TAMS in 2025: A simple tool for advanced workflows

The Time-Addressable Media Store API, open-sourced by BBC R&D in 2023, had its public debut on the show floor at IBC last year, with a high-profile demo on the AWS stand. This featured AWS’s own open-source implementation of the API and brought together several partners to demonstrate an end-to-end cloud-native workflow for fast-turnaround edit. We’ve continued to work closely with AWS over the past year, building the TAMS community to add more partners and end users through a programme of AWS Cloud Native Agile Production partner enablement sessions on both sides of the Atlantic.

A bigger, more elaborate demo on the AWS stand at NAB 2025 explored the use of TAMS to produce fast-turnaround eSports content.  In collaboration with the community we’ve been refining and evolving the API, adding even more flexibility, enabling novel multi-organisation workflows like the one being showcased at IBC this year on the Reuters and AWS stands.

Waiting in the wings for release post-IBC is another tranche of features that the community has been clamouring for. Fine-grained authorisation will allow control over which content assets different users can access, opening the door to cross-organisation multi-tenant stores that break down silos. Flow profiles will make management of technical metadata more straightforward, allowing organisations to template, adopt and enforce house profiles for media formats. Improved filtering of notification events (implemented using webhooks) make it easier for clients of the API to consume just the events they need.

TAMS hasn’t just been progressing on paper, though. The BBC is building a TAM Store into its media supply chain, initially for extraction of VOD assets and fast-turnaround clipping and edit for news. But since these and many other use cases can be served by the same capability, this is only the start. The interoperability benefits of TAMS are starting to gain real traction in the industry: we are seeing TAMS support appearing in products from AWS, Sony, Matrox, Zixi, Techex, and more. And multiple vendors are developing TAMS service implementations tuned to different use cases and targeting different cloud providers.

But don’t just take our word for it. Watch the video to hear what key stakeholders in the BBC and the wider industry have to say. And visit timeaddressablemediastore.org to find out more about TAMS, and to stay up to date with the latest TAMS news.