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Since its launch in 2020, Blue Lucy’s flagship product, BLAM, has also been the company’s only product. BLAM is a sophisticated workflow orchestration, system integration and media management platform, and both its core capability and the microservices which comprise its orchestration functionality have constantly evolved in that time. It has, however, remained Blue Lucy’s sole solution.  Until now.  At IBC 2024, Blue Lucy launched BOLT, a new product that’s described as a global gateway to content libraries for non-technical users. We asked Blue Lucy founder, Julian Wright, what prompted the decision to develop a new product and what distinguishes BOLT from BLAM.

Q: Can you give us an elevator pitch overview of Blue Lucy, BLAM and BOLT?

A : Blue Lucy’s ethos is to take an orthodoxy-challenging approach to solving media business problems.  Our core product, BLAM, is a sophisticated integration and orchestration platform designed to meet the complex and evolving business needs in production, localisation, and distribution. BLAM is an “enterprise” platform that serves the operational needs of multiple aspects of a media business.  Our new product, BOLT, is an operationally-simple offering designed to meet a fundamental, but most important, business need for any operation handling media assets – accessibility.

Q: What was the initial motivation for developing BOLT?

A : In BLAM deployments our implementation engineers and analysts tend to work with the media operations team within the ‘engine room’ of the operation.  In conversation with senior management teams, we were often surprised by statements along the lines of “your platform is great, the automation is really driving time to market and cost efficiency but at the executive level we would just like a really simple way to view our current inventory.” 

Q : So, is BOLT simply a media portal for viewing content?

That’s how it started, but it’s developed into more than that. On further examination, we uncovered a number of apparently simple requirements within the commercial business (i.e., outside of the technical content supply operation) that could be addressed by a toolset similar to BLAM.  Alongside the basic requirement to search and discover content is the ability to create showcases and viewing rooms and distribute these to sales prospects or internal marketing teams via secure links. Some customers want to create one or more branded ‘storefront’ portals to directly support sales or similar customer self-service functions.  On the subject of “portals” we saw a clear a common requirement within distributors to provide easy-to-use media upload portals to their production partners to allow them to push finished content and production metadata to the central content management and processing function.  This is particularly important to the aggregator distributors or production companies that hold a number of separate brands or labels under a broader umbrella.  BOLT satisfies all of these needs – it gives you effortless access to your content, provides an intuitive upload function and allows content owners to showcase and monetise content catalogues.

Q: Many of these capabilities are available in BLAM – what makes BOLT different?

A : All of these functions can be supported by BLAM as standard but as a collection of capabilities there was clearly a need for a commercially-focused product in its own right.  This is particularly the case in the overarching requirement that the tools needed to be easy to use – we took this one step further and defined the vision for the new product that it should have a zero-training requirement and be as intuitive to use as an on-line banking app – well the good ones at least.

Q: Are BLAM and BOLT totally independent products?

BOLT is built on the BLAM core technology and existing BLAM users may add the BOLT capabilities to extend the operational reach of their BLAM platform to support commercial and external business activities.  In this context, if BLAM is the engine room, BOLT is the viewing platform.  But BOLT is of course also available stand alone as a separate product.

Your content inventory represents the most significant proportion of the value of your media business. To maximise that value, make it accessible with BOLT from Blue Lucy.

Find out more about BOLT here or get in touch with the team to arrange a demo.

Everything you need to know about Lucia, BLAM’s new AI assistant.

The Blue Lucy team introduced BLAM’s new AI assistant, Lucia to the media and entertainment industry at IBC Show 2024 in Amsterdam. And, while the application is still in development, the industry response to Lucia has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic, even earning the Blue Lucy team a TVBEurope Best of Show IBC 2024 Award. But, in a market flooded with AI messaging, what makes Lucia special and what difference will she make to BLAM users? We asked Blue Lucy’s head of product, Joshua Martin and Lucia’s primary developer, Aaron Leanage, to answer some frequently asked questions about Blue Lucy’s newest addition.

Why did you create Lucia?

At Blue Lucy we believe that technology needs to constantly evolve to keep up with the needs of the media and entertainment industry. This ethos is a big part of the reason why we built our BLAM platform on a microservice architecture, as it allows our team to develop and deliver new integrations and capabilities really quickly. But we wanted to explore how the latest AI developments could make it even easier for our customers to get value from the platform.

Our goal was to lower the entry point to automation – so that customers don’t always need an engineer to create or manage processes or get answers to complex questions about workflows. Most operators can describe what they’d like the system to do, but not everyone has the time or capacity to learn how to access BLAM’s full functionality – Lucia was created to remove this barrier for our less technical users. Even typing is optional because Lucia responds to both text and voice prompts in conversational language, making BLAM accessible to almost anyone.

What can BLAM users expect from Lucia?

Lucia works alongside organisations’ predefined workflows to help with anything from simple searches to bulk actions and complex chained commands. Where workflows in BLAM are hard-coded to do things in a pre-defined way, Lucia provides flexibility for use cases that change from day-to-day.

For example: if you’ve got a big batch of new content coming in and you need to generate placeholders, remove the bars and line-up and then save the media in a new storage folder, Lucia’s got it covered. And she remembers what you’ve asked her to do before, so it’s really easy to repeat processes or revise them without having to start from scratch.

Some of the actions Lucia can take (which can be combined to create complex chained commands) include: asset searches, folder searches, creating placeholder assets, creating folders, attaching and detaching assets from workspaces or folders and getting metadata, workflow or user data.

Besides automation, what other capabilities will Lucia provide?

Because Lucia is based on a large language model (LLM) she can be used to perform tasks like summarising information, doing mathematical calculations, translating text and answering general questions that users may have about content formats, metadata and almost anything else – and you don’t have to leave the platform to find the information you’re looking for. Lucia can also be used as a business intelligence and support tool. You can ask her questions about your content and workflows, like how many assets are in a certain folder or whether any episode numbers are missing from a series of programmes, or get Lucia to perform calculations on data retrieved such as “get me all complete workflow runs completed in the last 24 hours and calculate the average runtime.”  This kind of information would previously only be available if the workflow had included a report generation process. 

As Lucia is still in development, we’re still in the exploratory phase, establishing what the potential capabilities are and what would offer the most value to our customers. For example, if the AI assistant is integrated with BLAM’s data processing service, Lucia can use historic data to predict asset-based costs and identify workflow bottlenecks. Similarly, Lucia could rewrite BLAM user documentation in everyday language tailored to your operational context and answer users’ technical queries, cutting down on customers’ first-line support costs.

Have there been any unexpected benefits?

It quickly became apparent at IBC Show that different BLAM users would find value in Lucia for different tasks. So, while a user may be interested in asking her how to do something or creating bulk or chained operations, managers may find Lucia’s ability to summarise large amounts of data more useful and use her to find out how long it takes for workflows to be completed or how long it may take for a user to pick up a task. One of the unexpected benefits we’ve discovered is how Lucia could be used to optimise BLAM’s implementation, for example an administrator can use Lucia to identify which microservices need to be updated or to interrogate workflows to identify bottlenecks.   

Is Lucia safe?

Lucia can only add value to content or processes in BLAM. She can’t modify workflows or change the original assets, and she isn’t able to do anything that results in a loss of data. What this means is that, while Lucia can be used to create new versions of content, the original asset will remain intact and unchanged and, although the application can be used to build complex chained commands, she can’t interrupt or edit existing workflows. Lucia is also bound by the same user-permissions as the operator working in BLAM, so she can’t take any actions or access any information that the user isn’t already cleared for.

When it come to keeping your data and content secure, Lucia uses your organisation’s AI provider, credentials and authentication so there can be no cross-contamination of data between BLAM customers, and Lucia will comply with any security agreements you have in place with your provider. The application currently runs in OpenAI’s ChatGPT and can be set up in Microsoft Azure’s Open Ai, but we plan to integrate Lucia with our customers’ choice of any large language model (LLM.)  

When will Lucia be available in BLAM?

Lucia is scheduled for general release to BLAM customers by the end of 2024.  Get in touch now to chat with the team about how Lucia might benefit your organisation or to arrange a demo. 

We’ve been mulling over our experiences at IBC last week and digesting some of the excellent reports and engaging sessions from the likes of Caretta Research, the IABM, and the IBC conference. It’s not Halloween yet, but they certainly made for chilling reading. There were 3 rather depressing major standouts for us, but it’s never all doom and gloom at Blue Lucy Towers…

• Tech needs to either make money or save money.
  This is of course a universal truth, but it was a big theme at the show. Large scale multi-year broadcast infrastructure projects are as good as dead. Broadcasters’ profits are down, and job cuts are widespread. In this climate every £ and $ spent needs to be justified by rapid, tangible ROI, and projects need to be delivering value as they unfold, not at some point in the distant future. Our recent blog post outlines the Blue Lucy approach to rapidly delivering business value through iterative implementation. This project approach gives feedback at every stage and gives you opportunity to refocus when things change – you can read more here
  
• Planned investment in 2025 is 14% lower than in 2024
  In such an uncertain business climate it’s no surprise that spending plans for next year are down. Projects that involve a wholesale replacement of tech will be fewer and further between. That’s why technologies that can integrate with existing, proven workflows and deliver further efficiencies will succeed. Integrate, don’t deprecate! Check out Blue Lucy’s integrations and get in touch to learn more.
  
• It’s content that drives business KPIs for media companies, so tech spend is being squeezed.
  This is, frankly, as it should be but against this backdrop it’s little wonder that business confidence levels within the technology supply community are below 2022 levels. Many of the traditionally buoyant tech speciality areas are in decline, so why are we so bullish? Because our business continues to grow.  And because Blue Lucy has a toolset that allows media organisations to take a rapid, cost effective and genuinely low risk approach to operational transformation – be it in driving efficiency or exploiting new market opportunities with solutions such as BOLT, our new easy to use content portal.

Want to explore how Blue Lucy can give you reasons to be cheerful in an uncertain business climate? Get in touch to find out more.

How easy is it for large, broad scope projects to deliver actual business value?

It’s a fact that our industry is littered with quietly, and not so quietly, abandoned big technology projects. Trade shows and networking events are frequently awash with talk of delays, cancellations and scope contractions for contracts that once grabbed the headlines. This begs the question: Has the industry lost sight of the importance of value? And how long is too long to wait for your technology initiatives to deliver tangible value to your organisation?  

Here at Blue Lucy we are used to implementing integration projects at scale, and although we have some battle scars to prove it, we’ve learned a thing or two about delivering value along the way. We’ve put together 6 key strategies to mitigate the risks associated with large projects, and the first one is all about scope:

• Don’t boil, slice:
  No, it’s not a cooking tip. It’s a technology and delivery approach that combines to allow projects to be implemented on the basis of the horizonal or vertical operational slice model. Here the supplier and management team work together to prove an end-to-end, or top-to-bottom operational capability that delivers value quickly. The project then continues on this operational slicing model with the next capability . The hackneyed phase “don’t boil the ocean” is overused, but it fits here. We believe it’s incremental slicing that delivers.

When it comes to technology fundamentals, there is a stand-out model which has proven to be revolutionary in terms of faster development times, ease of deployment and ongoing business agility:

• No-Code / Low-Code Development:
  You want to trial and test new operational pipelines and workflows, but you don’t want to wrestle with scripts or build a software development operation (Dev’ Op’).  You know there’s risk in developing and maintaining any software, even apparently simple scripts. You need to keep an eye on what’s right for the business and that includes reducing future liability. Working with no-code technology, your business analysts can build complex operational pipelines from a range of  microservices without requiring any software development knowledge. It’s simple, it’s fast, its adaptable, and proven.

We’re in the midst of a media consumption revolution, and it’s key for media companies to exploit this effectively and quickly. Hoping that significant technology decisions will pay dividends when a major project completes two years hence is not a strategy, it’s a gamble. The project needs to be seen to be delivering as it unfolds:

• Iterative Implementation:
  Iterative Implementations demonstrate earned value, and this approach delivers feedback at every stage of the project, including visibility of the effects of modifications, and the opportunity to refocus when things change, or go wrong. Your operational business needs are many, complex and evolving.  So choose a technology and vendor that enables a collaborative step-by-step approach. This in turn realises business value for you incrementally and at speed.

When you have to manage business requirements from multiple stakeholders your technology choices become crucial:

• Future-Ready Tech:
  Dig into the design philosophy of your technology candidates. Do they enable your vendors to deliver, evolve and support a solution that will keep delivering value to your business over the long term? Making the right choices at this stage of your project will empower you to tackle new business challenges and integrate with emerging technologies, ensuring long-term success for your business and a technical solution that stays relevant.

To be far reaching and impactful, your project doesn’t have to incur pointless expense deploying all new solutions or to start from a ‘clean slate’. Why eradicate successful workflows, or replace fully operational solutions that are still delivering great value?:

• Integrate, don’t deprecate:
  A modern, flexible platform will allow a media technology operation to be updated like Trigger’s Broom or, for the well-read, The Ship of Theseus. If you select a solution with hundreds of integration connectors for modern and legacy media platforms, you can keep the cost and disruption of implementations and iterations to a minimum.  The overall operation can be continuously updated with minimal impact and cost risk.

The days are over when the executive would sponsor a big-bang multi-year project for which the ROI was years in the future. So, how do you effect change? Prioritise value, focus on relieving operational pains or making business gains, and work with a team that is as focussed on the value outcomes as you are. For our final point, it’s all about focussing on what counts:

• Focus on the Value:
  In complex integration projects, it’s the project team that makes the difference between ‘good enough’ and ‘exceptional’. Great technology choices turn into outstanding deployments when the engineers are focused on getting you results, right from the start of the implementation. Work with a vendor who is focused on the difference their software can make to your operation. With joint focus, a shared vision, and a proactive approach, you’ll be able to derive value right from the outset. 

In summary, here at Blue Lucy Towers we firmly believe that it should not be necessary to have to write any software to get value from a content management / supply platform, and that any such platform absolutely should be able to deliver end-to-end business value in less than six weeks. Try iterative strategies, move away from a waterfall approach, and focus on value. If you don’t, the outcome might be a solution that simply fixes yesterday’s problems, but not until tomorrow.

According to Time Magazine, more than half the world’s population will go to the polls in 2024. The fact that the UK’s election also coincides with Independence Day presented an irresistible opportunity for Blue Lucy’s chief strategy officer, Jonathan Lunness, to share some thoughts around change, independence and choosing the technology you entrust with your media workflows:

Over the last few months, I’ve attended a series of industry events – from MPTS to Amagi’s AI conference, the DPP media supply chain festival and Henry Stewart’s DAM Europe 2024 conference – and sat through more than my fair share of product and customer presentations.  It’s been interesting to hear a broad range of customers talking about all the changes their organisations are undergoing: migrating to the cloud, launching FAST channels, growing audience share and those other important shares – the ones that relate to their stock price.  If there’s one thing COVID taught us, it’s that we don’t know what’s around the corner –what’s right for today’s situation isn’t necessarily going to be best option for the future. As an example, we collect metrics on how many times our customers change or tweak a workflow in BLAM. Over the course of delivering millions of assets, they also make hundreds of iterative changes to their workflows. And these changes aren’t to correct errors in the system – they’re in response to constantly changing requirements as they deliver new formats to new platforms. Fortunately, BLAM is a low-code/no-code orchestration engine, so it’s easy to make these changes. But imagine if each change meant filling in a change request, coding or scripting the new workflow and testing each iteration before deploying it…oh, and maintaining that code, at your cost, for the lifetime of the platform. Long deployment cycles, inflexible solutions, and changing customer requirements are not a recipe for success.

Another observation from attending these events is just how diverse the various customer approaches can be. Some are looking to support hybrid operation, others for variations in cloud provider, but everyone is looking for a mix of integrations with a diverse range of technology vendors that meet their unique business needs. Clearly there’s no point adopting a new MAM or Content Supply Chain solution if it means giving up your independence of choice – it’s not flexible if you’re locked into certain vendors because of walled garden ecosystems. That off-the-peg MAM with simple functions and $100 dollar per month seat pricing might meet your base requirements on day one, but what happens if the project is a success, and you want the whole company on the platform? Equally, is that vendor really going to be interested in building the 3rd party integrations and custom workflows you will inevitably need?

Walled gardens, it seems, are not just on the ground and some solutions are also tied to specific cloud vendors. An interesting aspect of attending such a range of events was to listen to international customers, and how the engagement and economics of cloud vendor choice differed between geographic regions. Clearly, in not following the herd, these customers are seeing different benefits to others. Ensuring your choice of MAM is independent i.e. not dependent on a single cloud vendor seems like sound advice.

As we head to the polls this year, it’s important to remember that all candidates are telling us what we want to hear. We need to do our own research, read those manifestos, and choose the right party for our own specific needs. In choosing a MAM or Content Supply Chain solution you should take similar precautions. Unlike a government however, with the right platform you can easily change direction mid-term and cope with unexpected global events – without running up the national debt. Choose wisely.

Want to find out more about BLAM?  Get in touch with our team to book a demo.

I was quite pleased to be asked recently by a Canadian colleague what our “theme” would be for the upcoming IBC. For me, theme reflects the ethos of the Blue Lucy approach to trade shows, we don’t tend to talk about product features or the specific capabilities in our roadmap.

Development of features and connectors is just something we do in pursuit of delivering customer value. If an operator needs a connector to a system or service, we will build it into a microservice BLidget – which we’ve been producing at a rate of two a week for five-years.  Listing 450+ BLidgets or detailing our CORE or UI functions in a tradeshow press-release doesn’t convey the value of our BLAM platform or approach.  We prefer to showcase business-focused solutions, which tend to follow a theme that relates to industry business needs at that time.

Forecasting Cloud

Some will remember our cloud stand at IBC 2018 – it was very popular with the crowd, particularly after the show closed.  At that time, we were about 18-months into the development of BLAM-3 and around a year out from the completion of the first customer implementations with PLAZA Media and Off the Fence.  Our 2018 IBC cloud stand was a little tongue-in-cheek, highlighting the paradox of demonstrating a cloud-based platform from a dark hall in the Rai. Then (three years on from AWS’s acquisition of Elemental) the media and broadcast industry was finally beginning to appreciate the functional power and flexibility of cloud services.  The trend – and our IBC 2018 theme – was very much about “cloud migration” which we thought was inexorable, hence the stand design – the cloud is now, and Blue Lucy is there, ready.

But the BLAM platform was actually designed to be completely infrastructure agnostic – so it can be deployed in any cloud, or on-prem, infrastructure.  This is a core tenet of the architecture, although we forecast that the vast majority of deployments would run in cloud infrastructure.  Five years on, we are surprised as to how deployments have manifested.

A Mixed Reality

Eighty percent of our customer base is operating cloud-ground “hybrid” BLAMs.  These systems tend to have the core services of the databases and the application interface together with one or more workflow runners (the microservice orchestrators) running in cloud infrastructure, typically provisioned by Blue Lucy as a managed service.  In addition, workflow runners are deployed on-prem’ at the operator facility.  These manage on-prem storage, LTO libraries and other resources such as rights management systems, transcoders, file-based QC tools, edit systems (Avid and Adobe) as well as baseband recording and playout systems.

In hindsight, it was unwise for the industry to assume that the entire production and distribution capability would move to the cloud over a few short years. In many cases, it just doesn’t make sense: operators do not wish to move away from on-prem tools that are providing business value, and that are still being amortised.  For distributors, the concept of forklifting their inventory, which may extend to many petabytes, to cloud storage doesn’t make economic sense. Using the cloud for distribution, particularly to FAST or OTT platforms is very common and workflows that utilise cloud services are extremely efficient. BLAM operators are using these pipelines for content distribution to fulfil content sales – this model of ‘leaving material where it is until it’s needed or can be monetised’ – is common.  Equally, we have a number of customers who operate with all browse material in cloud storage, but delivery is fulfilled from cloud or ground – based on which is the most cost-effective overall. Naturally that logic is built into the BLAM workflows.

IBC Theme

There are many and varied reasons why media operators cannot, or do not want to go all in for the cloud or why they wish to control the migration. So, it is ground-cloud, hybrid workflows which will form the basis of our theme for IBC2023 where we’ll showcase how Blue Lucy customers are harmonising on-prem systems and cloud services and applications to create highly efficient and cost-effective media workflows with BLAM. In short, we’ll be bringing the cloud to earth at IBC2023.

I plan to revisit this topic in more detail in the run up to the event but in the meantime do make an appointment to meet with us at the show. We are keen to talk on the basis of operational outcomes, we can work out the most cost-effective place to run the workload later, and even change our mind.  We are at stand 6.C29.