| How A Film Becomes a VOD |
It's sometimes easy to overlook the origins of a movie, when contemplating the myriad steps that make it a VOD attraction for digital video customers.
Yet the transit of a film, in today's digital world, introduces language that can glaze pretty quickly - usually within a sentence or two. And then there you are, a participant in a conversation that just beelined out of your knowledge precinct. Let it go a few sentences further, and you're nodding awkwardly while wondering how rude it would be to ask for a quick rewind and explanation.
Here's a sampling of the new lingo describing a movie's journey to a VOD server: Digital asset. Digital package. And, one of my personal favorites (it sounds so wise), meta data. Baseball euphemisms are here, too: Pitcher. Catcher.
And now, for the frame-crunching tale of a movie's 44,000+ mile voyage to VODville.
Did I mention? You're going along.
Say you're the guy in Fantastic Voyage who shrinks -- but instead of coursing through human arteries, you belt a few bars of Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me with Science," which transforms you into a digital bit. Your mission is to ride shotgun from the studio to the headend.
First, you and the film are loaded into an unmarked van and couriered to a post-production facility. There, for a fee expressed in dollars-per-minute, you get compressed, encoded into an MPEG-2 file, and imprinted onto digital linear tape (DLT) - you're now "in the can (baby)."
On the squashed side of the compressor, you're now part of a 3 or so Gigabyte file. You and the audio goes with you, and some overhead for other stuff, are coded for MPEG-2 transportation, at a rate of 3.75 Megabits per second (Mbps). You're still naked, in terms of encryption.
It is here that you and your digital bit brethren, as constituents of the digitized, compressed and encoded film, become known as a "digital asset." You matter. You become part of a film database that holds you and information about who wrote you, directed you, produced you, and acted in you.
You, the digital asset, get transferred to a satellite uplink - maybe by courier, maybe more directly, depending on your owner's set-up.
But before being jettisoned into the zone of geo-synchronous orbit, three more digital assets need to be slipped in with you. One is the cover artwork that depicts you. Another is the promotional trailer.
The third is the meta data.
"Meta," in a broad sense, means transcendent. In an applied sense, "meta data" is data that describes other data. It's the information that would otherwise be on the sticker of the tape container for the film, in pre-digital times: Title. Run time. Actors. Writers. Rating. Summary. Availability dates. Expiration dates.
Meta data gets tucked into your overall transmission vessel as an XML (extensible markup language) file, so that certain portions of it can be manipulated a la the Internet.
The meta data, trailer, cover art, and movie get wrapped together, and are now known as a "digital package."
Here's where the baseball begins. In the parlance of N2Broadband, a company making the things that create, manage and move "digital assets," your next step is to get "pitched" up to the satellite. The pitcher is a server located at the uplink. You are the ball: A digital package comprised of digital assets. You get encrypted, so that nobody pirates you along the way.
You can likely guess what happens after you hurtle 22,300 miles to the satellite, then down again to a headend satellite receiver. You get caught, by a "catcher" - another N2Broadband term. It, too, is a server, but more in the sense of a short-term cache. Its job is to recognize you, prep you for who needs you, descramble you, and squirt you to the VOD server. If this sounds like a stutter-step, remember that you're but one movie among hundreds, with potential zillions of on-demand TV programs right behind you. Being disorganized about who gets what, when, is a sure recipe for digital mayhem.
All along the way, you're checked and double-checked to make sure you're ok - an Internet backchannel usually exists between the uplink and the receive site, so that any missed packets can be re-requested. (Alas, if you're the missing packet, you're probably in the same cosmic pile as that sock you inexplicably lost en route from the hamper to the washing machine.)
That's the lingo of the journey, just in case you inadvertently glaze over during a cocktail buzz phrase attack about that "robust, scalable, digital asset and metadata management system for the broadband space." They just mean they've come up with something that keeps a movie safe with its baggage during its trip to become a VOD event.
This column originally appeared in the Broadband Week section of Multichannel News.