Open Services Alliance For Media Launches

Microservices-based solutions for the media industry hold great promise for end users and vendors alike. Assembling custom solutions from off-the-shelf services promises a wide range of benefits.

However, the reality of today’s deployments is that it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. Over the past decades, monolithic systems with comprehensive (and complex) APIs connecting them have served the media ecosystem reasonably well. With relatively few systems connected by a small set of APIs, the integration of these systems was manageable despite its complexity.

The move toward cloud-based solutions has brought with it microservices, and the promise of agility, flexibility and best-of-breed solutions. Like all promised panaceas, the devil is in the details. Because microservices solutions involve a large number of individual services, the explosion in the number of service connection points results in real challenges when it comes time to making them all work together seamlessly.

The Open Services Alliance for Media is comprised of media industry organizations worldwide and is focused on enabling improved open interoperability among service-based applications. It sees this as critical with media systems now being hosted on cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid (cloud and on-premises) and on-premise only platforms. Its work will support establishment of standards, best practices, registers, industry awareness and education, and any other tools at our disposal to foster cross-platform and cross-application interoperability and ease of integration.

The Alliance is composed of vendors, platform providers and media organizations (the end users) from around the world. Following a successful set of meetings in New York and Washington, the Alliance has selected three pilot projects to be its initial focus. These came from the process of evaluating dozens of candidate projects submitted by members with respect to their impact on the industry, ease of development, and support from proponents and Alliance members. Those three pilot projects are expected to focus on IMF-related services, standardized logging/status reporting from services, and real- time control.

With these projects, as well as future initiatives, the Alliance’s role will be to agree on priorities, assemble expert teams, and draft initial documents and designs. The Alliance will partner with SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) to then feed these documents into SMPTE’s 34CS Drafting Group on Media Microservices Overall Architecture for publication as standards, specifications or registered entities as appropriate.

In the spirit of agility, the Alliance plans to multithread its initiatives where possible, and focus on rapid development of its outputs.

For more information on the Open Services Alliance for Media, please refer to www.openservicesalliance.com (coming soon), or contact [email protected] for more information. To join the SMPTE 34CS Drafting Group mentioned above, please see www.smpte.org or contact [email protected].