TAMS — the Time Addressable Media Store — is an open standard that lets you query, retrieve and reuse live media by time rather than by file. Built for modern broadcast infrastructure. Used in production today.

The problem with traditional media storage

Broadcast media has always been stored in files. That works fine until you need to find a specific moment, reuse a clip across multiple workflows, or scale to dozens of simultaneous feeds. Traditional systems make you transcode, duplicate and manage files every time you want to do something new with your media. It is slow, expensive and hard to automate.

TAMS takes a different approach.

What TAMS does differently

Instead of organising media into files, TAMS organises it by time. Every piece of media — whether it arrived ten seconds ago or ten hours ago — is indexed on a precise timeline and stored in standard object storage. You query it the way you would query a database, not the way you would browse a file system.

That means you can:

• Retrieve any moment from a live or recorded feed without re-encoding
• Run multiple workflows from one recording — compliance, review, highlights — without duplication
• Build scalable systems using cloud or on-premises object storage
• Access media from a browser with no specialist client software required

An open standard, not a vendor product

TAMS is a publicly available specification, originally developed at BBC Research & Development. The spec is open, the community is growing, and implementations are already running in production environments.

That means you can adopt TAMS as the foundation for your own systems, or choose a product that is built on it — without being locked into a single vendor.

Built for real broadcast workflows

TAMS is designed around the things broadcast engineers and media organisations actually need to do.

• Compliance recording – Record required feeds, index the media automatically, and give authorised users browser-based access for review and export.
• News logging – Capture live feeds with configurable quality and retention settings. Find and retrieve specific moments without manual clip creation.
• Remote monitoring and multiviewing – View and monitor multiple feeds in a browser. No hardware multiviewer at every location.
• Replay and review – Step through recorded content, change playback speed, and export clips to standard formats.

Implementations

TAMS is already being used in production. Phrame is a cloud-native media platform built natively on TAMS, delivering compliance recording, monitoring and browser-based media workflows as deployable solutions.

Get involved

Whether you are a broadcast engineer evaluating options, a developer building a new system, or an organisation looking for a smarter way to handle live media, TAMS is worth exploring.