A Modern CMS for Global OTT
Can Legacy Management Systems Fit the Demanding and Ever-Growing OTT Industry?
The CMS (Content Management System) sits right at the center of your content supply chain. From where, it orchestrates and manages the workflows surrounding content organization, metadata management, creating asset relations, and the setting up of business rules for monetizing your content. All of these operations are managed from one central interface that a CMS offers.
Therefore, it is apparent that the CMS plays a crucial role in establishing compelling content-based workflows at scale. Yet many companies are still stuck with the legacy CMS of the past, built on a monolithic architecture. Such systems operate with cluttered and rigid workflows, often preventing companies from optimizing their content distribution process. Integrating new features or extending workflows to uplift customer experiences can be a constant challenge. A simple update requires extensive development support, only to entangle your backend further. Such a situation causes immense frustration not only to developers but also to other stakeholders across departments.
However, the advent of the modern CMS lays to rest such challenges by leveraging a modular architecture designed for agility, extensibility, and interoperability.
Makings of a Modern CMS
Built on Microservices Architecture
The modern CMS is built on a microservices architecture where each service is developed, deployed, and maintained independently from each other. The modular approach allows services to be more agile and independently scalable according to your needs. It is also more time-saving and cost-effective than scaling up your entire architecture. Moreover, services become more resilient to failures by being able to handle fault isolation better.
Powered by Best-of-Breed Services
The modern CMS is powered by combining best-of-breed managed and open-source services that cater to the unique needs and extensibility requirements of platforms. Managed services allow you to take a hands-off approach by leveraging solutions and the cloud infrastructure of a domain expert. On the other hand, open-source services enable a more hands-on approach to services that need to be tailored to fit to your specific business requirements.
Unified Management Interface
The modern CMS offers a unified management interface within which modular services and their workflows can be controlled as well as collaborate seamlessly. This is achieved via unified frontend and backend libraries and extensive APIs. This unification puts an end to disparate and siloed systems within your platform.
Management of Every Content
Content is key to user engagement, and it is what keeps end-users hooked. Catering to different user segments requires various content types, including video, live streams, images, audio, applications, and all the metadata that goes with it. A modern CMS manages all types of content under a single interface. It also facilitates the acquisition of third-party content in case of tie-ins and partnerships.
Automated Workflows
End-to-end automated workflows become essential for a CMS when dealing with time constraints and a massive number of assets. Workflows for all processes: ingestion, transcoding, encryption, packaging, and publishing of content can be automated and monitored from within a modern CMS.
Business Models Optimized for Your Audience
Content owners understand that different markets require a blend of different monetization models in order to attract and retain viewers. Some favor the free AVoD model, while others prefer a premium ad-free experience offered through SVoD or TVoD models. Supporting various business models by enabling personalized ad injection for AVoD and setting up multiple tiers for SVoD is an essential aspect of a modern CMS.
Robust Metadata Management
Good content needs to be supplemented with good metadata, as metadata helps in content discovery and facilitates search and personalized recommendations. Automated metadata ingestion, with provisions for manual editing and handling of language variations as well as serving frontend image requests on the fly, is central to the workflow of a modern CMS.
Multi-User and Multiple Instances
Preparation and management of OTT content are carried out by a variety of expert roles, ranging from engineers to editors to translators. A modern CMS provides each user, whether internal or third-party, with a separate dashboard customized for specific roles and data access policies. Meanwhile, it also unifies dispersed teams and workflows.
Does such a CMS Exist?
Yes! Axinom Mosaic provides everything you require in a modern CMS, powered by a combination of managed and open-source services running on a unified technology stack. Designed on a microservice architecture, the CMS is highly customizable and extensible, with the freedom to pick the functionalities you require for your audience. The CMS is adaptable to project needs, handles all content types, interoperable with numerous third-party services, and is front-end agnostic.
The capabilities on offer include the ability to automate the ingestion of your media assets, metadata management and setting up asset relations, on-the-fly image transformation, translation of metadata as well creating business rules and monetization models.
Although powered by modular services, Axinom Mosaic combines the capabilities on offer under a unified management interface by making use of micro-frontends. This enables your backend workflows to feel harmonious and consistent for your CMS users. For example, transforming an image using the Axinom Image and assigning its relation to a movie using Axinom Media is seamless and unified. Even though the Image Service is completely managed by us and the Media Service offers fully customizable workflows.
Axinom solutions have enabled prominent media, broadcast, and telecommunication organizations in reaching a global audience with their content. With the right mix of robustness, scalability, and extendability, Axinom fulfills viewer expectations for rich content libraries with unlimited localization. Not to mention supporting business goals with a spectrum of monetization and operating models.
“We’ve chosen Axinom as our partner because of their long and proven experience in content management and delivery,” says Tony Huidor, Vice President of Product & Digital Operations for Cinedigm. “An Axinom built CMS offers the most flexible and modular end-to-end OTT management platforms we’ve seen on the market. Their system will empower us to automate and simplify our content management workflows while improving the scalability and robustness of our OTT platform.”
