SDVI focuses on the provision of its “next-generation media supply chain management” solution, SDVI Rally. This solution is designed to “optimize common supply chain challenges in media workflows”. It packages this solution in four solutions - File Delivery & Validation, Batch & Burst, Media Prep and Packaging. Rally’s key differentiation is to automate the management of machine resources according to demand and provide usage and cost reporting. “Rally elastically scales resources required by your supply chain at any given time. Rally constantly analyzes throughput, performance and load, and deploys additional resources as required.”

ARCHITECTURE: Rally can be deployed on public or private cloud, virtualized on-premise, or hybrids of the two. Security and control functionality includes user rights, watermarks, key-based access and VPNs. No mention is made of micro-services, databases used or other underlying technology. It appears not to be deployable on-site.

INTEGRATION: Rally provides dynamic resource provisioning and demand-based scaling, spinning-up cloud-based resources as and when required to minimise cost. Integration seems limited with only storage, AQC, and transcoders (only generically mentioned) and Adobe Premiere integration.

AUTOMATION: While SDVI Rally has some leading automation capability in terms of its ability to dynamically spin-up and spin-down machine resources to meet demand and supply chain rules there is no mention of a graphical workflow design tool, so it is assumed to either hard coded or configurable through UI only.

METADATA: Very little is published about the SDVI Rally metadata functionality. The description of their Media Prep solution mentions compliance editing and ad marking, so temporal metadata is clearly supported. No mention of any other type of asset or business object metadata though.

USER EXPERIENCE: Rally is positioned as an automation solution more than a media asset management platform, and as such it seems its user interfaces are primarily for monitoring and reporting. For this they have a configurable widget-based user interface that seems rather dated in its style. The only media UI that can be found is a SDVI panel in Adobe Premiere, which includes work order management driven by job priority.

ANALYTICS: Rally provides extensive reporting functionality. This includes automated report generation for granular cost tracking, configurable billing, reporting and cost dashboards. Data collection and analysis aids accurate budgeting and deployment strategies. Accurate reporting of per-program cost enables efficient cost-to-air modelling. “Rally helps you to make smart business decisions quickly, supporting new revenue streams and accelerating time to revenue. Predictable costing data paired with technical flexibility allows you to align costs with expected revenue.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: SDVI integrates with Microsoft, AWS, Google and other AI video indexing services mainly for legal compliance checking, integrating with an Adobe Premiere panel. SDVI has its in-house intelligence for automatic control & optimisation of resources and application, dynamic resource provision and on-the fly scaling, and on-demand sourcing of applications and services. Whether this is only business rules based or whether this includes some AI and ML is unclear.