Windows Media Workflow at Starz: Episode 3 of 3 - The Software

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Starz Entertainment, the providers of premium TV channels like Starz and Encore and Vongo downloadable movies has built their entire media infrastructure around Windows Media.  Stephen Smith, Director of Media System Integration walks us through the entire workflow and architecture of the system that they built. 

This is a 3-part series, first showing the hardware, then the architecture, then the software that they built.

In this final episode, Stephen walks Michael Scherotter through the WPF application that Starz built to control the pipeline of media jobs that are each instances of Windows Workflow Foundation workflows.  WPF has allowed Starz to craft a highly skinnable and adaptable user interface. 

One of the most interesting applications of this digital media architecture and workflow has been the indexing of the spoken content of their entire catalog using SQL Server database and exposing that index via search through Interactive Media Manager (IMM).  Stephen explains that process at 20:36 in the interview.  That step has enable users of this system at Starz to search their entire 200 Terabyte SAN for specific instances of spoken words directly from IMM.