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Case

Cloud-based Metadata Plane

Challenge

For a large international Cable Operator Merapar has designed, developed and integrated a Metadata plane to replace the customer’s existing inefficient legacy solution. The goal was to provide a scalable, performant, cost effective Central Metadata Service that serves as a component in the customer’s internationally deployed ecosystem.

Specific challenges included:

  • Seamless replacement of the legacy solution within 6 months, fully integrated into the customer’s existing environment
  • Aggregation of Linear and VOD metadata from various providers
  • Publishing to multiple downstream solutions for onward publishing to end-user devices, among others
  • Enrichment of the incoming Metadata, multilingual metadata and high resolution images
  • Enable insight into the Metadata for all operators and provide basic editing features

Solution

  • Merapar took ownership to deliver the architecture, development and integration with a small dedicated team of approximately 6 professionals
  • Designed with a low running cost using elastic scaling and on-demand resources
  • Quickly built by making clever use of off-the-shelf tools and state-of-the-art (cloud) technologies
  • Seamless integration with customer existing listing providers and systems
Architecture of the metadata plane: listing providers, VOD content providers and an OTT library feed a cloud CMS, which publishes primary and secondary metadata out to set-top boxes, phones and laptops. Descriptive, technical, commercial and navigation metadata are colour-coded throughout

Results

  • Operational running cost reduced by more than 90% (over €1 million a year)

  • Performance improved by 500%

  • Designed, built and put into production within 6 months

  • Future-proof and extensible design allows for fast delivery of new features

  • Massively reduced number of components, saving operational cost

  • 25,000 updates per day from main listing provider

  • 1,400 VOD updates per day (including catch-up)

  • 4,000 EPG updates per day

  • EPG fast track for last minute updates

Typical use case for this type of solution

  • Validation and Ingest Metadata; Ingest enrichment data
  • Correlation and Enrichment based on configurable business rules
  • Quarantine of data if not meeting minimal publication requirements
  • UI for Metadata inspection / viewing (VOD and Linear) including ‘search’
  • Basic Editing / Editorial Modification of Metadata (including ‘locking’)
  • Multi-language
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