Paramount has been transforming the media supply chains of several key brands and their unique workflows into one integrated, flexible, and scalable global pipeline. To get this accomplished, the media and entertainment giant turned to Swedish media workflow specialist Codemill.
Codemill offers custom software development and products for the media and entertainment sector, including Accurate.Video, Accurate Player SDK and Cantemo MAM, products used in some of the world’s leading broadcast, streaming, content supply chain and media asset management workflows.
“Codemill are absolute superstars in this space,” Andy Bolding, VP of product for media supply chain workflow platforms at Paramount, said in a recent case study about the partnership. “They clearly come from a world of understanding user experience and design. Applying it to solutions as complex and as challenging as media supply chain operations was no small feat.
“We are made up of multiple media supply chain ecosystems, legacy workflows that have developed over time based on the brands that we own and operate. Whether it’s CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Showtime, or Paramount Pictures, they all have very different operating models associated with the way they manage titles and inventory, the way they distribute content, and the way they report against that,” Bolding added.
Neil Anderson, CRO of Codemill, spoke with the Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR) about how his company helped Paramount join all those ecosystems into one centralized, cloud-based solution, and combine all its disparate libraries into one searchable library.
EIDR: Tell us a little about Codemill and its work in the media and entertainment space.
Anderson: The founders of Codemill came from that academic background and formed the company as a UX design agency around 15 years ago. The company began doing custom web applications for quite a range of different types of customers initially but then started working with media and entertainment customers especially and some of the media asset management customer applications that sat on top of those media asset management platforms well. Codemill became experts in bringing together all these disparate media silos and metadata silos, unifying them into a single workflow.
EIDR: Tell us how Codemill began its work with Paramount.
Anderson: They approached us about three years ago after Viacom’s merging with CBS to help solve the huge amount of duplication in manual workflows and on-prem legacy infrastructure. They experienced the same issues studios that have been merging and consolidating experience, and wanted to try and become more efficient, streamline, produce savings. It was the first time that Paramount had taken a user-centric approach. To the younger generation who are now the media operators and the technical operators of these applications, they’re used to websites, they’re used to web applications that just work, they’re not expecting to go on a three-week course to operate a custom bespoke Windows application. It’s the legacy the whole history of the industry has been based around, these legacy server desktop black box systems.
So, what we helped with is answering how to migrate all of these different silos of data and media into a unified platform and do it by taking a UX-centric approach.
EIDR: Describe the process, how did Codemill and Paramount approach this project?
Anderson: Paramount realized quite quickly that they needed that help and they didn’t have that background because they were comprised of studio and engineering teams. We’d built quite a number of successful projects with Viacom in the preceding years and had built up a trusted partner relationship. So they decided to do a limited scope proof of concept of engaging with us on a 12-week UX project to investigate what a unified media supply chain might look like conceptually.
We set out to determine what are the essential building blocks in the media supply chain for Paramount in order to get content from the studios in Hollywood to CBS affiliates in the U.S. to Sky in the UK to show “Yellowstone” and to get content on Paramount+. You know, all of these different ways of trying to get the content out there, whether it’s linear broadcast, OTT or promos on social media. The main focus was trying to unify these things.
And that UX project, the feedback from it was very positive. It helped the business to internally sell it to the stakeholders to justify that this was the right approach. The thing with UX and taking a UX-centric approach is you’re mitigating risk. Taking an engineering approach is inefficient, you have to do 10 clicks every time to do a thing. We came up with high-level designs and clickable mock-ups and prototypes that we could get feedback on. It helped Paramount to understand that this was the right way to go. And essentially the business bought into that and then we started properly engaging in at any one point at least half a dozen of our UXs over the course of two to three years, focusing on different areas of the media supply chain that Paramount needed to develop, design and then develop.
Our UX designers were involved in all the research, the discovery phases, defining the requirements, refining those, coming up with designs, getting feedback, and ultimately coming up with final designs that were then handed over to developers who worked collaboratively to ensure they implement the features exactly as they’ve been designed. We then reviewed how they’ve implemented the features, making sure that’s exactly what is needed, and then connecting up these additional workflows like an ingest workflow, QC workflow compliance workflow, content preparation, metadata preparation, content fulfillment, a library system for managing the archive.
EIDR: What was the result?
Anderson: About two years ago Paramount was able to go live this since then we’ve continued to work with them on further improvements and also new priorities as they’ve come up. So now that they have this media supply chain and all of Paramount’s non-theatrical content goes through this supply chain.
They’re now looking at how they can further improve things, how they can leverage different AI services, and how they can have a kind of overarching reporting layer. Maybe someone’s waiting for audio dubs or subs or different things that need to be done to the project or it’s ready for distribution to the platform and it’s going to be released next week. These are incredibly complicated in a large business like Paramount.
You can imagine previously it’s hundreds of spreadsheets and emails and people Slacking each other going, what’s going on? You have this long history of technology that is doing stuff and then you’ve got business applications like Word and Excel and Slack or Teams which are not fit for media workflows. They’re just communication tools. There was a disconnect between the information and the media itself, with the media sitting in some storage somewhere. It’s about bringing together the front-end user experience with backend APIs with different platforms and different vendor technologies that can be connected seamlessly so that the user doesn’t really need to care where the file actually is residing. They just know that this is the current status of it.
The way MTV used to do things for the last 40 years is probably very different to what CBS News does or CBS Sports or how they get content to Paramount+ is very different to how they deliver content to Sky in the UK to go on their platform. So, you’ve got all of these very considerable differences and duplications of media, and inconsistent workflows. What one team in Europe does is different from what the LATAM team does.
We can reduce the number of clicks, we can provide data at the right point in time when it’s needed, and not overload. Essentially, it’s reinventing the way Paramount manages its content and its workflows in a unifying consistent way. Paramount now has the most mature media supply chain platform on the planet.
EIDR: With all the work that Paramount has done, could this serve as a blueprint for other media and entertainment companies looking to streamline their supply chain?
Anderson: I think that that is the case. You learn a lot of lessons, some of them are harsh, and some of them can be expensive lessons, and then you, hopefully, do it better. And I think that’s very much a lot of the learnings from those first cloud projects, they’ve led to greater successes with others at other studios where people have gone on to. Because, of course, all these people move around the different studios, normally, especially the technology people. So, people who worked at Sony moved on to Paramount and people who worked at Sony moved on to Amazon. We’ve been successful working with them over many years and they want to innovate, and they want to solve these problems elsewhere. So yes, it is definitely a blueprint.
EIDR: What role does EIDR play in this?
Anderson: The way studios use EIDR is they will generate high-level metadata about a show and register that to obtain an EIDR ID, and that ID will be unique to identify that show at a title level. That ID is essentially the master ID for that show and all of the relevant episodes and that lives throughout the entire lifecycle of the asset, including all of the hundreds of different versions of those episodes that might be created for all of these different platforms and broadcast partners and partners globally.
So, that’s a crucial element of title management. From the studio’s point of view that unique identifier is absolutely key to knowing exactly which version is which and that’s a big part of the underlying tech stack at Paramount. Underneath the UX we’ve developed for Paramount there are a dozen or more different vendors that are providing the underlying architecture, managing the title IDs, managing the media and the metadata and the transcoding process. All these different vendors lie under the hood, but as far as the users are concerned, they have no clue about that, they never see that stuff. EIDR is one of the most important underlying architectures that provides standardization.