IBC 2015 is coming soon, offering the perfect venue to update the broadcasting community on the Framework for Interoperable Media Services (FIMS) initiatives.
FIMS is a joint project of the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) with a membership of more than one hundred participating companies. A lot has taken place since the project first won the IBC Judges’ prize in 2012. Not only has FIMS significantly enriched its technical specifications, but more importantly, vendors now recognize the value of the proposition and are offering FIMS-compliant products.
What is FIMS about?
In a nutshell, FIMS defines open services that are loosely coupled, enabling multi-vendor services to be integrated and creating “best-in-class” media systems. The bottom line is that implementing the FIMS’ framework provides agility, interoperability, interchangeability and reusability of media related services. In order to achieve this, great attention is devoted to the decomposition of systems into business processing units that are highly re-usable if exposed as services through common interfaces. Another important characteristic of this Service-Oriented Architecture is to keep business process logic separate from service implementation. FIMS interfaces can abstract vendor interfaces, but vendors can also natively implement FIMS.
FIMS 1.2 and 1.3
FIMS 1.2 is now being released with new features in addition to the existing “capture”, “transfer”, transform”, “repositories” interfaces, such as a service interface to Quality Analysis tools and a better support for partial content and editing. FIMS 1.2 supports both SOAP and REST implementations.
The FIMS participants are already working on version 1.3, including the definition of services for automatic metadata extraction tools. FIMS 1.3 shall also support “growing content” in the context of live IP production and the existing “repositories” interface will be enriched. Interoperability with other standards such as IMF and AS-11 will also be provided. The use of W3C semantic technologies is being investigated to manage data, benefiting from the FIMS data model based on EBUCore.
Open source
FIMS will soon provide a platform for open source development where developers can freely contribute to the extension of the specification or propose implementations of existing features. FIMS is also working on a testing platform, which will eventually support certification. FIMS is operated under an IPR framework assuring that all products can implement FIMS compensation and royalty free. As of today, more than 100 companies have signed the FIMS Participation Agreement, including manufacturers, system integrators, MAM solution providers and broadcasters.
More
You can learn more on the FIMS channel, which features presentations from FIMS implementers and promoters. Video guidelines are also available. The official FIMS website provides a wealth of additional information, including information on how to join. There is also a LinkedIn FIMS SOA User group periodically communicating recent news.
Visit FIMS at IBC 2015 (EBU stand 10.F20).