From edit room to edit and roam – Blackbird delivers major workflow efficiencies at A+E Networks

Founded in 1983 with two cable channels, A+E Networks has since grown into one of the world’s largest media networks. With TV shows available in 8 out of every 10 American homes and content cumulatively reaching 335 million people worldwide, its collection of hugely popular culture brands includes A&E®, HISTORY®, Lifetime®, Lifetime Movies™, FYI,™, VICELAND® and BIOGRAPHY®.

Over the years, A+E Networks has produced and continues to create a vast volume of popular entertainment content including movies, documentaries and reality TV – top rated shows include The First 48, Storage Wars and Vikings.

With such a large and rapidly growing library of content, A+E Networks faced a number of challenges: how to produce content more quickly as well as widen the visibility and accessibility of its vast archive for different teams spread across multiple locations.

After considering available systems, A+E Networks chose to deploy Blackbird to empower its wider team to gain rapid access to content in production and archive – by making it easily and cost-effectively accessible in the cloud.

“So psyched to be part of the A+E Networks deployment of Blackbird.” – Kevin Tobin, Senior Director of Production, A+E Networks

Waiting to access content through expensive, traditional on-premise edit suites is now a thing of the past. A+E Networks’ digital team simply log in to Blackbird through any browser from any location and access and view the content they need.

Users can easily and quickly clip, edit and publish content to social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube – all in broadcast quality video. The digital team can tag people and hashtag trends in social posts to drive reach and engagement for TV programs. For hit reality shows such as Live PD, where speed to market of all the latest action is key, content can be edited seconds after live and published to social very rapidly to maximize engagement.

To support monetization of content, sponsor branding, adverts and promo messaging can all be added to social clips with OTT subscriptions and other services also promoted.

Blackbird is also being used to drive major efficiencies across production workflows. No longer do producers need to book time in an edit suite to view content for a particular TV show. With Blackbird they can view content in the cloud from anywhere via an app on their chosen device with comments and suggestions instantly sent back to the editorial team through the platform’s timeline.

Using Blackbird, A+E Networks is embracing the major advantages that cloud workflows deliver. With access to content from anywhere, anytime and lower training, travel and hardware costs, Blackbird continues to drive very significant efficiencies and cost-savings for one of the world’s leading media companies.

Blackbird drives massive workflow efficiencies for production of Gold Rush

Gold Rush is one of the highest rated TV shows of all time. Produced by Raw TV, this gritty reality show focuses on a group of ambitious gold miners living off grid in the brutal wilderness of Yukon, Canada.

Each season of Gold Rush consists of 22 episodes produced from over 2000 hours of footage using a large setup of cameras. For Season 1, rough-cut footage was transferred to XDCAM Pro disc on location with the discs transported to the nearest town and then sent to leading post-production house, ENVY, in London by airmail.

The ENVY team had to wait approximately 2 weeks to receive each set of rushes. This significant delay between shooting and viewing the footage created communication challenges between the Yukon and London based teams and difficulties in structuring stories. Managing and updating video files on portable hard drives for the editors’ Avid systems was time-consuming and with infrastructure expensive, the hardware-dependent workflow just wasn’t scalable.

Before work on Season 2 began, Raw TV and ENVY researched the market for a cloud-based video editing platform that could make their international workflow much more efficient. After a thorough analysis of available systems, they chose Blackbird.

Using the Blackbird cloud platform, rushes can now be delivered from Yukon to London overnight. The on-location film crew uploads XDCAM proxies generated by the cameras to ENVY’s server by FTP each evening. The following day the ENVY studios ingest the proxies into Blackbird’s codec enabling the Raw TV post team to view the rushes in Blackbird.

“This end-to-end solution gives us a much more efficient pipeline and a production that has really benefitted as a result.” -Jai Cave, Technical Operations Director, Envy Post Production

Using Blackbird in a browser, even on very low bandwidth, all project media can be accessed remotely from any location. Blackbird’s logging capabilities enables the production team to simultaneously sort through footage using keyboard shortcuts and expansions, transcription, spellcheck and metadata search.

Having instant access to the rushes enables Gold Rush’s producers to start putting story ideas together before the editing process begins. The edit team can easily inform the shoot team of editorial decisions and request story pickups due to Blackbird enabling real-time communication.

This new proxy workflow was the first of its kind in the world. The introduction of Blackbird reduced the viewing of rushes from 2 weeks to just 2 hours whilst the transfer time of files was reduced from 2 minutes to 10 seconds.

ENVY is a member of the Blackbird Productions Partnership Program. This program collaborates with post-production facilitates to provide Blackbird to TV programme creators globally.

Fitness technology giant, Peloton, uses Blackbird to edit all its on-demand videos

The global fitness industry is booming. Growing an average 8.7% per year, the sector is expected to reach $106b in 2020. Major technical advancements in internet connectivity and streaming capabilities are enabling a whole new generation of fitness services that tap into consumers’ desires for personalisation, freedom and experience.

Leading this new wave of health and lifestyle providers is Peloton – the $4 billion global fitness technology giant that is reinventing the industry by bringing the energy and benefits of studio-style workouts to the convenience and comfort of your home.

Peloton sells a connected stationary bike with a 22” hi-definition screen that offers a highly convenient and immersive indoor cycling experience. Each day, 14 live classes and thousands of on-demand classes taught by world-class instructors can be directly streamed into the home of a Peloton customer.

Peloton wanted to significantly simplify its existing video production workflow and reduce the time taken to produce and deliver its on-demand videos to customers. The company needed an agile, fast cloud video editing platform that could be used collaboratively by its transatlantic digital teams. After extensive research into available solutions, Peloton chose Blackbird.

Peloton’s digital production teams in New York and London access the full suite of professional editing tools available in Blackbird from a standard browser. They clip and edit live classes within a few seconds of the studio action and publish the finished videos to the on-demand video library housed on the Peloton app and website for its global cycling community to access – over 10,000 on-demand classes are currently available in lengths of 5 to 90 minutes.

A core feature of the Peloton experience is the ability for riders to control the audio levels of the instructors and music – this is enabled by Blackbird’s unique multichannel capabilities which support up to 16 video channels and 36 audio channels.

Launching in 2012, Peloton now has over 500,000 customers and a large celebrity following including Hugh Jackman, Usain Bolt and Richard Branson. Peloton is now expanding rapidly into new territories and beyond cycling, offering classes across running, walking, bootcamp, strength, stretching, yoga and meditation. The rapid rise of Peloton has been nothing short of a phenomenon in the fitness industry.

Deltatre deploys Blackbird to rapidly deliver European Tour highlights to media partners and social

With an estimated 400 million fans worldwide, professional golf is at its zenith. A new generation of exciting players compete at the top of leader boards around the world providing an enticing platform for fans, broadcasters and sponsors in this multi-billion dollar industry.

One of the most prestigious golf competitions remains the European Tour. Annually, hundreds of elite golfers compete in 47 tournaments across 26 countries – culminating in the high-profile, season-ending DP World Tour Championship in Dubai.

Keen to deliver the best golfing action highlights to media partners and fans, the European Tour faced severe challenges. It took their media partners hours to access content from tournament locations with some resorting to sending crews to the venues themselves to produce their own highlights at significant expense.

The European Tour approached Deltatre looking for a solution that would make their golf content easily accessible to its media partners in a much shorter time period. The requirement was for a fast, reliable cloud video editing platform that could support the time critical delivery of video content.

Deltatre chose Blackbird for the live editing and fast turnaround delivery of European Tour highlights. Satellite signals from golfing venues are sent to Deltatre’s operation centre in London. Editors log in to Blackbird through any browser and are able to edit streams seconds after live using a rich, easy-to-use suite of editing tools. Short clips of the best action can be rapidly produced as well as multi-clip edits, compilations and crafted highlight reels – with sponsor branding and adverts and other commercial messaging easily added.

“With Blackbird, we are able to turn content around far more quickly than with traditional methods.” – Pete Burns, VP EMEA Business Development and Account Management, Deltatre

Deltatre makes all of this great golf content accessible to its media partners through its Brightcove hosted CDN. The European Tour estimates that the time taken to make clips and highlights available to its media partners has been reduced from 5 hours to 5 minutes since the introduction of Blackbird.

The European Tour also uses Blackbird to rapidly publish clips and highlights to its website (www.europeantour.com) and official social channels including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter – all in broadcast quality outputs. Players, tournaments and sponsors can be easily tagged to drive content reach, engagement and monetization.

The European Tour continues to grow from strength to strength. An increasing number of fans are following this elite competition with high-profile sponsors such as Rolex, BMW and Emirates keen to reach this affluent demographic. Blackbird continues to play a vital role in building online awareness, engagement and revenues for one of the world’s most prestigious golfing competitions

The Buffalo Bills deliver content from live to fans in seconds with Blackbird

The New-York based Buffalo Bills is an institution in the National Football League (NFL). Founded in 1959, the 4-time Super Bowl finalists boast one of the largest and most loyal fan bases in the league.

Each week the Bills’ production team manages a 5-hour block of TV programming that covers game action, expert opinion and behind-the-scenes content. Accessing, editing and publishing this content for fans to enjoy had been laborious and slow using traditional editing systems. The team wanted an ultra-efficient cloud-based solution that would dramatically speed up their workflows and deliver content to fans much faster online. The Bills turned to Blackbird.

Accessing Blackbird through just a browser, the production team uses the platform’s rich suite of editing tools to rapidly clip, edit and publish content pre, during and post-match. Video clips and highlights are seamlessly delivered to www.buffalobills.com and the club’s Twitter, Facebook and YouTube channels within seconds of the live action. For further engagement and reach, emojis and graphics can be added and players tagged. Sponsor branding and adverts can be included, partners tagged and promotional messaging incorporated to drive monetization.

“What I really like about Blackbird is the ease of use – anybody can use it, from any computer. Blackbird has been a game-changer for what we do on a daily basis. We can pull a clip in a matter of seconds and get it online and keep our audience engaged whether on social or during the show itself.” – Jay Harris, Senior Producer, Buffalo Bills

With Blackbird continuing to power the Buffalo Bills’ online video content, this iconic team’s online fanbase continues to grow rapidly. Since the introduction of this ultra-efficient cloud video platform, the Bill’s Twitter following alone has increased by 25% to over 1 million.

Media Tech Transformation Webinar – Adapting for change

In this webinar, we explore the most important findings of the recently published Adapt for Change Report, including BaM Content Chain Maturity™, the supply-side implications of the move to as-a-service models and the growing cloud ecosystem.

If you are on the verge of moving to as-a-service models, evaluating your entry into the cloud ecosystem or want to learn about changing customer requirements in the increasingly turbulent media market, don’t skip this webinar.

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The Role of CDN in the 5G Era

The arrival of the 5G era is generating a lot of buzz. As a leading global content delivery provider, one question we hear often is: How will the implementation of 5G impact the existing CDN and in what ways? To answer the question, it is important to understand that the development of 5G takes phases. At each growth stage, 5G can offer different use cases and present the content delivery network with unique opportunities and challenges. Let’s take a close look at how CDN may evolve with 5G in the coming decade.

5G Phase 1: eMMB requires acceleration at the edge

The first commercialized feature of 5G will be eMMB, short for Enhanced Mobile Broadband, which emphasizes high bandwidth and high throughput of the network. Instead of primarily meeting the needs of individual internet users, 5G will heavily target industrial scanarios, such as manufacturing, production, industrial security and other industry verticals. While the speed of the 5G network is expected to be about 10 times of what we have today, the increased consumption of HD videos (4K/8K) in both individual and industrial scenarios will take the network traffic load to a new level. Intelligent security in manufacturing, for example, requires a large number of HD cameras to be added to the network and ultra HD videos will be produced and uploaded constantly. To take the huge load off the origins and the central network, it is critical that CDN provides more advanced acceleration, load balancing and storage capabilities at the edge. CDN will need to play a more important role in the first phase of 5G than it is in the 4G era.

5G Phase 2: uRLLC brings leaps of edge computing

The second commercialized feature of 5G will be the uRLLC. uRLLC stands for Ultra Reliable & Low Latency Communication, which provides ultra-responsive and reliable connections. With about 5ms end-to-end latency between user equipement and 5G eNodeB, it is ideal for use when it is critical to transmit real-time data, as in cloud gaming, virtual reality, unmaned driving, and remote medication. 5G unmanned driving, for example, will need to obtain maps from the cloud and upload road conditions to the cloud in real-time, placing strict requirements on network latency and reliability that only uRLLC can meet. Also in cloud gaming, due to uRLLC, a big part of the application computing may end up running on the closest edge servers instead of on users’ devices. These use case scenarios will likely require the content distribution technologies to be more specialized and customized for specific services and applications. CDNs see a great opportunity to advance edge computing and application delivery capabilities to meet the needs of the new services enabled by uRLLC, while tackling additional challenges in content routing, management, purging, and security.

5G Phase 3: mMTC facilitates change of CDN network structure

During Phase 3, 5G will feature mMTC (Massive Machine Type of Communications) which supports a high density of devices and long-range transmission with low cost and long battery life, making it ideal for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In dustrial and agricultural scenarios such as oil and gas transimission, temperature monitor and humidity control, a gigantic number of sensors will be connected to the network and an enormous amount of data will be generated. The edges will have to handle a decent amount of computing and storage to take the load off the orgin cloud. Other than sensors, as a large number of 5G base stations will be built, tens of billions of other “things” will be added to the network. CDN network nodes, therefore, will have to be placed in higher density to achieve better accuracy. A node may cover a radius of 10 kilometers in the past, now the coverage has to be reduced to a radius of 1 kilometer or even smaller. CDN network structure will hence look different from what we have today.

Overall, the definition of CDN will be significantly broadened in the 5G era; not only will the forms of the distributed content, applications and services be greatly expanded, the network structure, business model and the value chain relationship can also be very different from what they are today.

As 5G is beginning to take off, industry players are actively exploring possibilities with the nextgeneration network. At BaishanCloud, we have been dedicated to continuous innovation on the edge to meet the business and technical needs of the future. We believe heavy research is worthy to find out how to fully integrate critical technologies such as adaptive streaming, intelligent purging, TCP optimization into a smarter network and how to push edge capabilities to the level needed in each stage of 5G development. To get more of our articles on edge cloud industry, content delivery and network security, subcribe to BaishanCloud monthly newsletter at www.intl.baishancloud.com/latest/categories/newsroom.

KLH Case Study – How to optimize playlist & scheduling decisions for linear TV channel in a non-linear enviornment

KLH: KAN use case

The Organization

KAN, The Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC) officially began its radio and television operations on 15 May 2017, succeeding the Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA) as state broadcaster. Its formal goals include promoting the expansion of knowledge, Israeli culture, and innovation in broadcasting.

TV

Since 15 May 2017, the IPBC broadcasts two television channels on national DVB-T2 transmitters, satellite feed, the HOT cable company, the YES satellite company, smaller pay-TV providers (such as Cellcom TV and Partner TV) and a free 24/7 live stream on the Internet. In 2018, KAN introduced a 4K resolution broadcast on Channel 511 (which was only used for broadcasts of the FIFA World Cup).

Kan's TV channels are:

  • Kan 11: The corporation's main channel, replacing the IBA's Channel 1 and primarily broadcasting news, current affairs and cultural programs
  • Makan 33: The Arabic-language channel, broadcasting news and cultural programs and replacing the IBA's Channel 33
  • Kan Educational: On 15 August 2018, Channel 23 (known as Hinuchit or Israeli Educational Television) was replaced by a youth channel.

Radio

Kan operates nine radio stations, transferred from the IBA and sell tens of thousands Ads spots in a single month. Streams and on-demand programming are available via Kan's website. Some programs have Podcasts.

  • Kan Reshet Bet (Kan Network B) – The most listen Radio station in Israel, News, current affairs and sports, with news on the hour in Hebrew
  • Kan 88 – Jazz, blues, electronic music and traffic reports
  • Kan Tarbut (Here is Culture), the former Reshet Aleph – Talk and cultural programming. News in Hebrew is broadcast at the same times as Reshet Bet.
  • Kan Gimel (Kan C) – Israeli music, Hebrew news at the top of most hours.
  • MaKan, the former Reshet Dalet – Arabic-language station
  • Kan Farsi, the former Reshet Hei – Persian-language station. Also contains a 5-minute English news flash at 2 PM Israel Time, Sunday through Thursday.
  • Kan REKA (Immigrant Network) – Radio for Israeli olim (immigrants). Non-Hebrew languages. An hour of English news at 8 PM Israel Time.
  • Kan Kol Ha Musica (The Voice of Music) – Classical music and drama, with hourly Hebrew news
  • Kan Moreshet (Heritage) – Religious broadcasting on the Kan Tarbut network


Two web-radio channels are dedicated to specific musical genres:

  • Kan Nostalgia
  • Kan Yam Tichon (Kan Mediterranean Sea)

Digital Assets - OTT

The official App of the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation with the highest quality content in Israel in one convenient and available place, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year was launched in its current UX on April 2018.

The app includes:

  • Multi-Channel Live Page: 3 TV channels, 8 live radio stations and digital radio throughout the day
  • Advanced Player: Content Recommendations, Chromecast, Floating Player that allows you to continue browsing the app without stopping the tune, continue from the last viewing / listening point
  • Video on Demand (VOD) - a video library with hundreds of hours of full TV episodes from here 11, and also: Here's digital videos
  • News - All the most important updates from the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation news desk: headlines today, flashes, full releases and all the programs from here - Israel's leading news station
  • The largest library of podcasts in the Hebrew language - dozens of titles on fascinating and high-quality topics: history, culture, economics, science and more
  • Educational Here - All the content your little ones love: Educational TV shows including classics and archives, children's songs, children's podcasts and more
  • Full recordings and shows from all of here's radio stations: here at, here Gimel, here 88, here the sound of music, here culture and here's a legacy
  • Radio programs in 9 languages from the station here reka: Amharic, Russian, English, French, Georgian, Bukharan, Spanish, Yiddish and Ladino

The Challenge

​KAN The Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC) operates 3 different linear TV channels and 9 different radio station, each has its own team of programmers, producers and managers, however, all of them needs to access the same archive, use the same graphic services, coordinate with the same promo department and Ads agencies, and top management needs data to see the overall picture and steer the boat in the right direction.

Data is becoming the most important asset for media factories and driving the deployment of technologies that are enabled by or enable it. As companies move to direct platforms, the importance of consumer data in powering decision-making is growing. It’s not just about the consumer though, data is also important for the operations. This data is a goldmine and media companies want to leverage it in different parts of their content chains to drive automation, business analytics and business rules that deploy virtual machines depending on demand.

That data is very difficult to get right as media companies’ legacy architectures had allocated it in different silos within the organization.

The Considerations

Security

Microsoft uses a wide variety of physical, infrastructure, and operational controls to help secure Azure, Security is a key focus of cloud providers, who invest huge sums of money into securing their infrastructure. Cloud providers typically also offer a broad set of policies, compliance, technologies, and controls that strengthen the security posture by protecting the data, apps, and infrastructure from threats.

Multi-Layered security provided by Microsoft across physical data centers, infrastructure, and operations in Azure. The state-of-art security delivered in Azure data centers globally, Rely on a cloud that is built with customized hardware, has security controls integrated into the hardware and firmware components, and added protections against threats such as DDoS. Benefit from a team of more than 3,500 global cybersecurity experts that work together to help safeguard the business assets and data in Azure.

KLH Solution works with the SSL protocol and double authentication permission protocol.

These measures ensure the data is fully secured and safeguard.

Flexibility

KLH cloud base BMS takes full advantage of the Microsoft Azure Cloud services, scaling up and downsizing is a matter of hours, adding new analytics for a management survey is a matter of days and all of it without increasing costs at all. The KLH BMS cloud resources are part of the monthly fee and not affected by upscaling or downscaling. Creating a new Pop-up channel is a matter of one-day configuration and changing graphics is a matter of minutes.

The human factor

Deploying, integrating and implementing any software tool into an organization is a challenge, mostly due to the human factor. While technological integration challenges can be overcome by experience and prior processes and methodology, orchestrating the work of more than 100 stakeholders within KAN was a challenge that KLH took very seriously and prepare accordingly.

With 2 customer success managers working around the clock to train and provide first aid solutions and hands-on know-how to KAN team members, and a team of software engineers backing up the optimization process, the KLH BMS was launched after 3 months of migration and optimization, result in high satisfaction to the client, as KAN CTO put it in his words:

“The ability to get more efficiencies and synergies within our TV, Radio and digital platforms by using KLH system solution gives us the privilege to focus on the media creation rather than the operational hurdle, the holistic approach of KLH and the flexibility of its development team created real partnership that results in high satisfaction within all our different functions in the KAN corporate” says Cory Korkos –CTO, KAN, IPBC.

The Solution

To become an advanced media company that uses the data in a smart way, KAN The Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC) decided to use the Cloud advantages in organizing and gathering all data to one silo from the different operations.

An international tender for a Cloud base BMS (Broadcast Management System) was issued in 2016.

Before entering the tender, KAN the Israeli Public Broadcaster used several distributed systems that managed its TV and Radio workflows, all of them on-prem systems that were built and developed in the 20th century, with the growth of the non-linear assets and digital transformation that the media sector has been going through, the public broadcaster decided to look for a new and advanced system that will incorporate all processes within the corporate, KLH was born an built in the 21st century, in this decade, and the infrastructure that is built from is new and advanced, KLH is a Cloud-based BMS built on the Microsoft Azure. The Microsoft Azure Cloud is state of the art Cloud service that offers lots of advantages to those who know how to exploit it, Microsoft Azure is used by international media powerhouses like NBC Universal, NHK, TFI, Sony and Fox Sports, KLH took these new and advanced tools of the digital era and harness it to the media industry, today every client of KLH enjoy automatic software upgrades that always includes new and advanced features, a practice that goes without saying on the cloud but was and still big issue when it comes to on-prem software systems, the commercial advances are also huge, instead of spending a big amount of CAPEX, KLH clients spend OPEX only and using the Saas model – Software as a service, a big revolution that helps TV channel maintain low costs and be competitive in today’s media environment, and the most important maintain its flexibility to launch new services – non-linear VOD, digital assets and different types of business models.

In the past the broadcaster had to buy programs or produce it, put it on a linear TV channel and sell it to cable or satellite operators, very straight forward process, however today the distribution platforms the acquisition and the monetizing is so complex that the broadcaster needs some help managing all of it.

KLH help the broadcasters make some sense in all this complexity, KLH manage linear, non-linear and digital assets on the same management tool and connect all the different entities at the broadcaster site, from the rights management to the metadata and material management, to the reporting and accounting and the scheduling for all types of media.

Summary

KAN, the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC) has definitely fulfilled one of its formal goals - the innovation in broadcasting by introducing a Cloud base BMS, a cutting edge technology that allows it to travel to the 21st century.

About KLH

KLH BMS is a comprehensive cloud-based, multi-lingual management system for all types of TV channels, OTT providers, broadcasting platforms and radio stations.

Founded by a group of experienced professionals from the broadcasting industry, who saw the need for flexible and scalable tools to manage TV broadcasting.

KLH BMS solution offers a continuously evolving management system to meet the needs of the ever-changing media landscape.

With a deep understanding of the user needs and development capabilities, KLH offers a full solution to the supply chain includes:

  • Rights management
  • Assets management
  • Scheduling
  • Ads sales management
  • EPG distribution
  • BI Analytics

KLH BMS is a trusted supplier of broadcast management systems to yes, HOT, i24News, MTV, Nick, History Channel, Comedy Central, Trace Sport, Baby TV, E and more.

www.klh-tv.com

FileCatalyst Case Study: Flowers TV

​FileCatalyst & Flowers TV

Profile

Flowers TV is a 24-hour Malayalam general entertainment television channel from Insight Media City, an international media campus headquartered at Kochi, Kerala, India. The channel has been on the air since 12 April 2015 and holds the broadcast rights to the North American Film Awards. Apprehending the taste of the real television viewers in Kerala, Flowers TV has catered a visual feast on screen. With a fresh look and feel and a wide variety of programs, Flowers TV has grabbed the minds of the Malayali audience across the globe with the launch of a second channel, Flowers International, in a 10 month period.

Challenge

Flowers TV was looking for an accelerated file transfer solution to deploy at their new playout facility, Horizon Teleports, located in Moosburg Germany. Initially, Flowers TV used traditional FTP-based software and performed manual file transfers. Transferring substantial HD files from Kerala to Germany took a very long time to complete when using conventional TCP/IP methods, and as the RTT increased the bandwidth reduced to such an extent that the files wouldn’t reach the destination successfully. They needed a solution that was advanced, simple, reliable, secure and provided constant output (even when latency is present). Flowers TV also required automation and scheduling features included with their new solution. In addition to these features, they were looking into the ability to transfer live content and growing files to their counterparts.

Solutions

After reviewing the available solutions, Flowers TV decided to use FileCatalyst to overcome the issues they faced. They installed the FileCatalyst Direct software suite, with FileCatalyst Server as the main application (installed in Germany on a 500 Mbps link) and FileCatalyst HotFolder (installed at Kerala on a 100 Mbps link) to provide client-side automation capabilities. They also use FileCatalyst Express to perform manual transfers between the two sites.

Results

Flowers TV has been very happy with the performance and acceleration provided by FileCatalyst. Over a 100 Mbps link, Flowers TV has been able to get consistent upload speeds of 92.5 Mbps using the FileCatalyst HotFolder, and speeds of 95.2 Mbps when using the FileCatalyst Express client. Flowers TV is now getting a constant and reliable speed of 92 Mbps for every transfer, helping them get content to their playout facility in Germany at unprecedented speeds, regardless of latency, packet loss, and RTT.

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FileCatalyst Case Study: IO Interactive

​FileCatalyst & IO Interactive

Profile

IO Interactive is an independent video game developer based in Copenhagen, Denmark and the creative force behind some of the most talked-about multi-platform video games to emerge in the last decade. Starting with the groundbreaking and award-winning Hitman series, IO Interactive has since developed the cult classic “Freedom Fighters”, the controversial “Kane & Lynch” series and the adorable “Mini Ninjas”. Dedication to creating original IP and unforgettable characters and experiences are the hallmarks of IO Interactive.

Challenge

While developing their games, IO Interactive was constantly challenged with managing large data transfers across multiple outsourced studios, located in located in Europe. Many of their daily transfers exceed 1TB, and they have to maintain rigid schedules to stay on track. When using traditional FTP/TCP-based solutions, latency, packet loss, and other forms of network degradation had detrimental effects on the efficiency of their development.

Solutions

In order to overcome these challenges, IO Interactive has deployed FileCatalyst Direct and the FileCatalyst HotFolder client application.

FileCatalyst Direct is a suite of server and client applications that enables point-to-point fast file transfers which are capable of reaching speeds of up to 10 Gbps. HotFolder is a FileCatalyst Direct client application that provides automated download and uploads folders that can be set to user-defined intervals, ensuring that every endpoint has the most current version of every file.

Results

Since deploying FileCatalyst Direct, IO Interactive has maximized their bandwidth and substantially boosted productivity by allowing them to send large files in a fraction of the time it takes when using FTP/TCP. By setting up overnight upload and download tasks at each endpoint via FileCatalyst HotFolder, IO Interactive has removed the need for human interaction during transfer tasks, allowing development to continue immediately.

“As we strive to create larger worlds and more immersive experiences for our players, the size of our games continually grow with each major release,” said Mads Laksø, IT Architect & Team Lead for IO Interactive. “FTP-based solutions no longer meet our needs, so we had been looking for a solution that can send large files quickly and reliably. We are excited to say that FileCatalyst has filled this need by allowing us to send critical files exponentially faster than FTP/TCP.”

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