The Background
ATP Media is the global sales, broadcast production & distribution arm of the ATP Tour, the global governing body of men’s professional tennis. Formed in 1999, ATP Media provides the centralised exploitation and host broadcast production for the worldwide television and digital broadcast rights of 64 global tournaments.
ATP Media has unrivalled access and expertise in the broadcast production of men’s professional tennis. This unique service incorporates rights sales, multi-platform production, content management and worldwide delivery into a comprehensive end-to-end broadcast-focused solution.
Tennis TV is ATP Media’s direct-to-consumer, OTT streaming service, delivering both live and on demand content to all major streaming devices. It also features over 10,000 hours of full matches dating back to 1990.
The Customer Challenge
ATP Media already has a B2B commercial archive site in the cloud that hosts the ATP Tour Masters 1000 and Nitto ATP Finals match content for commercial exploitation. There was however, a wider asset management challenge - the aim to migrate and preserve all other match and video content across the Tour and present a globally accessible Production Asset Management service.
ATP Media initially approached Object Matrix with the requirement of preserving this high volume of media. ATP Media created a Preservation Project to enable the migration and long-term storage of existing heritage video content from legacy formats and infrastructure, such as LTO, to a secure location. As a by-product of this investment, ATP media was keen to consult with Object Matrix to also add the capability for the platform to serve as a media Production Asset Management system (PAM). This would enable the Production and Digital teams to manage their edit archive effectively, and to link ATP Media’s content delivery network to thousands of hours of footage.
As a globally moving property, ATP Media had previously been tied to drives that it needed to physically move around between events. This caused an issue for PAM and brought its own set of challenges and risks, being very cumbersome to manage and not always secure as the drives could get lost or damaged in transit between locations. Global production teams needed a scalable, flexible, and highly available digital environment to handle active media. With footage collated from approximately three thousand matches per year, it was becoming increasingly difficult to responsibly manage media footage.
Functionality was key but scope was also important, ATP Media was keen to ensure that the business could evolve over the long-term. The team required a solution that would be agile enough to integrate into relevant workflows and systems. As well as handle all work in progress, including all match content, synced live using global connective networks. Any solution also needed to take into account the evolution of the business, enabling the team to implement feature requests that might become important in the future.
The Solution and Workflow
ATP Media’s initial investment was half a petabyte of storage as a managed service (MaaS) so Object Matrix deployed a private instance of MatrixStore Cloud within a data centre in London, alongside a replication cluster in a secondary data centre. Through this bespoke cluster, ATP Media was allocated internet connectivity, as well as a dedicated fibre connection to ensure both global access over internet and local file system access to the facility using the MatrixStore File System (MXFS).
Scalability and security were key requirements, along with the need to avoid the potential egress costs of a public cloud solution, given the high demand that would be placed on moving content in and out. Having the ability to share content with conditional access between teams and freelancers means that ATP Media is always in control of its content through auditing capabilities and access permissions.
MatrixStore’s Vision interface brought the team additional operational benefits through ease of use, either by freelancers or internal production staff. ATP Media wanted a system that didn’t require a lot of training and support, to locate and share content. Vision allows users to quickly integrate, and global connectivity offers the option to work with staff in any location or on the move.
The Future
Investment in object-based storage provided the key to future flexibility for the team. Offering them the ability to present media for any environment and workflow, including Ai, ML services as well as both cloud and on-prem solutions.
ATP Media have already added another replicated half a Petabyte as the adoption of the system has been exponential given the challenges presented by the COVID pandemic and the need for even greater remote access of content.
About Object Matrix
Object Matrix is the award winning software company that pioneered object storage and the modernisation of media archives. It exists to enable global collaboration, increase operational efficiencies and empower creativity through deployment of MatrixStore, the on-prem and hybrid cloud storage platform. Their focus on the media industry gives them a deep understanding of the challenges organisations face when protecting, processing and sharing video content. Customers include: BBC, Orange, France Televisions, BT, HBO, TV Globo, MSG-N and NBC Universal.
