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Media distribution platform

Media distribution platforms focus on effective distribution of the media content, predominantly videos. With the increasing demand on enabling the web presence with dynamic video content, the platform adds immense value paving ways for generating revenue. It is not unusual to see the popular content management organizations will expand to provide media distribution services.

In simple words, media distribution involves content ingestion, content processing, content categorization, content management, content protection, content distribution, content delivery targeted specifically to content consumption layer.

Content ingestion is a process of gathering content from various sources. When acquired from various sources, they need to converted in uniform format to manage it efficiently. For example, news clip recorded on the field can be in raw digital format, or user generated home video uploaded to the system, or Warner brothers new movie made available in the system. Before making the content available, the content needs to be verified that whether the content needs to be re-purposed in a format that system can manage. Content ingestion may also consider transcoding the content into different formats for delivery. For example, the content is transcoded with 3gp format for mobile consumption. Content ingestion can be manual or automatic. In automated version, content ingestion works on the metadata. Content ingestion will involve workflow management in the bigger operations.

Content management is the next big chunk in the system, that focusses on content processing, metadata management, categorization of content, content access and protection mechanisms, internal communication mechanisms and external communication mechanisms that keep the entire platform operational. Pre-dominantly it comprises of repository management, asset management, restrictions/rights management sub systems.




While content ingestion and management form the start link of the disribution channel, content delivery mechanism forms the end link of the channel. Mainly, web browser, set top box, mobile devices form the consumption layer for which content delivery mechanism has to be designed. Delivery mechanism's prime responsbility is to deliver the content with minimum or no latency, as the latency will have the major impact on the experience. Content delivery happens through content delivery networks (CDN). CDNs can be either self hosted infrastructure or third party services from the providers like Akamai. CDNs are specialized to deliver content from the optmized end point for the end user.

End user experience is of utmost priority in a distribution framework. Most platforms will have specialized CRMs, analytical softwares to determine the user behavior, monitor user interactions and so on...

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