2016-09 SchneiderMedia - Managing Legacy Video Archives

SCHNEIDERMEDIA
Consulting

“Technical B2B Content for the Streaming Video Industry”

SchneiderMedia is a technical B2B content development firm specializing in the
streaming video technology industry. With 20 years of experience in the streaming
video space we are uniquely positioned to develop high quality, technical content
for vendors bringing innovative video solutions to market. Our work aims to covert
your sales leads by building the substance behind the marketing, offering your
targeted customers the deep insight they need to make their buying decisions.
Services include:

• White Paper Development
• Technical Copywriting
• Industry and Technology Training

This document contains a sample white paper produced by SchneiderMedia
Consulting: How to Manage Your Legacy Video Archives. The paper discusses the
challenges and key considerations for organizations interested in migrating legacy
content archives into a modern video management solution. The framework used in
this sample white paper can be leveraged to produce technical content supporting
your streaming video products and solutions.

Contact
Bill Schneider, Owner
bills@schneidermedia.biz
206.601.9751

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Copyright © 2016 How to Manage Your Legacy
SchneiderMedia Consulting Video Archives
bills@schneidermedia.biz Rev: 1.0

2
How to Manage Your Legacy Video
Archives
A White Paper on Adopting a VMS Strategy

By Bill Schneider

Managing legacy audio and video archives is
an age-old problem. Our generation has seen
video formats evolve from film and tape to
early proprietary digital formats in a period
of about 25 years. In the last 10 years the
streaming video industry has cycled through
about four mainstream commercial formats
and codecs settling on the current standard
of the h.264 codec and MPEG4 container.

During this time large video archives have
been built in the preferred format of a given
era. In many cases these archives must be
maintained and made accessible for years to
come. As formats evolve the management,
distribution, and consumption of legacy
content formats gets more costly.
Application maintenance, format
obsolescence, and content management are all concerns for organizations that need
to maintain video archives over the long-term.

In October of 2014, for example, support for the Helix Media Delivery Platform was
discontinued by RealNetworks, creating urgency for valuable content housed in the
RealMedia format. Archives housed in RealMedia are at risk of becoming
inaccessible due to the lack of support in modern commercial applications.

This paper discusses a proposal to help organizations facing this challenge migrate
source content from older, proprietary codecs to a modern source format. It then
About the Author: Bill
Schneider has been involved in
the streaming video industry
since its inception. Throughout
his career Bill has focused on
addressing the streaming video
challenges faced by organizations
like AT&T, the U.S. Government,
and many other enterprise and
educational institutions. As a
customer focused professional
Bill has developed deep expertise
in how to define and
communicate product and
solution value to technical
customer audiences.
Archives housed in RealMedia are at risk of becoming inaccessible due
to the lack of support in modern commercial applications.

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discusses a plan to ensure your video content archives can be easily managed,
distributed, and consumed for years to come.

Streaming Video Format History

The four most widely adopted streaming video formats over the last 20 years were
RealMedia, Windows Media, Flash, and MPEG4. While there have been other formats
used throughout this period this paper focuses on the dominate codecs leveraged
for streaming video applications.

RealMedia
During the dawn of the streaming video era the RealAudio (ra) and RealVideo (rv)
codecs quickly became the format of choice with early streaming adopters.
Innovation driven by RealNetworks solved the problems associated with
distributing large audio and video files in a bandwidth constrained environment.
The efficiency gained by streaming and buffering media content drove the
commercial viability of the Internet as a broadcast medium. The last commercial
update for the RealMedia format was for RealVideo 10 in 2008.

Windows Media
Quickly after the advent of RealMedia, Microsoft entered the streaming video
market with an alternative streaming media platform and format option: Windows
Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV). Microsoft accelerated the
adoption of streaming media by bundling the Windows Media platform stack with
the Windows OS. In the absence of a standardized format optimized for low
bandwidth consumption content distributors were required to support two
separate systems to serve both RealMedia and Windows Media viewers.

Flash Video
Adobe quickly entered the streaming media market when video support was added
to the Flash plugin. Now video was easily embedded into web pages requiring very
little effort for the end user to view video files. No longer was a separate video
player required to enjoy streaming video. This concept quickly accelerated the
adoption of online video and injected a new proprietary format into the mix: Flash
Video (FLV). The relative ease of Flash Video distribution and consumption pushed
the Flash format into dominance. Content housed in the FLV container may leverage
the Sorenson Spark, VP6, or the h.264 and HE-AAC codecs.

The four most widely adopted streaming video formats over the last 20
years were RealMedia, Windows Media, Flash, and MPEG4.

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MPEG4/AVC
While the format wars ensued in the PC world, the mobile world was moving
towards a standards based format option. In efforts to ensure maximum
compatibility with feature phones carriers moved to adopt the h.263 and eventually
h.264 codecs in combination with the 3GP and MP4 containers. As the smartphone
entered the market and gained dominance the streaming video world quickly
moved to prefer the standards based format of mp4/h.264 in order to support a
multi-device, consumer world. H.264 is now the preferred codec for http based
streaming protocols such as HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and MPEG-DASH.

Challenges with Legacy Content Archives

Format Obsolescence
While most commercial video systems currently support legacy digital formats, the
software required to encode, deliver, and playback a given format will continue to
evolve. Vendors will focus on supporting modern technology formats in order to
meet the most immediate market demands. Support for the older formats will wane
as the industry adopts the newer technology. The longer archives sit in the older
proprietary formats the more risk and cost there is in maintaining support for those
formats. The current state of RealMedia, with the end-of-life for the Helix Media
Delivery Platform, is a great example of this scenario. Content owners leveraging the
RealMedia format are now faced with having to support an obsolete platform simply
to ensure access to important archived content.

Other proprietary formats, such as Windows Media and Flash Video will also meet
the same fate at some point. The Silverlight 5 end-of-life in 2021, the waning
browser support for Flash, the demand for multi-device support, and the
consequent push to evolve and adopt standards is driving the expiration of legacy
formats.iii To this end it is important to build a long-term archival strategy in order
to ensure maximum content accessibility in the decades to come.

The Silverlight 5 end-of-life in 2021, the waning browser support for
Flash, the demand for multi-device support, and the consequent push to
evolve and adopt standards is driving the expiration of legacy formats.
H.264 is now the preferred codec for http based streaming protocols
such as HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and MPEG-DASH.

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Discoverability, Distribution, and Consumption
Additional challenges lie in ensuring your content is accessible by your intended
audience. Many legacy content archives are hosted on file shares that make it
difficult to discover the valuable information contained within the audio and video
content. These archives lack search, categorization, metadata, and security
capabilities essential to managing today’s media archives.

Video content distribution also puts a heavy demand on network resources.
Ensuring content consumers have an optimal experience in all viewing locations,
whether on a home Internet connection or field office, can be a huge challenge for
many organizations attempting to distribute video content.

Also, viewers today often require the ability to consume content on different
devices, including smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers. The multi-device
requirement for your content adds additional layers of complexity for your
organization.

Finally, as your organization evolves the demand to capture, store, and distribute
content for the purpose of retaining and sharing information will grow. As a result
you will require the ability to create and register future content efficiently, while
also reducing administrative costs.

Preparing for the Solution

The education and enterprise streaming video space has been focused on resolving
many of these problems over the last several years. The technology is maturing and
the tools required are generally available. The challenge is that the VMS space is
competitive and it can be difficult to select the appropriate solution for your needs.

In the case of migrating and managing your legacy content the solution has two core
elements:
1. Safely migrating your valuable content housed in a legacy format to a
modern, standards based format. This will ensure maximum flexibility and
support with most modern commercial VMS solutions.
As your organization evolves the demand to capture, store, and
distribute content for the purpose of retaining and sharing information
will grow.

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2. Selecting a robust video content management system to help organize and
distribute your legacy content while at the same time smoothing the way for
future content creation, management, and consumption.

Key Considerations

Bulk Transcoding of Legacy Content
The first consideration is how to best migrate content in a legacy format to a
modern, standards based format. While many content management systems do
support bulk transcoding into MPEG4 it is recommended that you treat this
requirement as a separate task possibly requiring a separate solution.

The biggest concern with this task is ensuring that your bulk transcoding solution is
fully capable of supporting the input format used in your environment. It can be
difficult to guarantee that your preferred VMS solution will handle your legacy input
formats reliably and transcode bulk jobs at the performance and scale you may
require. There are, however, specialized encoding systems that can complete this

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task very well. You will then be well positioned to focus solely on selecting a system
that will best meet your future content needs.

Below is a list of questions you should consider in preparing your content
transcoding requirements:

• What format/codec combination are your video archives currently
housed in? Taking an inventory of the existing format/codec combinations
you have in your environment will be important when selecting a
transcoding solution. While tools like ffmpeg have wide spread support for
many formats and codecs, the tool must be properly configured. Transcoding
vendors often use ffmpeg. Verify that solutions are properly configured to
support your video library formats. This will help you to foresee and mitigate
potential compatibility problems.
• What bitrates are your legacy archives encoded at? You will need to
know this when creating the profiles required for your updated content. The
main goal with the transcoding task is to convert the legacy format into
widely supported format while at the same time preserving quality.
Configure any required profiles to ensure you preserve the quality of the
original source.
• How much content needs to be transcoded? You should know
approximately how many hours of content you have to encode along with the
total size of your video archive. This will allow you to predict costs and
estimate approximately how long it will take to transcode your content. This
is especially important with large archives. This is a case where a specialized
transcoding solution would be critical versus relying on a VMS cloud vendor,
for example, to do your bulk transcode.
• Do you have the expertise and resources in-house to execute on this
project or will you require outside expertise? This is a basic build versus
buy decision. If you have 1 or 2 ffmpeg scripting experts and excess
computing resources you may be able to crank through your archive with
minimal extra cost. Otherwise a high performance cloud transcoding solution
may be the better option. Evaluate your Internet connected bandwidth
capabilities to ensure you address any potential connectivity issues with
potential SaaS solutions.
It can be difficult to guarantee that your preferred VMS solution will
handle your legacy input formats reliably and transcode bulk jobs at
the performance and scale you may require.

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• How much storage do you require for housing the updated content? Do
you have this infrastructure in place? During the initial transcoding
process you will be effectively doubling the size of your archive with the
exception of any efficiency gains with the codec conversion. Make sure this is
accounted for in defining the transcoding workflow requirements.

Metadata
When migrating to a modern video management system you will need a plan for
creating and managing metadata. Metadata is all the supporting text, images, and
files associated with your content. Good metadata is essential to maximizing the
value of your content. Archives that have been sitting on simple file systems will
likely have very little metadata associated with them. Consider the following when
developing a strategy for metadata creation and management for legacy content:

• How is your content currently organized? Taking note of any existing
categorization scheme and directory structures will help in determining how
to build a metadata strategy around the content you intend to preserve.
• Do you need a deep metadata strategy for the content archives? If so,
applying a meaningful set of metadata on a large content archive could be
daunting beyond basic categorization. In this case consider a transcription
service for the most important content. This will convert the entire audio
stream into text, enabling robust search and accessibility capabilities to your
legacy content with minimal effort. There will be extra costs with this task to
consider, however.

Content Management and Distribution
The video management system (VMS) will be the biggest choice you have to make. It
will be the central management and consumption point for administrators and users
of the video content. There are many different solutions on the market each with
their pros and cons. Below is a list of key considerations in defining your
requirements:

• Do you require an on-premise or hosted cloud solution? Your
requirements will depend on the availability of personnel and computing
resources in your organization versus the cost of a hosted cloud provider.
• What level of content security do you require? Safely sharing proprietary
corporate information with your internal employees is a major concern. VMS
solutions have a number of potential security solutions, from content sharing
restrictions to deeper digital rights management (DRM) solutions. Take the
Good metadata is essential to maximizing the value of your content.

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time to evaluate your requirements against the sensitivity of your content
and internal corporate IT security policies to ensure your selected solution
meets your content security needs.
• What third party systems will your VMS be required to integrate with?
In most organizations there are directory services and existing content
managements systems in use. Make sure you understand the requirements
for integrating with systems such as SharePoint, Salesforce, or a learning
management system (LMS). Vendors often claim wide support for many third
party systems. Take the time to evaluate their claims against your specific
requirements.
• What types of users and devices do you need to reach? Evaluate disability
access requirements in your environment, such as closed captioning support.
Understand the scope of device support you are required to provide with
your VMS.
• Where will your users be consuming the content? Do you have remote
employees watching from satellite offices or will users be viewing in a single
location? Knowing the full scope of content distribution requirements will be
important when evaluating the infrastructure required to ensure a quality
viewing experience.
• Will you be delivering live content? If live is required the VMS should be
able to support the ingest and registration of live content. You will also need
to evaluate the CDN requirements for the distribution of the live content to
remote locations.
• What volume of content will the VMS be required to transcode and
process? This is extremely important when determining how the system will
scale and whether you choose an on-premises or cloud solution. If you are
considering a cloud option make sure they can support your scaling
requirements. Do not assume that a cloud solution will scale if you expect
large volumes of content.
• How many concurrent users do you expect? This is particularly important
for live content. Understand the capacity limits of your network and evaluate
the CDN capabilities of vendor solutions to ensure you can deliver a quality
experience to your users.
• What are your video analytic requirements? Video analytics can offer
great insight into content viewership and engagement. Data you will want to
know includes: video quality, total number of viewers, viewer polls, and
geographic location, to name a few.

Future Content Creation
How you plan to create and ingest new content to your selected VMS should also be
thoroughly evaluated. Content can be created in a variety of ways, including tablets

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and smartphones, integrated content capture tools, and independent, specialized
content creation and editing tools.

Below is a list of key considerations that will help you evaluate your requirements
for content creation and registration:

• What are the content creation workflows? Defining the content creation
and registration workflows will help you evaluate exactly what type of
content creation solutions you need. Once defined, you can determine what
additional investment you need to make in your tool set. If your VMS vendor
does not offer a content capture solution you will need to verify that your
VMS and required content capture tools are compatible. Validate
compatibility before your purchase.
• Who will be creating content? Depending on the use cases you intend to
support you may require one or more solutions for content creation.
Enterprise YouTubes, knowledge sharing and training, and professional
video production all require different tools with potentially different skill
sets. How you invest in content creation will largely depend on the
experience you are trying to create for the content creators and viewers.
• Will live streaming be supported? A webcasting tool will be required if you
intend to support live streaming. If you have a content production team make
sure they are involved in defining requirements for your overall solution. If
you hope to support the live streaming of meetings, where ordinary users
will be producing content you should consider a content capture tool that is
tightly integrated with the VMS solution.

How you invest in content creation will largely depend on the
experience you are trying to create for the content creators and
viewers.

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Taking the Next Steps

This paper merely scratches the surface in describing the complexities in adopting a
modern video content management strategy. Migrating your video archives to a
modern VMS solution requires careful preparation in order to preserve existing
content while also enabling your organization to easily create and distribute content
in the future. If you need help in selecting and implementing a VMS solution for your
organization consider SchneiderMedia Consulting. We have been involved in the
video content management and distribution space for over 15 years and can offer
the following services:

• Requirements Gathering and Needs Assessment: Through this process we
will evaluate the specifics of your current video related workflows and
content management practices. We will evaluate where you are today and
define a plan and clear requirements for your next generation video content
strategy. The result will be a detailed requirements document that can be
used as a framework for researching and selecting a VMS solution.
• Solution Selection and Implementation: Our knowledge of the VMS video
streaming space is uniquely positioned to help organizations select the
appropriate solution for their needs. We are solution agnostic and objective
in our ability to evaluate your needs against the existing VMS solutions on
the market today. With our expertise you will be sure to select a solution that
maximizes your investment in streaming video. Once the solution is selected
we can manage the implementation of your selected VMS solution.
• Adoption: The internal adoption of enterprise video is the single biggest
challenge for organizations new to video streaming. Video can be a valuable
asset, enabling a powerful knowledge sharing tool. However, if your
employees are not able to create compelling content you will be missing the
true value of your investment. SchneiderMedia will help you build a

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framework that ensures your knowledge assets are effectively created,
retained, and consumed.

Final Words
Thanks very much for your interest in this paper. Please reach out to us at anytime
with any specific questions about your streaming video challenges. We also
welcome your feedback and comments on how this paper helped you.

Contact Information
You can reach Bill Schneider directly at: bills@schneidermedia.biz

Resources:

i Silverlight End-of-Life:
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight
ii Popular browsers reducing support for flash:
• Mozilla Firefox:
o https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/07/20/reducing-
adobe-flash-usage-in-firefox/
• Google Chrome:
o https://chrome.googleblog.com/2016/08/flash-and-chrome.html
• Apple Safari:
o http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/14/11938562/apple-blocking-
flash-safari-10-macos-sierra
o http://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/14/safari-macos-sierra-
plugins-disabled-default/

2016-09 SchneiderMedia - Managing Legacy Video Archives

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