This is an extremely embryonic broadcast asset management system, written in
PHP using a MySQL database.

It's not written in PHP for any particular reason, other than it being easy
to rapidly prototype.

The intention is that this system will track various kinds of assets:
everything from individual video and audio streams, depicting images,
subtitles, and so on, through different formats and multiplexing schemes
into complete programmes, which can then be arranged into series and brands,
and scheduled for broadcast on one or more outlets (outlets being specific
outputs of channels).

The high-level data model is based upon the BBC’s Programmes Ontology, which
you can read about at http://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/programmes/2009-04-17.shtml

Every asset is given a key, identified by an eight-character base32-style
string (for example, a0000p1r). utils/encode.php and utils/decode.php will
transform arbitrary numbers to and from this base32-style scheme.

To get started, create a database, and put the details in a config.php file in the
lib/ directory (see config.sample.php for an example). You can then run:

php -f utils/initdb.php

The initdb.php script uses database versioning to track state (see the _modules
database table), and so is safe to run multiple times.

Next, you can import the TV-Anytime XML files from the tv-anytime directory:

php -f utils/import.php tv-anytime/*.xml

This will produce a lot of output, as it imports each of the genres, formats
and media types contained in the XML files.

The TV-Anytime data isn't used, yet, but demonstrates how the system works. If
you look for one of the lines in the output which looks like:

Created new term with key a00000s6

You can pass that key to utils/dump.php:

php -f utils/dump.php a00000s6

This is a low-level utility which retrieves the contents of the asset that you
requested as a PHP object and uses print_r() to dump its contents. If you look
at the code in lib/object.php and lib/genre.php, you should be able to see how
it fits together.