Media-Friendly Storage
TAMS - Time Addressable Media Store
TAMS lets systems use time to work with media.
What is TAMS?
A media production process works in time, it's how production teams plan and run programmes, it's how post-production teams edit, and when recording live feeds, time is an obvious reference point. Time Addressable Media Store (TAMS), an open protocol, has been developed to let any application access media by timecode. Rather than requesting media by files, clips or projects, applications simply ask for the media from a particular moment, or over a period of time.
Why it Matters?
Traditional storage systems are not built around time; they're organised around files and folders, which means time has to be reconstructed later by each system and mapped to the files, this can be labour intensive. What TAMS does is to move time down into the storage layer itself, where it naturally belongs, freeing the whole infrastructure to work with the shared, common language of time.
The Power of TAMS Amplified - TAMS x tx darwin
Recognising the power of TAMS, Techex has introduced a native integration into its media processing framework, tx darwin. The tx darwin TAMS Module is designed to ingest Transport Streams and upload them to AWS in chunks and can be configured either in Multi-Essence Mode or as Separate Inputs Mode.
Explore the Benefits of TAMS
Open in All Senses of the Word
By moving time into storage, TAMS opens up the playing field for media organisations that want to build their own infrastructure, allowing vendors to more easily interoperate around the same storage. This reduces the costs associated with the accommodation of proprietary formats or interfaces.
A Natural Evolution
The open nature of TAMS means your infrastructure can evolve without forcing wholesale replacement. New tools and capabilities can be added incrementally and tested alongside in-production solutions with relative ease, whether from established vendors, new companies, or internal development teams.
Built to be Interoperable
With TAMS your investment in storage and media isn't subject to vendor lock-in or their roadmap aligning with the needs of a project. When better solutions appear, whether financially better, technically better or leading to improved workflows, you can adopt them without having to move your media, and workflow disruptions are minimal.
New Efficiencies
The TAMS API is a metadata ecosystem where the currency is references to chunks of media. This means the TAMS API can hand out references to all the software in the system all pointing at the same time, yet that media itself never needs to be duplicated. This can have an immense impact on storage costs and the day-to-day responsiveness of the storage.
Efficiency Breeds Sustainability
TAMS can significantly reduce the storage footprint and energy consumption of a media organisation's infrastructure by eliminating the need to duplicate media across multiple systems. This means fewer servers, less cooling and lower power demands, making TAMS not just an operational improvement, but a meaningful step toward more sustainable production.
AI and Automation Ready
By exposing media through a standardised, time-based API, TAMS provides a foundation that lends itself naturally to AI and automation tools. Services like automated speech-to-text, content tagging, compliance checking or highlight generation can efficiently access the media they need without requiring bespoke integrations with each storage system.
Global Potential
TAMS brings together live and file workflows, making it ideal for live sports, news, live entertainment and many applications outside of broadcasting.
Wherever media organisations need to edit or process media which is still being recorded as part of a live programme, TAMS allows global collaboration on editing this content and turning it around into produced content before the programme finishes. Such workflows have been possible for a long time, but only by using specific vendors and without the broad, easily implementable interoperability that TAMS provides to make that media available to the wider workflow.
Software-Defined Infrastructure which is Ready Today
Software-defined infrastructure is a powerful architecture for media organisations today and for the near future. Today, projects like TAMS are the first steps towards the ability to have an all-software facility which exists both on-prem and in the cloud. Unlocking the full value of such infrastructure will take time and much more industry collaboration, but TAMS is already working and unlocking value.
TAMS sits side-by-side with the Media eXchange Layer (MXL) from the EBU, which is another open-source project with wide industry collaboration and is part of the wider 'Dynamic Media Facility' project. This all represents a focused effort by the industry to move quickly to a world where broadcasters are more flexible, quicker to move and more efficient.