UMDP
Universal Media Delivery Profile — an open JSON schema for broadcast and OTT delivery specs.
What it is
Every broadcaster, OTT platform, and distributor publishes its own technical delivery specification — usually as a PDF that vendors and post houses re-implement by hand for every spec they support. Updates are easy to miss and impossible to diff.
UMDP replaces the PDF with structured data. Codecs, audio loudness, timecode, packaging, compliance — the full delivery contract — encoded as a single JSON document any tool can read.
Why we built it
SpectraQC needs to validate files against dozens of delivery specs. Building one bespoke parser per broadcaster’s PDF is a tax on every QC vendor in the industry, and it doesn’t scale.
So we wrote the schema we wished existed and put it in the open. UMDP is governed openly and licensed for free use under CC BY 4.0. Any QC tool, ingest pipeline, MAM, or asset manager can consume UMDP documents — whether or not it has anything to do with SpectraQC.
What’s in the box
- Schema
- JSON Schema (Draft 2020-12) describing the full shape of a delivery spec.
- Profiles
- Real-world delivery specs already encoded as UMDP documents — public broadcasters, OTT platforms, ad clearance, mezzanine deliveries.
- Validator
- A small Python CLI that any CI job can run to reject malformed specs before they ship.
- Governance
- Written-down rules for how new fields land, how versions are cut, and how the schema evolves without breaking everyone downstream.
Who it’s for
Broadcasters and platforms. Publish your delivery spec as UMDP and your suppliers can validate against it automatically. No more “did you read v5.1?” emails.
Post houses and vendors. Read one schema, support every spec. Diff a profile to see exactly what changed between versions.
QC and ingest tool builders. Ship support for new specs without re-implementing parsers. UMDP is just JSON.
Status
UMDP is at version 0.7.2. It covers the fields needed by every public-broadcaster, OTT-mezzanine, and ad-clearance spec we have profiled so far, and it’s additionalProperties: true throughout — vendors can add their own fields and propose them upstream as the ecosystem stabilises.
Schema and profiles are CC BY 4.0. The validator and tooling are MIT.
Get involved
UMDP grows by forks and pull requests. The most useful contributions are:
- A new profile — encode a public delivery spec your organisation supports.
- A schema field — propose a new field with rationale.
- A correction — fix an inaccuracy in an existing profile against its source document.
UMDP is governed openly and welcomes contributions from broadcasters, studios, distributors, post houses, and QC vendors. Maintained by SpectraQC.