IBC: FIMS Project Will Receive Judges' Prize

AMWA and EBU joint effort on metadata will be honored during the convention

By George Winslow -- Broadcasting & Cable, 8/23/2012 11:10:17 AM

Complete Coverage: IBC 2012

The IBC has announced that FIMS -- the Framework for Interoperable Media Services -- project will receive the Judges' Prize during the convention.

The FIMS project, which is a joint effort by the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), represents an ambitious effort to create industry standardization in the way that core metadata should be stored and presented.

As more companies moved to file-based workflows and began distributing more content to more devices, they often found that the metadata they need for their workflows would be lost or corrupted as files moved from different facilities or through equipment or software supplied by different vendors.

To overcome that problem, AMWA and the EBU brought together virtually all of the manufacturers in the segment and a large number of broadcasters to create a specification that would preserve metadata in files.

The effort took some notable steps forward recently with FIMS' publication of version 1.0 of its specification and the first large-scale implementation of FIMS by Bloomberg Television.

"IBC values sharing knowledge above all else, and in developing practical standards so quickly, the FIMS partners had to share their knowledge if the resulting standards were going to be robust enough to be useful globally," said Michael Lumley, chairman of the IBC Innovation Awards. "It is right that we celebrate broad collaboration across the industry, and I am delighted that we can honor EBU and AMWA for their efforts in driving the FIMS project, and Bloomberg on behalf of all the partners, as the pioneering implementer of the standard."

The IBC Judges' Prize will be presented to FIMS, along with the International Honor for Excellence to NHK during the IBC2012 Awards Ceremony. The ceremony will be held in the RAI Auditorium Sunday, Sept. 9.

Also during the ceremony, the IBC Innovation Awards, Exhibition Design Awards, Special Award and the Best Conference Paper Award, which will be given to the Fraunhofer Institute for telecommunications Heinrich Hertz Institute, will be announced.