The media organizations worldwide that form the alliance will focus on enabling improved open interoperability among service-based applications.
Microservices-based solutions for the media industry hold great promise for end users and vendors
alike. Assembling custom solutions from off-the-shelf services promises a wide range of benefits.
However, the reality of today’s deployments is that it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. Over the past
decades, monolithic systems with comprehensive (and complex) APIs connecting them have served the
media ecosystem reasonably well. With relatively few systems connected by a small set of APIs, the
integration of these systems was manageable despite its complexity.
The move toward cloud-based solutions has brought with it microservices, and the promise of agility,
flexibility, and best of breed solutions. Like all promised panaceas, the devil is in the details. Because
microservices solutions involve a large number of individual services, the explosion in the number of
service connection points results in real challenges when it comes time to making them all work
together seamlessly.
The Open Services Alliance for Media is comprised of media industry organizations worldwide and is
focused on enabling improved open interoperability among service-based applications. We see this as
critical with media systems now being hosted on cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid (cloud & on-premises) and
on-premise only platforms. Its work will support establishment of standards, best practices, registers,
industry awareness and education, and any other tools at our disposal to foster cross-platform and
cross-application interoperability and ease of integration.
The Alliance is comprised of vendors, platform providers, and media organizations (the end users) from
around the world. Following a successful set of meetings in New York and Washington DC, the Alliance
has selected three pilot projects to be its initial focus. These came from the process of evaluating dozens
of candidate projects submitted by members with respect to their impact on the industry, ease of
development, and support from proponents and Alliance members. Those three pilot projects are
expected to focus on IMF-related services, standardized logging/status reporting from services, and realtime
control.
With these projects, as well as future initiatives, the Alliance’s role will be to agree on priorities,
assemble expert teams, and draft initial documents and designs. The Alliance will partner with SMPTE
(Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) to then feed these documents into SMPTE’s 34CS
Drafting Group on Media Microservices Overall Architecture for publication as standards, specifications
or registered entities as appropriate.
In the spirit of agility, the Alliance plans to multithread its initiatives where possible, and focus on rapid
development of its outputs. For more information on the Open Services Alliance for Media, please refer
to www.openservicesalliance.com (coming soon), or contact [email protected] for more
information. To join the SMPTE 34CS Drafting Group mentioned above, please see www.smpte.org or
contact dir.standards@smpte.org.
- Florical Welcomes Jeff Halapin as Customer Service Manager - April 6, 2020
- Cloud-based Media Systems – From good idea to necessity? - April 2, 2020
- Open Services Alliance for Media Launches - February 20, 2020
