COCKEYSVILLE, Md.—At Sinclair, Sony’s Ci Media Cloud serves as a central component in our operational workflow, supporting various tasks across multiple departments including master control, traffic, programming, news, sports and engineering. Currently, more than 5,000 users across Sinclair rely on Ci, making it part of daily operations for more than 80% of our staff.
Sony Ci has been deployed so widely at Sinclair because of its intuitive user interface, which requires little training and provides a solid set of fundamental features that can be applied to many different workflows. From a user’s perspective, this reduced complexity results in less time spent in training and faster user adoption. We’ve frequently found our users can apply these tools to create solutions specific to their individual needs without the need to engage technical staff.
Send and Receive
For instance, Ci provides features to receive and send files, send file requests and file links, view proxies, add or change metadata, and search. These basic functions can be linked and arranged to support very different workflows. These may include enabling stringer contributions for high school football, contributions from our own news crews in the field, or reception of commercial spots and syndicated programming from various production houses.
These features are made even more powerful because most are also available via API. We’ve made extensive use of this capability to automate search, modification and movement of files through integration with other systems, including various workflow and orchestration engines. Systems as diverse as production asset management, channel playout, traffic and title management interact with Sony Ci thousands of times a day at Sinclair. Ci’s API event reporting is so granular that we’ve built dashboards in business reporting tools that track and assign cost to specific events and user actions. This contributes to Sinclair’s core philosophy of being a data-driven business.
Ci also subscribes to one of our fundamental design tenets: media and metadata should be independent of applications, such as media asset management. In the past, MAM systems would ingest media after it was often more than less locked in the MAM tool.
Windows Into Storage
We subscribe to the MovieLabs 2030 vision in which services come to the media, rather than the other way around. We believe media and metadata (in the form of “sidecars”) should be available directly in shared storage. We design architectures in which multiple systems simultaneously access media from shared storage.
Sony Ci integrates nicely within this architecture and sits on top of storage that we control, populated with media by other systems, which is destined for use by even more systems. In essence, Ci provides a window into this shared storage, giving users and automation the ability to search and view media and adjust metadata. These actions, in turn, control or trigger additional workflows by yet other systems downstream.
Our media supply chain, which we call the Cloud Media Pipeline (CMP), processes, on average, 30,000 files per week. Sony Ci is an integral component of the CMP.
The flexible and intuitive nature of Ci proved invaluable during an event, which required us to activate our own disaster recovery plans. Users across the organization were able to apply Ci in ways we had not considered as they worked through recovery. In our opinion, this was due to both the intuitive Ci user interface and Ci’s cloud-native architecture. In our experience Ci, as a product, is clearly focused on providing a tool that can solve many problems, as opposed to being hyper- and inflexibly designed around a single use case.
Overall, Sony Ci functions effectively in a wide range of operational contexts, providing a versatile solution for media management across Sinclair’s distributed infrastructure.
More information is available at cimediacloud.com.
