Shawn Snider Ross Video Vice president, production workflow & cloud services
What was the biggest technology challenge you’ve had to face in your work? As I come from a software-engineering background prior to moving into product management and executive leadership, I’ve faced several challenges in developing and migrating technologies through the years. Creating new products from the ground up brings a myriad of interesting problems to solve: how to scale the application; how to make it easy to deploy and support; how to build a great user experience. And how do I design a highly secure product that’s also easy to use and understand? When I think of the largest technological challenge, it’s likely the design and implementation work I did as part of the Media Object Server (MOS) technology group – whose members span both broadcasters and vendors alike. For those who don’t know, the MOS standard is a protocol that is designed to allow many broadcast systems to interface – meaning newsrooms can communicate with devices like teleprompters, graphics, playout, automation, etc. As part of a MOS workflow, devices can contribute plug- ins to the newsroom, allowing graphics and clips to be added to stories and rundowns, without ever having to leave the newsroom environment. When I joined the MOS committee on behalf of Ross, the protocol was already reasonably mature and due for a technology life-cycle overhaul. As part of this project, I took a legacy ActiveX specification for plug- ins and designed a new HTML5- based implementation, using the same communication interface, but modernising the approach to ultimately enable the first steps of MOS towards cloud-based workflows. This was quite a technical design feat, as it required both replacing a legacy implementation scheme with modern technology, but also using HTML5-based technologies in extremely innovative and clever ways that were never intended to solve the problem. This was all while handling synchronisation and message queueing,
and adapting to some of the original design constraints of the protocol. Ross Video graciously contributed this development back to the community, and it was adopted into the standard as the next-generation plug-in interface. In turn, this development was vital to the future of news-based workflows, enabling systems to eventually migrate to the cloud and adapt to a distributed architecture, supporting remote workflows and contribution. If we hadn’t developed a strategy to modernise the protocol – first with the HTML5-based interface replacement, and later with the MOS v4 security contributions – there’s a high likelihood that the protocol would be a relic. We wouldn’t have anywhere near the same level of interoperability between vendors today, it would need native one-off integrations between each pair of systems. Workflows that teams have adapted to – contributing graphics, clips and automation elements in stories and rundowns – would be inconsistent between vendors, or require one vendor to provide the entire end-to-end solution, limiting customer choice. Lastly, as Microsoft is phasing out support for ActiveX, existing customers wouldn’t What were the stakes for not resolving it? have had a migration path forward to the cloud. Potentially, they would have been left scrambling when existing workflows simply ceased to function, as support for those legacy technologies ends. What happened? How did everything work out? It’s been a remarkably successful project. By taking the initiative, we were able to design and provide a sample implementation to the community within a period of months, with full ratification into the standard in under a year. We have seen vendors migrate legacy plug-ins to this standard, enabling new workflows and integrations that we never imagined possible. At Ross Video, every one of our MOS-enabled products now supports
the HTML5-based specification – and it’s allowed us greater flexibility to design and create simplified, user-friendly workflows for our customers, setting them up for success in a cloud-based environment. On top of that, several years after this modernisation, the MOS leadership won a Technology and Engineering Emmy in recognition for the impact that it has made in creating unified, cross-vendor workflows through our industry. What did you learn – and what would you do differently if you had your time again? If you want to see a project succeed, it’s often best to take the initiative, design and demonstrate a proof- of-concept and then execute on it – accepting feedback from a larger community once you’ve proven the technology is possible. But make certain you’re open to that feedback, and ensure you have received enough insight or solicited enough input early on, to cover the many possible use cases. This approach dramatically accelerates the adoption of the changes – not designing by committee and getting hung up on every small detail along the way. What would I change? Adoption among vendors after ratification was slower than I would have liked – not unexpectedly, but it did hamper early efforts for cloud-based integration between vendors. Additional marketing to push for adoption on a quicker timeline across the industry, rather than a ‘wait and see’ approach, would have likely led to greater success. And us being further along as an industry in our adoption and acceptance of cloud-based workflows. IF YOU WANT TO SEE A PROJECT SUCCEED, TAKE THE INITIATIVE
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