Prime Focus is an Indian service provider that has developed their own media enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, called CLEAR, automating the complete media supply chain. It is understood that this solution is not sold as a standalone product for media companies to independently use, but only as part of a Prime Focus managed service. CLEAR is a cloud based MAM that is promoted for different applications as Cloud MAM, Operations MAM, Broadcast Cloud, DAX Production Cloud and CLEAR Vision Cloud - primarily operated by Prime Focus personnel as an outsourced service, but also with media organisation access.


ARCHITECTURE: CLEAR is hybrid cloud and on-premise deployed platform. The application software (MAM, Database, BPM, and Enterprise Service Bus) and metadata are on the Cloud while content storage, streaming, transcoding, auto QC and accelerated file delivery applications are local. It is hosted on multiple data centres around the world. Security is promoted with SOC compliance, ISO certification, data and assets protection with encryption, watermarking, and content disaster recovery. No mention is made of the underlying technology (microservices, databases and other).

INTEGRATION: As a managed service, CLEAR primarily integrates with third party resources that are located in the Prime Focus premises, and has an on-prem gateway to manage local resources. Information on specific vendors that they integrate with is not provided, nor the integration approach, nor resource monitoring capabilities.

AUTOMATION: While CLEAR promotes BPM workflow templates that are fully configurable and customizable, no mention is made of a workflow design tool. Prime Focus claim to have a native media recognition AI engine (called Machine Wisdom) that automates metadata generation (including action tracking) and a variety of content actions (segmentation, creation of highlights packages).

METADATA: CLEAR can manage large and complex metadata schemas and provide the services to manually and automatically enter data into these on behalf of their clients, but it does not provide a self-service metadata design tool that their clients can use to make their own changes. No mention is made of more advanced metadata capabilities.

USER EXPERIENCE: The CLEAR user interfaces appear modern in their style, but as this is a managed service not a deployment self-service platform the user experience is more about the quality of service. Feedback from the market implies that this is poor, with transcoders regularly failing, and unpredictable and long delivery times for requested services.

ANALYTICS: CLEAR does not offer end clients tools for monitoring the progress of workflows and for getting insights into the status or performance of the platform or the managed services. It is this lack of visibility that is the oft cited issue with managed service providers in this industry.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: CLEAR integrates with Microsoft, IBM Watson, Google Vision AI services for automatic content segmentation, thumbnail contextual ranking, logical scene boundaries, automated storytelling clips compilation, and action tracking.