribution technology and end user devices. Given that each of these has several options, the potential combinations could quickly grow exponentially. Commonly adopted strategies to avoid significantly increased costs (namely content storage costs and/or content distribution costs), include i) adopting the minimum set of common formats supported by all distribution technologies and target end user devices, and ii) balancing between the required computing and storage costs.

Because packaging only involves modifying the container which embeds media and not modifying the media itself, it is a much lighter operation than encoding and requires substantially less computation power (CPU). Similarly although DRM does modify the media it is much less computationally intensive than encoding. Accordingly, both packaging and protecting the content can often be executed Just In Time (JIT), when end users request content fragments. This approach avoids having to store all the different combinations of encoding, packaging and protection schemas that may be requested by end user devices, but increases the amount of computing required by JIT packaging and protection to serve content to end users; so it corresponds to trade-off between storage for computing power.

Live content requires more powerful and often more expensive hardware/software whose costs are not justifiable for VOD content and so frequently the infrastructure for Live content is usually separate from the one used for VOD content.

This stage also includes any server-side capabilities to support deferred viewing of live events, namely for the following scenarios: i) slightly delayed viewing supporting trick modes (pause, continue, fast rewind/forward) and ii) viewing at an arbitrary later time. The former is typically implemented through rolling buffers containing most recent content on a channel; and the latter is typically supported by a Network Digital Video Recorder (NDVR) which creates VOD assets (files) from the original live streams.

Content Discovery

Content Discovery includes all the activities to transform and expose content metadata to i) facilitate content discovery by end users and to ii) orchestrate media and metadata preparation for distribution to end users.

Underlying capabilities include content catalogues (structured metadata) and metadata indexing and searching (unstructured metadata).

Whereas Live content usually relies on a special purpose calendar-oriented catalogue adopting concepts such as channels and programs/events and which is usually denominated as the Electronic Program Guide (EPG), VOD content relies on classifying content using concepts such as categories and tags. Categories and tags may also be used for Live content but usually do not take centre stage on the User Interface for Live content. Both catalogues are usually index to support search.

This stage also includes recommendation and content rating capabilities that hopefully reduce users’ effort to select content prior to its consumption. Such recommendations and ratings might be editorial, e.g. based solely on editors’ judgments, or combine content catalogues with effective users’ consumptions and ratings to produce personalized collaborative recommendations. Algorithms for this later type can vary greatly as will their effective impact — so much so that Netflix even had a public competition to improve their algorithms.

Content metadata received from content creators may be available in formats distinct of this layer’s adopted formats and data models, and thus this stage also includes capabilities to transform metadata such as to convert data structures, metadata domains, data representation, etc.

Metadata is then exposed for consumption by end-user devices. On satellite and cable solutions this metadata was frequently packaged and broadcasted to Set Top Boxes using Transport Streams (MPEG2-TS / DVB) or similar protocols. In some more recent cable and satellite implementations and on OTT platforms this metadata is most commonly exposed through a set of web services which are invoked by connected end-user devices.

The structure of metadata, both ingested and exposed, is often solution specific. Occasionally vendor specific de facto standardization initiatives do promote reuse, but this is frequently limited to that vendor’s technologies.

Leveraging the inevitable links between content metadata and the media assets it represents, this stage also often includes the capabilities required to orchestrate of all media and metadata ingestion and preparation processes. The orchestration technologies will often communicate with other building blocks through special purpose adapters, to decouple themselves from the specific technologies or interfaces used by those other building blocks.

Content Distribution

Digital Media solutions will frequently have thousands or even millions of simultaneous users, and so solutions must be able to scale and do so in a cost-effective way. How this is achieve largely depends on the physical distribution medium used to transmit content.

Cable and Satellite operators broadcast most content to their users through Direct To Home (DTH) networks, or through Digital Terrestrial Transmission (DTT) networks. Originally cable networks were created to distribute Television content, but their use was later extended to phone/voice and internet connectivity as well.

But both Over The Top (OTT) and cable and satellite solutions increasingly distribute on-demand content through the general purpose internet. To ensure appropriate scalability these solutions usually rely on Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) that cache content throughout multiple internet locations interconnected via very high bandwidth links, and often have infrastructure located close to end-user locations. Content is only transmitted once to each such location (or at most a few times), and then served to a large pool of end users, which can access it with a low latency. These CDNs are provided by companies such as Akamai, Limelight, or others.

Whereas some solutions may rely on a single CDN provider, others will integrate with multiple CDN providers to either minimize their distribution costs, or optimize overall performance on all target locations. Solutions integrating with multiple CDNs must have the capability of selecting which CDN each user should use and this selection may vary per user request.

Additionally, digital media distribution solutions should be able to measure end-to-end performance and use those measures to produce statistics that guide both their real time decisions (such as when selecting which CDN to use), and longer time resource allocation decisions.

Content Consumption UIs

Appealing and functional User Interfaces (UI) are a key part of every digital media solution. Sometimes solutions will target a single platform, such as a proprietary Set Top Box (STB), but increasingly solutions incorporate UIs for major consumer device platforms, namely popular Web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge) and mobile platforms (iOS and Android).

In spite of the added costs and complexity associated with developing and maintaining several UIs, targeting multiple platforms increases end users access to content which in turn increases the potential to monetize the content rights acquired by content distributors.

Some solutions will avoid multiple UI applications and focus instead on creating a single application, such as an HTML5 web app, which can be used on many devices. Although this approach will likely reduce the overall code base size it i) does not eliminate the need for platform specific code, for instance to address different platform support for encoding, packaging, or DRM formats, and ii) might have some limitations on either performance, functionality or addressable devices. Despite the potential pitfalls, the increasing maturity and supportability of HTML5 should at least warrant its evaluation.

From a functional perspective UIs must be able to play content and should facilitate content discovery by end users, which means they will usually include a VOD catalogue viewer, an Electronic Program Guide (if it includes live streams, exposed as live channels and events), and the ability to search content via text or voice criteria. Many UIs will also provide the ability for the user to save links to its favourite contents, and memorize (a.k.a. bookmark) the point in time at which as user is on a given title. And more advanced interfaces will provide the ability for users to rate content, thus contributing to collaborative recommendations based on those ratings, and to automate viewing of multiple shows (a.k.a. binge watching).

The UI application should also enable to user to manage her profile. If the solution supports in-app content acquisition (Transactional VOD or TVOD) or subscriptions (SVOD) this will require UI integration with the EPG and VOD catalogue interfaces, and possibly with the payment services. Some solutions rely on the browser-based UI for such operations, either to reduce the number of distinct forms per device type or to avoid incurring on costs imposed by mobile platform vendors such as Apple or Google which take a cut of each sale executed through applications on iOS and Android respectively.

Typically, UI applications will use local storage to store some configurations. More advanced applications will also use this storage to store content and DRM licenses to allow the users to view content while not connected to the internet.

Monetization

More often than not media solutions are designed to provide financial revenues that contribute to the costs underlying their development and ongoing operations and, when it is also a goal, to provide a profit. In some cases these solutions are meant to be accessory or supportive of other commercial offerings (for instance, when a video is produced and distributed to help sell a car) and these might not have such direct financial requirements.

A media solution can obtain financial income directly from the users which consume the content by having those users subscribe to pre-established content packages or to bundles of content packages and services (such as internet connectivity, and phone lines). It can also enable user to purchase or rent to view specific contents, with the more relevant difference between purchasing or renting being that those rights are respectively perpetual or for a limited period of time. Subscription consumption is commonly designated as S-VOD, and pay‑per-content is frequently designated as Pay VOD (P-VOD) or Transactional VOD (T‑VOD).

To support obtaining direct financial income from its end users the solution needs to be able to have a repository of its Customers and Users (each Customer may represent several distinct Users, for instance the individuals within an household) and track User Consumptions which then feed Billing systems that convert consumptions to charges. Customers will then settle bills through Payment systems with which the solution integrates. These systems integrate with Accounting and Tax Management software to help ensure that the company complies with its fiscal obligations.

Whereas some players, such as Netflix, market all-you-can-eat plans, whereby users have access to all the content available on the platform, more often than not solutions offer different subscriptions plans and/or market pay-per-content, in which case they must keep track of individual user Content Visualization Rights (a.k.a., Entitlements) [ii] and block users from seeing content for which the rights were not yet acquired by the user or cannot be acquired by the user (which is the case when the user is located on a geography onto which the content cannot be distributed). Because these are directly connected to specific users, this document includes Entitlements within the User Management group of capabilities.

Commercial offerings may vary not only according to which titles they entitle the user to see and when, but also according to other aspects such as which resolutions, or number of concurrent devices.

Solutions that differentiate content visualization rights will include more or less sophisticated Commerce related capabilities which allow the content distributor to set up different commercial offerings and to dynamically create content Bundles, Promotions and Discounts. These solutions will then allow consumers to acquire additional entitlements by upgrading their subscription, renting content (allow temporary access to additional content), or purchasing content (either by downloading it to the user device or by providing perpetual access to that content stored on the platform).

In order to maximise value for all stakeholders it is important to minimize the effort consumers have to spend to acquire those additional entitlements, and often this means that that consumers should be able to directly acquire them from the same User Interface they use to access content. However in some cases this guideline cannot be followed to the letter as it would imply that a percentage of the sale would have to be payed to the platform and store owner (such as Apple or Google respectively for iOS and Android), and is circumvented by only selling through complementary web channels.

Complementarily or alternatively to obtaining financial income directly from end users, solutions can also obtain income by including ads on their content and charging ad sponsors for that. These type of funding is sometimes referred to as A-VOD (Ad funded VOD). For that purpose the solution must provide an Ad Catalogue Management capability, which allows defining which ads are presented, when, with what frequency.

More advanced A-VOD solutions will also provide a Dynamic Ad Insertion capability which enables making such decisions on real time and also considering other data such as which specific user is the ad for or the characteristics of the content within which the ad is inserted. This provides the ability to better focus ads and hence charge higher feeds to ad sponsors.

Finally media solutions will typically include Usage Analytics capabilities to allow business decision makers better understand how/when/where users consume content and which additional content they should add to their platforms. Usage Analytics may also support automated systems such as the ones used for the just mentioned Dynamic Ad Insertion capability.

User Management

As in most other industries media solutions have end users, are developed and operated by technical teams, and involve running software processes, and the solution will identify the members of each of these groups differently.

The solution may either allow anonymous users, in which case it will not require them to identify themselves. Even if not requiring such identification the solution might still track their individual consumption patterns by relying on information stored within the user platforms such as cookies and/or etags.

But whenever end users have to pay to access its content, the solution has to enforce user authentication a mechanism whereby users or their unique hardware explicitly identify themselves and prove that they indeed correspond to that identity by sharing some secret information which should only be known by the individual associated with it. On its side the solution will register individual end users on an End User Directory which usually stores both their identities and information needed to authenticate them, as well as on a Customers repository.

When the user subscribes a physical service, such as TV, Phone, or Internet service, its provider can rely on the hardware or on software embedded within that hardware, to implicitly authenticate the user. On such scenarios both the identity and the secret information might not even be visible to the end user.

In other cases the authentication process will require the user to provide a user identifier and a credential such as a password, pin, or smart card, which are checked against the information stored for that user on the End User Directory [iv].

To ensure stronger isolation and security, accounts for both Technical Teams users and for software processes are stored within a separate Infrastructure Directory. Whereas the End User Directory is used to grant access to the end users application, the Infrastructure Directory controls access to its underlying infrastructure.

Authentication is just one of the mechanisms used to delimit access to content, and is usually combined with i) the choice of frontend functionalities, ii) authorizations, and iii) data/content filtering:

• The choice of frontend functionalities implicitly delimits which how end users can interact with content — if the frontend does not provide a functionality to view/edit/update/delete a given piece of content, then end users will not be able to invoke such functionality;
• Authorization is a mechanism by which an application can determine whether a given user is allowed or not allowed to access a given functionality (obviously this is only relevant for those functionalities which are made available);
• Even if a user is allowed access to a given functionality she might only be allowed to access a given subset of the data for which that functionality is relevant, and the application will do this by filtering the data/content available to such user. Hence on a multi user system I might be only granted access to my files and not to those of another user.

Often organizations will provide distinct frontends for distinct purposes, namely for different types of users (internal, partner, end users) and/or target platforms (web, mobile, console, etc). This segregation, which is not specific to the Media Industry, improves security and, because different types of users normally use different platforms, saves the cost of having to develop & support all functionalities on all target platforms.

As stated on the introduction this document is focused on media distribution solutions, with the term distribution meaning distribution to end users, which will want to consume that media across a multitude of distinct target platforms. Many such solutions will have a well-defined set of functionalities which does not vary by authenticated user. When such authorizations are needed they will usually rely on information also stored within the End User Directory.

When these media solutions vary access to specific contents per end user, such content filtering relies on the repository of Content Visualization Rights (Entitlements) previously mentioned within the Monetization section.

Complementarily to the above (and sometimes overlooked when creating these solutions), User Management also entails the processes and functionalities required to provision new users and decommission users which should no longer be able to access the solution. When solutions need to maintain records of former customers for a period of time, they will have to inhibit access to those users without deleting information they require about them. This can be achieved by deleting those from the User Directory while retaining their details on the separate Customers and Users repository previously mentioned within the Monetization section.

Wherever possible and to reduce costs, maximize revenues (quicker access to content by new customers and no access by former customers), and ensure security, provisioning, decommissioning and deleting these records should be directly triggered by end user actions (or, for recurring subscription payments, inactions at planned times) and automated. These adopted processes must also comply with existing legislation on user data management for the target markets, such as EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (a.k.a. GDPR).

Operations

Organizations implementing media solutions need to support end users, to support technical integrations, and to ensure that the solution meets its non-functional requirements, namely (see section Non-functional Concerns):

• High availability;
• Appropriate performance;
• Scalability;
• Security.

All of these goals are data-driven and that data must originate from the solution, or from its underlying infrastructure (hardware + operating system). And most of the above aspects, especially non-functional requirements, impose the need to automate processes and interactions.

Modern operating systems generate logs and performance metrics (such as requests per second or number of errors per period of time) which provide some of the required data. The application must however complement that with additional application specific information which is required to properly diagnose and troubleshoot interactions, failures, and intrusions.

Data originating in the application is often stored within application managed a repository better adapted to store and query the application specific context than infrastructure based repositories. The application repository should include information that enables identifying the client, its infrastructure and the context within which the (request) context originated. Where the context involves multiple application layers (as is the case for a request originating on a client device, and executed on a server) that information should include correlation identifiers which are shared across all layers for a given context.

Regardless of which repositories are used and where data originates from (infrastructure or application), operators will want:

• Consolidated views of both logs and real-time metrics (logs must also comply with existing legislation on user data management for the target markets);
• Configurable mechanisms to automate detection and reaction to given conditions;
• Automated and configurable notifications through different communication channels such as SMS, Instant Messaging or email;
• Ability to automate deployment & scaling.

These capabilities are usually addressed by a mix of packaged but configurable products and either some customizations or special purpose custom tools. Their description is beyond the scope of this document.

Appendixes

Media Industry Players

As can be expected, given the large set of capabilities, the inherent complexity of some of these, the pace of technological and business model evolutions and the corresponding required investments required for many of the capabilities, the industry has many players most of which will focus on some but not all of these stages, and continues to provide plenty opportunities to explore unique capabilities or combinations of capabilities.

Of particular concern to many of the agents, from content creators, to consumers, and including all in between, are those players which expose content to consumers and therefore hold the customer relation. Historically these players did not frequently change due to the high capital investments they required, but the adoption of the internet to distribute content has somewhat changed this.

The following table describes the common types of content distributors, and highlights the key differences between them:

Common types of Content Distributors

Notes and references

• [i] See http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/industry.html for a definition of what is an “industry”. And https://www.threerooms.com/difference-industry-sector-market/ to clarify the differences between an industry, a sector, and a market
• [ii] Whereas I consider that End User Content Visualization Rights better reflects the underlying concept than User Entitlements does (historically Entitlements is more akin to the data structures used in broadcast-based systems to transmit subscribers or individual users access rights), Entitlements is the word widely adopted by the industry and trying to change it would, at this point, be counter productive.
• [iv] To increase security directories will usually not store passwords but rather their hashes
• Direct To Home or DTH is often used to designate satellite and cable based links. Digital Terrestrial Television or DTT is often used for digital TV broadcast over the air.