CDSA

During the Dec. 5 Content Production Summit, the Content Delivery & Storage Association (CDSA) highlighted some of the challenges the media and entertainment (M&E) industry face with onboarding and offboarding and what it’s doing to resolve those issues.

The constant onboarding and offboarding of production crew members across major elements of M&E has considerable cost and timing implications against an overall industry effort to work faster, be more agile and achieve greater efficiencies.

CDSA and MovieLabs are attacking this space from both ends. While CDSA’s Production ID Working Group is driving a near-term effort to make operational efficiency improvements through best practices, MovieLabs is developing a “North Star” vision for  the industry that defines key transitional elements that CDSA can then target.

The CDSA executives who served as panelists during the session “CDSA Working Group Highlight: Addressing Crew On/Off-Boarding” are engaged in both those endeavors and the value they see in this effort.

“What we’re talking about here [are] … the best practices [that have] been coming out of the working groups,” said moderator Ben Schofield, CDSA technical director. These groups didn’t even exist “just over a year ago but we wanted to kind of give you a sense of where those groups are going and what they’re doing,” he noted.

“The real issue here is for everybody,” he told attendees. “We’re talking here about content security. But if you actually did a hard search on any production out there, you’ll find that there’s a fraction of the individuals that are actually being identified, and a lot of the assets are being tracked. And I think that’s critical for content owners and studios to actually have control over that.”

He explained: “We’re looking here at some of the foundational elements for production security. That’s how you start with identity. Start with assets, start with instant management and try and build up from there. And really, what the working groups are is a set of expert practitioners drawn from a pretty good roster of the major studios and streamers.”

Schofield added: “What we’re trying to do is share that best practice between us.  And there are three working groups that are interrelated.”

Keith Ritlop, co-chair of CDSA Production Security Work Streams, is running the Production Identity Workstream, while Shira Harrison, co-chair of CDSA’s Production Security Working Group, has “picked up on the production process manual, which is linking things into the controls,” said Schofield.

Schofield turned the presentation over to Ritlop, who said: “As we try to solve the different problems that are facing our productions today, we’re really looking for a holistic, standardized view. And when we look at all the different services that we could offer to productions and to help them take advantage of technology and kind of establish cloud services and make things more secure, transfer content to and from vendors – kind of everything in that whole production ecosystem that makes it work across film and TV – we really kind of zeroed in on production identity as like the foundational component of that because what we are seeing across many different studios and the different representatives that we were talking to in these work groups is that there isn’t a consistent way to onboard and offboard production crew members.”

Ritlop explained: “Some companies treat them as contractors and they onboard them through the standard corporate process. Other ones treat them completely as third parties. And then other studios are somewhere in between. So what  we’re looking to do is kind of discuss best practices, look at what’s working, what’s not working across the different studios, and as Ben said, we have a lot of great representation from Apple and Amazon and Netflix and NBC and Amblin.”

The working groups are able to “talk through some of the issues,” according to Ritlop, who told attendees: “We’re really all trying to solve the same problems. So by putting our heads together and discussing what’s working, what’s not working, it really helps accelerate the whole process and really solves a lot of problems for both the corporate side and the production side because the other part of my job really is dealing with a lot of the engineering teams and security teams at corporate and really showing them the production use cases because a lot of them may not be familiar with it. They’ve never worked in production and they’re not sure how film and TV productions work.”

Ritlop added: “By providing that insight and that bind of deep analysis of the use case, you can really short circuit the whole process and get to the answer quicker.

Produced by MESA, the Content Production Summit was presented by Fortinet, and sponsored by Convergent Risks, Friend MTS, Amazon Studios Technology, Indee, NAGRA, EIDR, and Eluv.io, in association with CDSA and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS).