Digital Media Asset Management

The Client

The client is a global broadcast and media services provider working with the biggest media brands on the planet. Their services help channels, broadcasters and content rights holders reach and engage with their audiences through traditional and new media. It has 2500 employees worldwide and distributes over 2.7 million hours of programming each year.

The Challenge

Using the old IT infrastructure, the client faced four major problems when adding new clients to their portfolio:

  • significant upfront investment in infrastructure
  • the need for dedicated hardware for each client
  • the time needed for developing a new application for the client
  • every client was using a separate application
Every client was using a separate application

This setup allowed our client to provide top quality services, but they came at a high cost in terms of time and money.

Project setup

The solution developed by Qubiz comprises:

  • a new digital asset management platform that now is common for all clients
  • a series of dedicated applications for each type of task the clients execute on the platform

In the first phase of the project the new platform was created. Through the platform, our client can request hardware resources on an as-needed basis (scale up or down the storage and computing power according to necessity), thus maximising the utilisation of the infrastructure in use. We started this phase with an augmented team of five composed of one software architect, one project/delivery manager, a functional analyst, one software developer and one tester.In the second phase, we developed new features for the platform, including a task management module. During this phase three more developers were added to the initial augmented team.In the third - and current - phase, the dedicated applications are being developed, which include file acquisition, transcoding, digital rights management, and file delivery. Also, new features are being added to the asset management platform. While the platform is developed in .NET, we decided to make a technological switch and develop the dedicated applications in Java. Furthermore, we started using a continuous delivery approach. Currently the team has 10 members: one software architect, one functional analyst, one project/delivery manager, five software developers and two testers.

Communication

In order to make sure the communication is not affected by distance and time zone differences we agreed to:

  • use Kanban as a project management methodology
  • have frequent live & Skype meetings together with our client, including two (!) daily meetings
  • ask questions and request clarifications whenever is necessary via Skype or email
  • visit each other several times a year

Technical Solution

The solution offered by Qubiz is a cloud application that uses the following technologies:

Architecture patterns and components:

  • Service-oriented architecture
  • Event-based architecture
  • Microservices architecture
  • Layered architecture

Technology stack:

  • JAVA 8
  • Spring
  • JUnit
  • ASP.NET, MVC/ Web API
  • MySQL database - RDS
  • HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery
  • Integrated ADFS
  • Amazon services, including: Cloud, Glacier, S3

Responsive design: Bootstrap

Let's meet for a chat about your project
Request meeting
Read more about the work we've done
See case studies