TAMS — the Time Addressable Media Store — is an open specification for broadcast media storage and retrieval. It was developed at BBC Research & Development, published under an open licence, and is now being adopted by a growing number of broadcast engineers, media organisations and technology companies.

This page explains where TAMS came from, who is involved, and how you can engage with the community.

Origins — BBC Research & Development

TAMS was created at BBC Research & Development, the technology research arm of the BBC.

The BBC’s media operations involve enormous volumes of live content: dozens of simultaneous feeds, multiple concurrent workflows, and strict compliance requirements. Traditional file-based systems created recurring friction — every new workflow meant new copies, new transcodes, new storage overhead. Content was duplicated rather than shared. Time was spent managing files rather than working with media.

The TAMS architecture emerged from the question: what if media were a queryable resource rather than a collection of files? What if you could ask “give me feed X between these two timestamps” the way you would query a database, and get exactly that content — without copying, transcoding or manual intervention?

The answers to those questions became the TAMS specification. It was published openly so that the rest of the broadcast industry could build on the same foundation, rather than every organisation solving the same problems independently.

An open specification

TAMS is published under a permissive open licence. The specification is hosted publicly on GitHub, and the project is maintained transparently with contributions from the community.

This is a deliberate choice. The BBC’s view is that open standards benefit the whole industry: they allow interoperability between tools from different vendors, reduce the cost of adoption, and avoid the kind of proprietary lock-in that has made traditional broadcast infrastructure so expensive to change.

The TAMS specification defines the storage model and query interface. It does not define application behaviour, user interfaces, or deployment architecture — those are left to implementors, which allows the ecosystem to be both open and commercially diverse.

Who is building on TAMS

TAMS is being adopted by a range of organisations, including:

Commercial implementors Companies building products and platforms on TAMS include Phrame and others. These implementations bring TAMS to production deployments and demonstrate what the standard makes possible in real systems.

Broadcasters and media organisations Organisations evaluating or deploying TAMS-based systems for compliance recording, news logging, monitoring and content reuse.

Technology partners and infrastructure providers Companies offering TAMS-based media services on top of cloud and distributed infrastructure.

The open-source community Developers contributing tools, client libraries, reference implementations and documentation.

If your organisation is using TAMS and would like to be listed here, please get in touch.

Why TAMS matters now

The broadcast industry is in the middle of a long transition — from hardware-centric, on-premises infrastructure toward software-defined, cloud-friendly systems. TAMS is part of that transition.

The old model — dedicated hardware per workflow, file-based storage, proprietary protocols — is expensive to scale and hard to change. The new model needs storage that is queryable rather than just retrievable, media that can be shared across workflows rather than duplicated, and systems that can run anywhere rather than only on specific hardware.

TAMS provides a practical, well-defined foundation for that new model. It does not require you to abandon existing infrastructure overnight. It can be adopted incrementally, starting with one workflow and extending over time.

The growing ecosystem of implementations, tooling and community knowledge means it is becoming progressively easier to get started — and progressively more valuable to be part of the community.

Events and community activity

The TAMS community is active at broadcast technology events, including NAB and IBC. If you want to see TAMS implementations demonstrated or meet the people building on the standard, these are good opportunities.

Community activity also takes place on GitHub — through issues, discussions and pull requests on the specification repository.

Get in touch

Whether you are evaluating TAMS for your organisation, building something new on the standard, or interested in contributing to the specification — we would like to hear from you.

GitHub repository: https://github.com/bbc/tams